Grounding in community: positioning government for a meaningful relationship with its public

The U.S. Digital Service (USDS) has spent nearly a decade demonstrating how agile, human-centered approaches can improve government products and services for millions. USDS’s human-centered approach focuses on “the greatest good for the greatest number of people in the greatest need.” Our success as civil servants comes from how we serve the public, not metrics of success we define for ourselves. At USDS, there are several approaches that we use to guide our work, including those below.

1. Recognizing Our Gaps

The communities we serve are more than research subjects, and they deserve to be seen in their whole selves.

How might the combination of your own lived experiences impact the way you understand the people you’re serving?

One of the six USDS values is “hire and empower great people.” As part of this, we strive to create teams that reflect the diversity of the public that we serve—however, we know that lived experiences are complex and multifaceted, and we can’t always be a perfect reflection. We recommend that teams use tools to help them recognize gaps between themselves and the people they serve. For example, positionality tools may allow us to better understand the limits of our own perspectives, identify whose voices may be missing, and become more intentional about including those most affected by a product or service.

2. Building Relationships

A critical aspect of customer experience is how people *feel* about the product or service and the people who provide it.

What actions can you take to identify communities experiencing relevant challenges, and then reflect their voices and experience in your product decisions?

Another USDS value is to “design with users, not for them.” Customer experience success is about building a relationship with the customer—and in our work, strong relationships allow technologists and the public to co-develop tools that deliver value. Building on various public participation frameworks, USDS encourages a relationship-building approach that encourages our teams to do more than just inform or consult people we serve and truly work to involve, collaborate, and co-design with them. Better outcomes are possible when we prioritize the needs and voices of the public in our work, one step at a time—this includes navigating bureaucracy and stakeholder dynamics in pursuit of community engagement and relationship-building with the people our programs serve.

3. Understanding the Problem

Understanding the problem and not jumping to a solution - digital or otherwise - pushes us to pause and consider how we can take deliberate action with vision and impact.

How do you maximize the impact of what you can do now and what you can do later, while acknowledging the things outside of your control?

USDS receives more requests for help from Federal agencies than we can accommodate. To make the most impact, we need to be rigorous in articulating what problem we are trying to solve, and for whom (a seemingly simple, but often overlooked step). We then have to match that problem with the right service and technology solutions, and realistically work toward those with agencies.

This means digging into root causes and finding the ideal approach that yields the most impact now and in the future. When teams define their scope, they should focus on reducing overall burden for the public and creating solutions that help the most people overcome the most pressing barriers. Ultimately, we must go beyond asking whether a solution works, and instead ask “for whom” the solution is working, who is being left out, and whether we’re meeting people’s most pressing needs.

In the spirit of human-centered design and iterative processes, USDS has been testing our tools and approaches across the civic tech community. We encourage you to try some of the approaches and tools we shared above and reach out with further thoughts and feedback.

Some additional resources to support the approaches described above

Note: we are not endorsing any of these, but want to provide some options for teams to consider

MIT Teaching + Learning Lab // Identities & Positionality

The Journal of User Experience // Invited Essay: Learning to Recognize Exclusion

Urban Institute // Exploring Individual and Organizational Positionality Toolkit