Introduction
How is human-centred design applied to the work of the Australian Public Service? In episode 4 of the Digital Insights series, our experts explore the application of human-centred design to products and services, delivering the ideal experience for citizens.
Podcast host, Fleur Anderson is joined by:
- Ashley Donaldson, Design & innovation Consultant, Tobias
- Laure Yassine, Product Manager with the Simplified Trade System Implementation Taskforce
Listen to Episode 4 on:
Transcript
Introduction:
Hello and welcome to the Digital Insights Podcast. A podcast brought to you by the Australian Government's Digital Profession. Keeping the Australian public service digital ready. I'm Fleur Anderson and I'm your host today. I acknowledge that we are recording this podcast on the lands of the Ngunnawal people, the traditional custodians of the land.
I pay my respects to their elders past and present. I extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening.
Fleur Anderson:
Welcome to the Digital Insights podcast! Last episode we spoke about using agile project management principles to keep the user at the centre of the way we work. But what about the design of our products and services? How do we design for our users and keep the human experience our number one priority?
Today, we're going to be talking about human centred design with two very excellent humans who are also experts in the field. Today, I'm speaking to Lord Yasin, product manager with the Simplified Trade System Implementation Taskforce.
Hi Laure.
Laure Yassine:
Hi, Fleur. Thanks for having me.
Fleur Anderson:
Oh, you're welcome. And at the Gold Coast, we've got Ashley Donaldson, design and innovation consultant with Tobias. Hello, Ash.
Ashley Donaldson:
Hi, Fleur. Thanks for having me.
Fleur Anderson:
Thanks for joining us. So why don't we start by breaking down what is human centred design? It might seem obvious, but I'd love to hear from both of you about what you've got to say for it. Isn't it just designing things for humans?
Laure Yassine:
At the heart of it, yes. Yes. That's exactly what it is. It's about putting humans at the centre of your design, whether it's a product or service or whatever it is you're designing. It's about having a deep understanding of people's needs, behaviours, motivations, the challenges they face and designing solutions that meet the needs for those people
Fleur Anderson:
Right. And so actually, I mean, it so begs the obvious question what sort of design was it before if it wasn't being designed for humans?
Ashley Donaldson:
Many types of design so that you can often find design, that's business centred design and product centred design, engineering centred design. All of these things are kind of a result of trying to get efficiencies in different areas.
Fleur Anderson:
Okay, that's interesting that you said that about engineering centre design. I was doing a bit of reading about this, and I understand that the birth of human centred design actually came out of a disaster that many of us would have heard of the 1970 93 Mile Island nuclear power plant accident and an engineer called Don Norman, who's now 85 or so he's now known as the godfather of UX and human centred design, was asked to investigate why the power plant operators made the mistakes I did. And I found this really interesting what he had to say.
I said what we found was that of all the operators, they were all very intelligent. So let's be clear, there was no Homer Simpson's there and they did the best they could in an environment that was horrific designed.
So that's so interesting, isn't it? Because it sounds like the start of human centred design actually started in the computer or digital space, but we're now seeing it applied and a whole lot of other places from architecture to policy.
Aren't we Laure?
Laure Yassine:
Absolutely. A lot of people think human centred design is just about product development, but it is. You can. You can use it in architecture, in education, in policy-making. You know, when policymakers design policies, a lot of times what you see is that, you know, of course, intelligent people with subject matter expertise, designing policies.
But then when it comes to implementing that policy on the ground just doesn't make sense. So, you know, why wouldn't you bring the people who are impacted by those policies who have the lived experience to understand their needs and design the policy alongside them to make sure that when you implement that policy, it's actually meeting their needs.
Fleur Anderson:
Hmm. OK, that that makes complete sense. Ashley, we were speaking the other day. I think you mentioned that in some places in the world, you can't even get a policy passed unless it's been through this process.
Ashley Donaldson:
Yes. Finland is one such place where the government has taken an experimental approach to policy design. So there was a small think tank called Demos Helsinki that partnered with the with the Finnish government to develop an experimental framework.
And that experimental framework starts with anthropology. So understanding humans and studying them in their natural habitats.
