Design Principle 1: We Will Put People First
Studio Notes | Short Reads
This post is part of a series exploring the Design Principles for Government in Ireland. If you’d like to start from the beginning, check out our introductory post here.
The first of the Design Principles for Government in Ireland might sound a little obvious. If we are providing services for people, then surely, we have always put people first?
In reality, this is often not the case.
While it is usually true that services intend to meet the needs of people, often there are assumptions made as to what those needs might be. It may also be the case that technology, either by procurement or by design, doesn’t help to meet these needs and can instead stand in the way.
Design brings a powerful toolkit for better understanding the people we are trying to serve, helping us to identify their needs and find new opportunities for better service delivery.
What does it mean to put people first?
This design principle calls on our public services to prioritise the needs of users by conducting thorough research – engaging with people in an in-depth way including techniques like one-to-one interviews, observation studies, diary studies and more.
When designing for healthcare, for example, it should be considered vital to engage directly with patients to understand the nuance of their experience and the unique challenges they might face when using a service.
Having a deep understanding ensures these needs can be addressed appropriately in design, and assumptions which may have been made in the past can be challenged.
Putting people first should also include those who help deliver a service. We all know what it feels like to deal with a service where the staff seem unsupported, unhappy, or unequipped to deal with a query. For this reason, in complex services we need to co-design with not just the users of the service, but all stakeholders involved in its delivery.
In our healthcare example, this would include administrators, nurses, porters, doctors – anyone with responsibility for meeting patient needs. Their needs, in delivering the service, must be designed for too. They might need access to information, tools, resources, or just better processes to work with – we need to identify these needs in order to design for them.
Good research and a strong co-design process means that everyone’s experience is better understood, assumptions are challenged, and ideas are taken on board.
What does this look like in practice?
A good example of this – although not from the public service – is our work with Irish Heart Foundation on the Digital Transformation of their patient services. The national stroke & heart charity provides vital support to patients and carers all over Ireland who have been affected by cardiovascular disease.
We engaged patients, carers, former patients, and medical practitioners – all of whom use the service in some way. We also worked with patient support, nurses, co-ordinators, management, and ICT stakeholders from Irish Heart Foundation. Doing this provided a holistic picture of not just of what service users needed, but also what tools and technologies might best support the needs of the IHF’s teams who deliver the service.
The result was five comprehensive service blueprint documents which helped to describe the future of Irish Heart Foundation patient services following their digital transformation. These documents and accompanying insights were beneficial to informing the procurement of a new case management system for the Irish Heart Foundation in 2024.
How can you get started?
There’s just one thing you need to do to start putting people first… talk to them. While design research is a complicated practice, with lots of tools and techniques that can be learned – we all started out with just one conversation. Speak to a customer, colleague, or a member of another team and do so with an open mind, looking to better understand their experience.
Next week… Government Design Principle #2 “We will design to be inclusive”.
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