 maybe do a tiny little hop like this or stretch your arms in a way that won't hit your neighbor. Fantastic, thank you. Go ahead and sit on down. So good afternoon. I'm Sid and I'm incredibly honored to be here in Lisbon with all of you. One of the things that I think I probably have in common with everyone in the room is that I'm a UX practitioner because I want to make things better for humans. And in the last 12 years or so, through a number of jobs, I've moved closer and closer to doing that mostly through working with the institution of government. So I've been at a research firm that was very idealistic in Volpeters. I've worked with the Center for Civic Design on ballot design for the United States and I'll talk a little later about the story of why we need ballot design. I've worked with Code for America which is another NGO that works with United States cities to help them improve technology and designs for any aspect of citizen experience that touches a city. And finally, I just finished up a two-year term as part of the United States federal government in 18F, which is one of the two technology agencies that were started by President Obama in order to modernize technology in the federal government. I have a story that I like to tell about how I ended up here and it's a true story but it isn't the whole story so I'm going to tell it first and then I'm going to talk about what's wrong with it. Starts on a beautiful June day in my hometown of San Francisco. We have a ocean layer that comes in very heavy in the summer. So there was a ton of fog rolling across the city and I was driving through a really large park in town with my seven-year-old in the back. As we drove along through this heavy mist, she spotted that there were sprinklers on in part of the park and they were spraying all over the grass and the road. Things were muddy and messy and her little voice pipes up and she says, Mommy, they're wasting water. There's water all over the road. They don't need it right now. And I said, Yeah, you're right. That's really too bad. Keep driving because I'm trying to get her somewhere before I need to get to work and she said, But we should do something. And I said, Oh, no, I didn't say that. I thought that want to disappoint a civic impulse in my seven-year-old child. But I had no idea what department in San Francisco I might be able to find a phone number for to call and say, You should probably turn off the sprinklers in the outer part of Golden Gate Park. So I said, Well, sweetheart, you know, and I hear myself say sometimes you just can't do anything about things. And luckily, my kid is argumentative. And so she says to me, But mommy, I defy you to resist that from your seven-year-old when you're in a hurry. And I thought, Oh, man, okay, I just heard that San Francisco can be reached on Twitter. And that if you tweet this one address, they'll answer any kind of city question. So what the heck? I'll try it. I'll pull the car over. I'll send a quick tweet. I sent a quick tweet. Said, Hey, the sprinklers are on in the park. Is there anything you can do? And I said, Okay, sweetheart, you know, we've done our duty and let's go and I dropped her off and I headed to catch my train for work. About 45 minutes later, my phone dinged. And it was San Francisco writing back to me saying, Thank you. Thank you very much for reporting this. We're gonna take care of it. And here's a ticket number. And I thought, Well, that was not what I expected. I just had a user experience. I just had a user experience with my government. And I started to realize, I don't really think about user experiences with my government. This is a little bit strange because I'm a user experience person. And in fact, the next day when we drove through the park to drop her off again, the sprinklers were off. And we felt like we had in a little way kind of affected the fabric of the city. That started to show me something that was possible. And that's a really important meme in the civic technology space that we're there partly to show that the things that we all do when we practice in industry are also possible when we practice in public spaces. But why didn't I think about government as part of my sphere as UX researcher and designer? Why don't most of us think about education or medicine or the courts or libraries as part of our sphere as designers? The funny thing was that when I went back a few years later on kind of reviewing my project archive, I came across my first civic tech project, which was about two years before this incident in the park. And I'd completely forgotten that it happened to be with government. So 2009, you might remember, was a rough year. There was a financial crisis. There was a flu pandemic. And during the flu pandemic, the consultancy that I was working for got a call from some researchers at Stanford, a major university in California. And they said, we're trying to help public health officials get information about flu vaccination out on websites. And we've come up with a platform based on Google Sites, which was a good, simple website publishing platform at the time. And we don't know if there's anything that we should look at about it from a design perspective. So we did a tiny little sprint with them, maybe a couple of weeks of just improving both the way that public servants could enter information local county health officials could put in, okay, we've gotten ahold of vaccine. We're going to have a clinic on Wednesday the 20th or whatever the information might be, and better organizing the information so that members of the public could find it. This is one of the really important functions of government. And I'll tell you, you probably know, if you see international news that in the United States, we have a robust anti government faction that doesn't think government should do a whole lot. But nearly all of them will think that there are some circumstances in which the government should assist you. And something like a flu pandemic is on the list. Assistance is really one of the big functions that we ask for out of our government. If you start to think, what is it that it does for us? There's a number of things around regulation, infrastructure, shared record keeping. Things are important like populations and births and deaths and registrations, dispute resolution, part of the court system in most countries. But assistance is really, really deep. Assistance is something where inclusion or exclusion from it makes not only an enormous difference in the actual circumstances of your life, but potentially in the way that you feel and the way that you relate to the culture that you're part