Fleur Anderson:
Well, you sound like David Attenborough.
Ashley Donaldson:
Well, we are all just adults. But but we we do get affected by um by our context that- that changes the way we do things. So human centred design at its heart is understanding the capabilities and limitations of humans, specific humans in a specific context.
And so what they have done is they've created this, uh, this framework for the Finnish government to run experiments and one of the most popular experiments or well known experiments is that a universal basic income - which didn't come out with what they were expecting, actually.
But it was good to test that because the idea of of doing that anthropology and running randomised controlled trials is you get out of it are evidence based policy. You know, if it's going to work or not, and you can foresee unintended consequences that come out from as Laure said, you know, really smart people who are ten steps away designing policy.
Fleur Anderson:
And so what was the unintended consequences that the Finnish government uncovered?
Ashley Donaldson:
It wasn't unintended consequences. They had a hypothesis that universal basic income was going to - was going to generate a better standard of living and better commercial output for the economy. It did but only slightly. And so they haven't rolled that all across Finland.
Fleur Anderson:
Oh, that's very interesting. OK. So sort of going back to their agile methodology of doing it as a pilot before you make a really big, costly mistake?
Ashley Donaldson:
And that said, you know, looking at - I think it was the 2020 OECD life satisfaction index - Finland has risen rapidly amongst the ranks and is now number one in life satisfaction. I think part of that is because the policies and the government is structured by what actually will help the people.
Fleur Anderson:
Right. Okay, that's really interesting. So we always hear references to things like user experience, interface design, service design and system design. I mean, they all sound like jargon to me. But Lord, where does this sit with human centred design?
Ashley Donaldson:
Yeah, I think every five years is a new buzzword that comes about so many years ago, and I helped write the definition for user experience. And you think these days it means user interface. But back then, it was a person's perception responses resulting from, from the use or anticipated use of a product system or service.
So it was at its heart looking at an entire system. These days, user experiences is used interchangeably with the user interface, so it's just that interface between a human computer.
Fleur Anderson:
So you've had some really interesting experience in your own background. I was reading your bio Ash, so you were with the international service, sorry, International Standards Organisation. It was when you did the definition of user experience.
Ashley Donaldson:
Yes... five years of hard slog to get a definition that no one read. However, it was a really interesting time I was Australian expert to ISO for by human factors and human centred design.
You mentioned earlier the origins of human centred design being a 3 Mile Island. It actually harks back much further. Where I came from was from aviation. I was a commercial pilot. And in aviation, I came across the scientific discipline of human factors. And that's what they apply to all of aviation to make it the safest mode of transport because they look at the different actors from, you know, your flight attendants to your pilots to licence their own mechanical engineers and how they all interact with each other within a large system. And all that got spun out of World War two.
So human factors became the science of psychology in World War 2, where they were looking at why pilots were crashing planes because planes were getting more complex. And so they changed the layout of the cockpit to create a simple a plane to fly. And then they had to shift from having people with the right stuff to we need as many people in the war effort as possible, so we need to make these machines as easy as possible so it spread out into the tanks and troop carriers and everything else. And that's where we have this massive ramp up of let's design systems to fit people instead of training people to understand systems.
Fleur Anderson:
That's so interesting. It's actually literally life and death, isn't it? It's not just about designing a nice chair. It can actually save lives. And you're also the first expert witness in the, in the Federal Court on human and computer interactions.
Is that - have I got that right?
Ashley Donaldson:
Yes. Yes, I was. I was brought into Federal Court. There was an organisation which had claims that they made every effort to make. This software is easy to use as possible. Yet it resulted in a lot of damage.
And so I was brought in to assess whether they have or not. You know, there are international standards around this, and yes, they haven't made any effort toward that.
Fleur Anderson:
Well, I know that some of the software I try to use would not be classed as human centred. I don't know who it's focussed at. So, OK, so we've talked a bit about human centred design generally. When I was, you know, researching this as a complete Luddite, there seemed to be a few different methodologies out there. Can you explain Laure - you know, just at the sort of simplest level, what are the stages that you go through when you're applying humans into design?
