Eight things I’ve learnt from designing services for colleagues

Steve Borthwick – DWP Digital

Civil servants are users too. Indeed, as Steph Gray more radically claims, civil servants are people too. And as users, and even more so as people, they have needs. Some of those needs are for purely internal systems and processes, others are as users of systems supporting customer services.

In the second category, the needs of the internal user are superficially similar to the needs of the external user – to gather and record the information necessary to move the service forward. That for a time led to a school of thought that the service for internal and external users should be identical, to the greatest possible extent. But as this post recognises, there is a critical difference between somebody who completes a transaction once a year or once in a blue moon and somebody who completes that same transaction many times a day.

That shouldn’t be an excuse for complexity and confusion: just because people on the payroll can learn to fight their way through doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to make them. But it is one good reason for thinking about internal user needs in their own right – and this excellent post provides seven more reasons why that’s a good thing to do.

Meanwhile, the cartoon here remains timeless – it prompted a blog post almost exactly ten years ago arguing that there is a vital difference between supporting expert users (good) and requiring users to be expert (bad). We need to keep that difference clearly in sight.

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