of. And that's the space that civic technologists were starting to work in mostly is when does the government assist people? How can we help make the experience of getting that kind of assistance better? What do we even call that? I do want to call out my fellow speaker, Jess McMullen, who coined the term citizen experience in about 2010. And when I started thinking about it around this time, I googled it and discovered that he had started using this term. And I thought this is a really nice way to talk about what we do. But there's more to the public sphere than just government. So I named I think a number of institutions. They look a little bit like this. Not just government, but medicine, law, education. All of these things are institutions and I'm using that term in a specific way to name things that act not just at scale, but over time, to have a significant influence in society. And just like assistance, whether you are able to access institutions and how strongly institutions are in the space where you are makes an enormous difference in your life circumstances. And we don't talk very much about how to design for something that acts over time in a long term way. So I'd like you to meet 19 year old me. I have a story about a library. It's another tiny story. But it means a great deal to me in thinking about what the care of an institution can feel like. So here I am 19. It's the fall of 1990. I'm just back from an undergraduate research fellowship in Japan, where I studied women's language. And one of the terms of the fellowship was that you would write a paper when you got back. And so I needed to access some Japanese language references about specifically the Kyoto dialect. My university had an open stacks library, and it's huge and spooky, because you can go in there and it's 14 floors of darkness where you flip on the light just at the end of the row of shelves if you get to the book that you want. And so I found my Japanese language reference on a bottom shelf, and I had the light flipped on amid this whole dark floor, and I pulled it out, just opened it up. So this is pretty obscure. I wonder who's checked it out before. When I looked at the space where the record would be, no one had ever checked it out. And it had been published in something like 1948. And we were now in 1990, and this book had been sitting in the library. And at first I thought, oh man, there's some mistake, they must kind of regret buying this because no one uses it. But then I realized that they had anticipated, if not this person, because the university was male only in the 40s and for quite a while after that, but they had anticipated that someone would need this book. And so in their mission, as the library of a major university, they had bought it with a long time scale for whenever the person might need it, we will have it. And that kind of design value for a supporting public institution is something that makes a person feel like part of a community in a way that few other things can. I got chills standing in the library. I'm getting them a little bit just remembering it. So sometimes institutions are challenged. And at the national level, where I have been working for the last couple of years, the United States government is having as difficult a time as it's had in many decades. However, I'll let you get that picture. The institution of government in the United States is bigger than the national government. There are some 20,000 bodies that are individual governments, whether they are a locality or a water board or a state. Some of those states are pretty big. My home state of California is about 38 million people. And each of these acts as a government for somewhat different functions in the federal government. And while it's very complicated, it makes the institutional landscape an interesting place to act. That's not to say that one of these smaller governments having a design problem can't affect the national government. You may remember the first time in recent memory that the United States had election troubles. In 2000, we couldn't figure out for six weeks who had won the presidential election. And people believe that that is due to this particular ballot design, which was available in Palm Beach County, Florida, which is a county that is favored by wealthy, retired people, mostly Democrats, and that voted significantly for the right-wing candidate in the election much, much more than expected. Because the way that this lines up, if you wanted to vote Democrat or you wanted to vote for the right-wing reform party, it's unclear which hole you should punch your ballot in. And so there was a huge overvote relative to registration and expectation for Pat Buchanan, the right-wing candidate. The election came down to a close recount in Florida by about 300 votes out of tens of millions. And this was very likely the deciding factor as a design. So this was one reason why some people started working in government quietly. But it didn't start to coalesce as a movement until after a few other things happened in the U.S., including a movement to release open data from cities and to be more transparent about government. So when I went looking for things to do and I found Jess and I found a few other things, most of what was going on was hack-a-thons, meaning that engineers would get together on weekends, usually in a government building, and they would pull out government data sets and they would see what they could build, whether they could put together an interesting application based on something that the government had come up with. And I partly thought that the engineers shouldn't have all the fun, but I also thought that some of what the engineers doing could really benefit from a design perspective. So I decided to attend a city camp in San Francisco and that's a combination of hack-a-thon and unconference. And I put on the board my post-it, so I'm not sure if you can read at the scale, but it says user experience, citizen experience, how to get ideas and data from the public and get the design and research community involved. And I figured I'd probably not make it onto the unconference schedule and I might even get thrown out of the hack-a-thon because I can't code. And that seemed to be a lot of what it was about, but I put it up there and I had brought a set of handouts on paper because it was a city building and there probably wasn't going to be a projector. And 45 out of the 200 people attending the unconference came to my session and I actually had to give it in the round, spinning myself sort of, you know, chunk by chunk in order to accommodate all of the interest in adding a design perspective