Laure Yassine:
Absolutely. So with human centred design, the you know, it really advocates for starting with the discovery phase. So, you know, having your research as your design is going out, talking to people and understanding their needs, understanding you know what their pain points are, what a - what are their motivations?
What are their behaviours? So you have that phase where you just bring all of that insights that you hear and you, you basically move into design based on that insights. So you move from that discovery phase to, you know, building some prototypes and, you know, starting small, going out, testing it with users.
Does that is that what we heard? Are we on the right track getting that feedback, iterating on it, going out again, testing it wider and broader and just that continual iteration until you have this end product that you send out into the world or a policy or service that you put it out in the world that actually meets the user needs. And a lot of it is, you know, you go broad, you get that information you need, then you kind of, you know, bring it back narrow and try and understand idea what? What are we trying to achieve?
How can we solve that problem? What are the different ways we can solve it? Until you have that, you know, end solution?
Fleur Anderson:
So as a practitioner, is it difficult to have a bit of distance there? Like if you are talking to users, they tell you, you know, this is what they want, you come up with a beautiful prototype, this is going to solve it all and then they hate it.
But how do you sort of that? Well, this is what you ask for. I mean, you know, as I think Henry Ford said, if I asked people what they wanted, they would tell me that they wanted faster horses.
So, you know, how do you deal with that? Yeah.
Laure Yassine:
And look, I think, you know, even in the discovery phase, you know, experienced researchers and designers try to get to the bottom of what people need, not what they want, because sometimes people think they want something, but that's actually not what they need.
So you really try and unpack that early on. You really you also unpack the real problems and the causes for maybe some of the challenges, not just the symptoms that appear on the surface and that helps you design, you know, better solutions that meet the actual problems.
But you know, there's you could end up with a prototype that doesn't meet the needs. That's why you got early. You can even go with just sketches on a paper and go away on the right track. And the biggest thing is you can't, you know, you can't be too attached to it. You have to be comfortable with killing your darlings. You know, it's not quite right. Yes, it's about what people need at the end, not what you think they need.
Fleur Anderson:
So, yes. What do you think Ash?
Ashley Donaldson:
To Laure's point - you know, when we're doing research, we rarely ask people about what they want in the future or what their future behaviours will be. What we are looking at is - and this is why it's really important to understand the context - we want to see all the things that are affecting them at a certain time. The types of constraints and pressures that they're under and things that will affect their decision making. We also want to understand what motivates them.
And, you know, with that, we have to dig deep into not just asking a basic question and getting a yes or no answer, but what we do is call layering. So we keep on digging into 'why that', 'why that'?
'Why that' until we get to these core motivations or core issues for them, we take away those core issues and the context of use and then get multi-disciplinary teams to work on solutions. And then we take those solutions back to the users things that they couldn't have conceived of.
And play it back, does this solve your problem? Oh, yes, it does. I know it doesn't. So we scrapped that one. Try another one.
Fleur Anderson:
So, Ash, the other day when we were talking, you mentioned an absolutely fascinating example of where you've applied human centred design. Can you just tell us a bit more about that?
Ashley Donaldson:
Yeah, sure. We were approached. one company was approached by some investors that we're looking at a market niche which was testing removal using the latest laser technology. And so we had a look. And we basically had to go back to why do people get tattoos in the first place?
What's the history in the culture of tattoos? And then we did research right across North America with people who had tattoos to understand why they got these cartoons and why they no longer relevant, why they want money. And also talking to tattoo artists and seeing what is evolving and changing in that realm.
And then we had to look at the removal process and look at clinics that were, we're currently doing it, look at the latest technologies that the way we're in there and we're able to piece together these this large ecosystem of players working in amongst each other and project out what was going to be the future of this practise.
Fleur Anderson:
I found this really interesting that so it might on the surface, tattoo removal, you know, it's just a thing that you get done, but you uncovered some really, really interesting and kind of heartbreaking motivations with the people who wanted this service.
Ashley Donaldson:
Well, yeah, a tattoo is an indelible mark on you, and that mark often holds great significance, whether that was a drunken valley holiday or something, the name of a partner who has, who has abused you. And so there are lots of motivations for people to try new things.
It's a long and painful and expensive process, but we came across people who had been sex-trafficked, people who had been gang tattooed, people with prison tattoos and, you know, all talk and people who had suffered domestic violence, all types of really terrible things.
And every day they have this memory and they see it. On the flip side, there were also tattoo aficionados who had either outgrown the bands that they loved when they were 17 and tattooed on themselves, and were a bit embarrassed or had, had changed their style and wanted to make room on their skin as a powerful new one.
Fleur Anderson:
So for people who are thinking about going into humans into design Ash, you have to tell us about your research (inverted commas) to the tattoo parlours across North America.
Ashley Donaldson:
Yeah, well, we got to go from the dingiest dens and talk to people in there. We had one artist in Texas who had gone through his shots. So to become an artist, you have to kind of suffer a lot of things in some cases. And he had a terrible caterpillar tattooed across his forehead and all his really bad tattoos that were done by drug fuelled artists that took him under his wing. But he had become quite a good artist right through to going into the studios.
Bang Bang, Bang Bang, one of the artists to the stars, and he's got two studios, and in Manhattan he does Rihanna and Justin Bieber's tattoos, LeBron and all sorts of people. So we went from one end of the spectrum to the other end.
And what we like to call extreme sampling and see what are the common motivations and common issues that you see across the extremes of these folks?
Fleur Anderson:
So Laure, you done any extreme sampling in your work?
Laure Yassine:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, any time you want to do research, it's really important to take into account the different types of people, the different needs they have. So you don't want to design just for, you know, the common person.
So you know, when you do that, it's important to make sure that you're, you know, recently we did research with people who've been affected by bushfires, and it was important to go in different communities in rural area, regional as well as urban.
It was important to make sure that we're understanding the different, what different communities need, what their strengths, what their weaknesses are. You know, older people, younger people, people with families or alone. So it's really important to make sure that you have that diversity.
So when you're designing a solution, you're not forgetting about, you know, maybe the 20% that sit outside of that.
Fleur Anderson:
Hmm. So anyone who's been involved in a bushfire incident, which a lot of people have in the last two years, that is a really life changing event, isn't it? Absolutely. And so I was really interested when we spoke the other day that you've been doing a large piece of work around life events, and I just immediately thought, you know, births, deaths and marriages. So it's not exactly that, is it?
Laure Yassine:
Oh, it's that in much, much more. What do you think about a life events? The way we define it is a major change that happens in someone's life that really impact your life, sometimes forever. So that could be birth of a child.
It could be starting school, losing a job, death of a loved one, getting married and everything in between. But it also can be those unexpected events such as, you know, facing a natural disaster or, you know, being a victim of a crime.
They're all really big events that change your life.
Fleur Anderson:
And so how does this apply in a at a government level? I'm assuming that you have to deal with a whole lot of different government agencies when you're trying to map what it looks like for a person going through a life event.
Laure Yassine:
Absolutely. And that is really the reason why we take a life event approach. Before I left the DTA, I ran the life events programme there and we mapped a lot of different life event journeys. And the idea is that you are thinking outside of your agency silos outside of your service, you're thinking about people, not as a user of your particular service. You're thinking about them as humans going through life, you know, being in very stressful situations. And usually when people go through that change, they are doing things they don't usually do. They're interacting with government more than usual.
So it's really important to work together to understand what that experience looks like and how can we, as government, work together to improve that experience and streamline that journey for people. And maybe I'll use birth of a child as an example.
But you know, when we when we looked at that experience, what we want to do is we want to understand what's happening way before birth and after. So we start by looking at, you know, when you start planning for a pregnancy or you fall pregnant all the way to having your newborn at home.
And we want to map that whole experience. We want to understand what are people's frame of mind, what are they thinking? What are they worried about? What are the challenges? What are all the things they have to do?