to this. And I started to think we have something here. There's something for designers to do in this public and institutional space. Around the same time, an organization called Code for America, which I later worked for was getting started. And its idea was that if you paired designers and technologists with mayors and city officials, they'd be able to make things better. And a pivotal moment for design and government in America happened at the very first year that this was going on when its founder, Jennifer Palco, was talking to a young fellow named Scott Silverman who was a designer. And she asked him, what's your motivation for being here? And he said, I'm here because I believe that government can be simple, beautiful and easy to use. This is kind of a radical and transformative statement. And at the same time, as designers we probably think this is table stakes as a set of design values. But it made an enormous difference because that very loud non-governmental organization made this part of their pitch to the United States local governments at large. In 2012, another designer and a friend and most admired colleague of mine named Dana Chisnell started a project called Field Guides. And this was directly because of that ballot design that I showed you. They're called Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent. And they're little booklets that she ran a Kickstarter to develop and distribute for free to every county election official in the country. So elections are locally administered in the United States and that means there's about 3000 election jurisdictions. And those people have conventions, they have conferences like this, they talk to each other. There's very few designers among them. So she started to provide simple and easy design advice. And she asked me in 2012, if I would work with her on a project, to find out what was the state of election websites across these counties. We did a really extensive analysis. This is a structured reporting data collector that we developed in order to allow a large group of volunteers to actually assess each of these sites. We did a lot of qualitative research with the people working with their own election website to find out information about the upcoming election. And eventually, based on this and significant further research, there is now a set of free election tools. Election website tools at electiontools.org produced by this organization that any election official in the United States can use and adapt. And this has started to change one of the primary ways that voters get election information. I found this just tremendously exciting to be a part of. I never felt like more of a UX person than when I was diving deep into admittedly ugly, messy, not up-to-date government websites. In 2011 as well, the U.K. started a national effort which had designers in it from the beginning, the government digital service after which the U.S. digital services named. And the first thing that they produced was Gov.U.K. This is the prettiest thing I'm going to show you. It's probably the one really beautiful thing. And for my money, this is the best institutional design on the web. It looks almost identical to how it looked when it launched in 2012. It looks like nothing else out there. And it's an incredibly simple and effective design using tools like typography and white space in the service of public sector U.S. So this was out there. But the American national government didn't get in on the game for quite a while. After the financial crisis of 2009, there was a new government agency started called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. So rather than changing all of our laws about finances, we had an extra office to try and protect consumers from the lax laws. And one of the first things that the designers there did, because they did bring designers on, and they brought designers on with titles like IT specialist, UX design, or IT specialist grade two performance. But these were people who were experienced designers. And one of the things they looked at first, because the crisis had involved home loans, was the disclosures that everyone has to receive if they get a home loan. They used to look like this by regulation. They're very hard to read. They're very hard to understand. And they're very easy for an unscrupulous lender to make a sort of obfuscated design so that someone can't tell what they're actually going to end up paying. This got a lot of people and a lot of banks in trouble in 2000 and seven through 2009. So this is not shiny or digital or anything that we would think of as innovative. But they redesigned this. And it took until almost 2012 to get the redesign done. And it took until 2015 for the corresponding regulation to get adopted. But this is now how home loan disclosures are required to be in the United States with white space, clarity, specific labels so that people can understand. This is another one of those things where it doesn't seem like much as a design project. And on the other hand at the scale and the time scale that this organization works, it's going to impact millions and millions of people. I went to Code for America myself in 2013 and we did a lot of things along these lines, little pieces of showing what is possible. The city of Asheville, North Carolina doesn't have any designers and in fact when I started doing this in 2011 I could identify one UX practitioner working for a United States city, Raleigh North Carolina of all places and when Asheville sent a few people to Code for America's conference they sent their IT team and their CIO came to my workshop about basic, basic usability testing. He called me a couple of weeks later and he said I think I'd like you to maybe coach a session for me. Is that a thing you can do? And I said yes, definitely. I helped him do a couple of sessions. I helped his team write a protocol and I didn't hear from him for about six months. He came back through town and he said we built something. We built it entirely based on talking to citizens. They had built something that would tell you for any address in the city every piece of data that the city owned about that address and this interface opens up, you can pop these open, you can see filter by distance from the location it's a really nice website and not a single person who worked on it was a professional designer. So in some ways having been shown what's possible this group went and did what was necessary to do something that actually every American city wanted to do but it was the crew in Asheville that just stepped over and got it done. Chicago meanwhile decided to implement user testing at