What are the services they have to interact with? And that really starts building this picture that is, you know, not just government, but also what are the other third parties they have to interact with. And it starts showing us where there's duplication of effort, where maybe there's gaps, where government is not servicing some of the needs, where people have to fill out all these different forms over and over, you know, and then you bring people together from across federal, state, local government hospitals. You bring them together and go, 'How can we make this easier?' How can we make it easier than having, you know, giving new parents a bunch of forms when the baby's born to register the baby?
Fleur Anderson:
Yes. Not at any state to fill in those forms are you Ash? You've had a child recently, haven't you?
Ashley Donaldson:
Yeah, definitely not when we had our first child or my son, I came back to the hospital after getting a couple of hours sleep just to find my wife on the beds also kind of half asleep slave nursing our son with a stack of forms sitting on her lap.
And she hadn't slept in three days. Yeah, she was expected to fill that -
Fleur Anderson:
- everyone was crying, it sounds very familiar, yes.
Ashley Donaldson:
It's not - it's not a perfect time to put all the load on the on the user then.
Fleur Anderson:
No, that's a polite way of putting it. Well, I think that of any new parent would say anything that makes that easier is well worth it. So let's have a think about just in terms of the context of government agencies.
You know, everyone has got their own conflicting documentation, these privacy policies. It can make life really difficult when you're trying to collaborate, doesn't it, Laure?
Laure Yassine:
Oh, absolutely. It's, you know, the great thing that you see is that there's so many passionate people in government that want to work together, that want to make life simpler for people. I mean, that's what why we exist, right?
We're public servants, we're there to serve the public. The challenges come when there's governance and funding problems and privacy and data issues and legislation. So, you know, one of the things that we can do when we take that life events approach is to try and see where those big systemic problems are happening and how they're impacting people, and then we can work together to prioritise those and work across agencies. But you know, you can start small as well. You can test with a small piece piloting a small area with couple of agencies to, agencies to see how that could scale up.
But a lot of things need to happen to allow that to happen. You know, it's you know, about getting the right governance, getting the right funding model and having the right people in there and the right approach and the right focus on people to make sure that we can make it happen.
Fleur Anderson:
Yes, I was listening to a talk the other day by a US based practitioner of human centred design called George. I think that's how you pronounce it. And he was describing that when there's a lack of human centred design in government.
It's like being given an ugly jumper by a well-meaning relative at Christmas time. It's not something you want. It doesn't fit terrible colour and it's got a reindeer on it. And if only they had just asked you what you wanted or better still, give you some money to go buy it yourself.
As do you have any experiences or advice for practitioners who are working across multiple agencies or departments about how to get that collaboration going. And I suppose also going back to our conversation before about, you know, the ego sort of side of things talking to people about where things are not working and it might be know where they might have to kill their darlings, as you said Laure. Ash?
Ashley Donaldson:
It is an interesting thing, I think one of the things that Laure has touched on is when taking on a life of business approach, it's considered a whole of government approach. So you've got to have that data to be able to bring different agencies together.
Beyond that, it's also a whole of society approach. So when we were working in natural disasters, all of government was one piece of the puzzle. And there's also the charities and the community groups and all these other third parties that generally wouldn't be considered that we've got to bring into the fore.
And what we did was we mapped out all of them, interacted with each other and help people access services. And we created models around them. And I think having that big picture where you've got that typically siloed organisation that might be aware of, of some of these other actors may not be aware of and saying, you know, this is what they need from you and you can start making those bridges. And now I think the other really important thing that was brought up was finding those passionate people because they are a lot of passionate people in government.
We're working within specific constraints. If you don't have the mandate to join people together, then it's more about personalities and getting people who who are passionate enough to make the effort to work together and in governance. We have the laughing communities which allowed people to talk to each other and share information on the similar types of projects that we're doing and jurisdiction level, and they can work together.
Fleur Anderson:
So these projects that we've spoken about are really big significant projects, GovX. MyGov. Even the - even the tattoo business. What about - can you talk us through about how you would apply human centred design to a small project, you know, to something as simple as a web form?
Laure, how do you go about it?
Laure Yassine:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is really again, it comes back to, let's say you have a form online already or page online and people are having a lot of issues with it. You're getting a lot of calls because people don't know how to fill it out.
And so what you need to do is you need to go out and talk to those people. Maybe watch them as they try and navigate that page and fill out that form and see what issues they're having. Try and really unpack.
And as Ash mentioned before, the why you know why? Why is that happening? Why is you having a problem? Dig deeper to try and understand the key problems, then take all of that insides, come back as designers, developers, researchers and design a different prototype or solution for a form and see if that works.
Go out. Talk to people again. As I mentioned before, it could be sketch on a paper or, you know, on a document just to see, does that make sense? Then you build it as a clickable prototype and see people navigating through it and just observe them.
Does that make sense? And then you start seeing, Oh, actually, we've put a banner at the top that people just scroll straight away. So they're not actually seeing this. It's not useful. So what else can we do? Colours - every, every little thing on that page and on that form matters.
And by observing people and understanding how they navigate that, you can then design things that you know, actually works for them and you take it out until you get it right and then you, you launch it.
It's also very important to make sure whatever you're designing is accessible. It's important to test it with people with various needs to make sure that, you know, it's suiting different accessibility requirements as well. So that's something that you can't forget about.
Ashley Donaldson:
One of, one of the other things that you can actually find out when you go out and talk to people about their needs is, is the form really required in the first place? You can find that out, not only from the person with you doing the research, but also looking at the service provider.
Do they have that information? Are they just capturing them for the marketing sake and not doing anything with it? So it's always good to question points of friction and points where people are having struggles with to see if you can remove it altogether.
Fleur Anderson:
So Ash, you mentioned the other day as well that you applied human centred design - back to the tattoo parlour, which I'm just fascinated with - to all sorts of things like how the humans were interacted with in the retail setting and about branding.
I mean, how... what was it that you were looking at there?
Ashley Donaldson:
So, so the initial research that we did gave us a rich bounty of insights into where tattoo culture was heading and why people are wanting tensions removed and their fears and worries and getting this done. And so that for us informs absolutely everything.
And as you mentioned, the branding of these companies was very highly informed by the colours that we use, the textures the letter forms and the name. We're all informed by what we knew about the people who wanted to get tattoos removed.
Also, the design of the physical clinics. We wanted to design them to be both efficient and comfortable for people who are coming in and are often coming in with shame. You know, like they were ashamed of this tattoo or ashamed that they were getting something removed that made a mistake in the past.
So just designing not only the physical clinic, but those staff interactions to make them feel at ease and feel comfortable about the process. We designed the operational and how we could actually have that. Then investors acquired three companies and then four and we could draw from them.
What are the most effective and efficient operational things that I'm doing to get the experience? As so, we're able to design best practise in that and create a learning system so they gather feedback all the time and continuously evolve how they run both the operational and clinical practise.
So, yeah, we got to basically design everything from start to finish.
Fleur Anderson:
So I have to ask this, though. These are all amazing examples. But have you ever been involved in a human centred design project where you've ended up giving someone an ugly jumper?
Ashley Donaldson:
And I can tell you that I would say probably 60% of the projects that I do, it's a much more when the client asks for some early thoughts on it, because it's often the way that a business case is created by let's start with the solution and cost how much that's that's going to and then see how much it's going to cost. And then we'll go do the research. So you've got to start with the solution. And so most clients come to us with that. And they often one early insights and I can tell you if they want to design up front, almost always that design is wrong.
We can take that out tested based on their understanding of the situation. We will pull together, designed to be able to take you down and tested, and then it will be rejected by the users. And so then we have to go back and say, Hey, maybe we should do some research and understand the real issues first and then we can come back to the design and nine times out of ten, don't go with that. And we come out with a much better solution and that solutions iterated and refined as you go on.
Fleur Anderson:
I could talk about this for hours with you guys. It's such a fascinating area. Not it's not just digital. It applies to every single thing that you can think of. So thank you so much for talking to us about human centred design.
Really appreciate your time today. So I'm going to say goodbye now to Laure - goodbye.
Laure Yassine:
Thank you, Flora. Thanks for having me.
Fleur Anderson:
Thank you, Ash.
Ashley Donaldson:
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.
Fleur Anderson:
Goodbye.
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