scale across all of the hackathons and other civic development and design efforts that were going on there and they got a funder to fund a civic user testing group where they recruited a panel of people from every single district of Chicago to test anything that was developed by the hackathon community and they found out a lot of things where inclusion hadn't been a priority in the development of those or where something was simply wrong with it and as they worked with more and more people they started to discover that they were working with people who didn't feel very comfortable with technology. So they started to offer to actually train people on technology if they came and participated in a cut group test and this program got adopted in Miami and Oakland and multiple other U.S. cities and once again there was a spark of seeing what was possible and turning it into doing something that really made a difference. In 2015 internally at Code for America we started a project called Digital Front Door and the idea was that city websites in particular weren't very good and they tended to fail in a couple of specific ways. They're a very unusual kind of site. We did a whole effort across the country to change sites that looked mostly like this into sites that looked a lot more like this and not just looked like this but worked like this and worked better for people. So the national government finally caught up in 2014 with these two agencies and this happened after a disaster. They had this healthcare site for President Obama's signature initiative that failed completely and so they called for rescue and in came the designers and the developers and the product managers and all these folks a lot of them from Silicon Valley came and they fixed the site and a few of them stayed around but a lot of them fixed it and moved on and it came out okay. I joined up myself in 2016 and I want to call this out because this is a slide I've shown before and something I usually need to account for to Americans. Do you work for President Trump? Well in fact I did not directly but in the administration there's a number of ways that you can think about service in the context of an administration that is wrong. I like to think about the last two a lot and to the extent that it can be squared with the first two and with my own principles it was really important to me to do that. And throughout that time I discovered again and again that people in service in government make more and more consequential design decisions than any of us in this room. They're constantly deciding how someone will experience an interaction with an incredibly important institution mostly without support from a design practice or a design professional anywhere in there. So what kind of principles should we have? GDS published some that were mostly about how we should do the work of design. These were very helpful. Coach for America had its kind of table stakes one. It's, hey, simple, beautiful and easy to use. That's great for everything but how should it be simple and who should it be easy to use? So over the years I've come to think about three that I think are really important for any public institution. Public institutions need to respect people's time and people's dignity and people's abilities. For any construction of ability is what language they speak, what they're physically able to do, what they may have available in terms of attention because of the stress level in their lives. Whatever that is, institutional interfaces need to respect that. They need to not only allow but invite full participation. And this one sounds kind of strange but it has worked for a lot of designers. It's the idea that government and citizens are on the same side and should experience the same level of good design. So not just interfaces for the public but interfaces for officials should be easy to use and feel like you're part of a community. If we want institutions that take good care of us and I believe we do, some of our practices are some of the best things we can add to the mix to do that. And some of the work looks a lot more like redesigning a crummy little site for public health officials that's meant to be a hack than like a grand and shiny design project. So a couple of months ago this February, a designer I'd never heard from, never heard of, working out at American City in Boston, posted a really interesting post about his two years working for the city. First of all I was really excited that there were designers that I'd never heard of working in American cities now. There's now hundreds that are directly employed by American cities. And what he had done in two years in Boston was convert a hundred plus PDF forms into actual web forms and work with the departments that owned those forms to turn their processes into something much more modern. And he put a really useful statement in there which he said on average this is the work of changing not just a form but the practices behind it. And this gave me a benchmark that we could all share to say, okay if I want to make a change in a little piece of government this is the kind of work it is. We might be able to figure out ways to do it more efficiently. We might be able to figure out ways to break it up among us because institutional work needs a whole community doing it. But the conclusion that I come to is that we need as designers if we want to work in this space and I hope a lot of you do to be able to work over time and to follow principles really carefully and most importantly to open our practice because what Josh Guy did in Boston was he went and shared about what he was doing with everyone and he invited them to participate in it even if they didn't have design training or skills and he spent extra time more time than it would have taken him to just get in there and rescue it to do it with the people there and he was incredibly successful and he made a ton of friends but here's the thing if everyone in this room goes and quits their job tomorrow and goes to work for a public institution and brings a couple of friends A, I would love that B, we would make a dent in some of the challenges of interfaces with public institutions but it would just be a dent and that is a valuable thing to do but really the most generous and impactful thing that we can do is share our practice with people who work in public institutions already and who are part of our communities so I like to think of it as serving rather than saving and this is my question and my invitation to you today how can you share your practice with the institutions that are important to you I would love to talk about this more thank you