Episode 114: Designing for Impact: How User Research Can Transform Government Services with Dana Chisnell
Designing for Impact: How User Research Can Transform Government Services with Dana Chisnell
Have you ever wondered what it's like to work in product management and UX design in the government? Dana Chisnell, the Acting Executive Director for Customer Experience at Homeland Security, tells Melissa Perri what it’s like in this episode of Product Thinking. Dana shares her journey from being an independent consultant to ultimately joining Homeland Security. She describes the challenges of implementing human-centered design in a massive government organization, and the importance of proactive user research to inform service design. Listen in to learn how Dana and her team are working to improve customer experiences for the public in their interactions with DHS agencies, from TSA to FEMA.
Dana Chisnell is the Acting Executive Director for Customer Experience at Homeland Security. She has over two decades of experience in UX design and research, and has worked with both private companies and government agencies. Dana is the co-founder of the Center for Civic Design, a nonprofit organization that works to improve the voting experience for all citizens. She also served on the board of the Usability Professionals' Association and is a frequent speaker at conferences on user experience design, research, and civic technology.
You’ll hear Melissa and Dana talk about:
Proactive user research is essential to inform service design in the government context, and to improve customer experiences for the public.
Implementing human-centered design in a massive government organization like DHS requires a shift in mindset from focusing on reactive customer service to proactively understanding the needs of customers and reaching the most vulnerable.
Product management and user experience design are relatively new concepts to the federal government, and there is a need to expand the pool of practitioners and build design and research ops.
DHS has committed to improving customer experiences across its agencies, including FEMA, TSA, USCIS, and CBP.
Dana’s team at Homeland Security is working on building and scaling design and research ops, and expanding the pool of practitioners, while also supporting the commitments made by DHS agencies under President Biden's executive order.
Different government agencies have varying levels of CX and UX maturity.
The government is focused on impact and improving people's lives rather than maximizing revenue, which changes the incentives for product decisions.
The process of product management and user experience design is similar in the private and public sectors, but outcomes are measured differently in the government.
The political climate in the Executive Office and Congress can affect the potential outcomes for the public.
The challenge in government is getting stakeholders to think about outcomes rather than outputs. Demonstrating the impact that a program will have on people helps get stakeholders to shift their mindset towards outcomes.
Problem focus is still applicable in government product management, just like in the private sector.
When working for the government, it's important to take into account the whole population, not just a perfect persona that a private company may prioritize.
Dana advises starting by working with the most vulnerable people first, such as those who have been historically marginalized, to understand their situation before moving on to other groups of personas.
The power dynamic when doing user research with vulnerable people is sensitive, and it's important to not make people more vulnerable and afraid by doing the research and design work. Third parties such as vendors or nonprofits may be trained to do the work instead.
Everyone on a team should do research, regardless of their role, to gain exposure to users and customers.
The government measures user experience by the level of burden experienced when filling out a form. There are incentives for lowering that burden, and basic usability testing with the intended audience can help achieve this.
Resources:
Dana Chisnell on Website | LinkedIn | Twitter
Transcript:
Dana Chisnell - 00:00:00:
A change in the mindset from focusing on the customer service, which is reactive. You have a service out there in the world, somebody's having some trouble with it, they need some help. They need to call you or interact with you online somehow and instead working proactively, so doing the user research up front to understand what the needs of the customers are, who the customers actually are in many cases, and reaching the most vulnerable of them. The people who have historically been the most marginalized to understand what they are trying to do and what their perceptions of the government are and what their experience has been like so far to inform changes that we should be making in the overall services.
Melissa Perri - 00:00:45:
Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is The Product Thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking podcast. Today we're talking all about product management and UX in a government context. And I'm joined by Dana Chisnell, who is the acting executive director for customer experience at Homeland Security. Welcome, Dana.
Dana Chisnell - 00:01:37:
Thank you, Melissa. It's great to see you. I'm glad we're getting to do this.
Melissa Perri - 00:01:40:
Yeah, me too. So I've known Dana for quite a few years. We have traveled all over the place together to speak at conferences, Iceland, Thailand, all over. It's been really fun. And since I've known you, you've always been working with the government, one context or another. How did you get started with that? What led you to get into civil service?
Dana Chisnell - 00:02:01:
It wasn't always the case that I worked for government. I spent a lot of my career, actually as an independent consultant, working with tech companies, mostly in financial services. That was lucrative enough that it supported my hobby, which I started around 2000, 2001. I've been a user experience designer and user experience researcher since before we had names for those things, which means a really long time. And in 2000, during a presidential election, I lived in San Francisco at the time. And I remember sitting on my couch in San Francisco watching the election returns come back from the presidential election, seeing video of people who are being interviewed on their way out of the polling place saying, I don't think I voted for the guy I meant to vote for. And I was like, oh, that's an interesting design problem. I wonder how elections get done.
Melissa Perri - 00:02:56:
Was this the hanging chad election?
Dana Chisnell - 00:02:58:
It was. That was the very one. So that led me on a journey of learning about how local elections get done and who runs them and how stuff gets done to put on an election. There are a lot of more elections than most people realize, but that was a big one. That was the catalyst. So when I say I used my independent consulting revenue from banks and insurance companies and tech companies to support my hobby, basically what I ended up doing was working with local election officials in counties and states over the next few years, doing user research and user experience stuff with them and for them. And then that led to other kinds of research projects with the National Institute of Standards and Technology. And eventually that got me to partnering up with Whitney Quesenbery to start the center for Civic Design. And in the meantime, we had done this interesting project with a little bit of money from the MacArthur Foundation to look at county election websites. This is in the election leading up to the 2012 Presidential election, and Scrappy Group of volunteers did this review of 140 county election websites. This sounds really boring and mundane, but in 2012, the web was a different place from where it is now, especially for local government. And like, a third of all counties didn't even have websites, period. Another bunch of them just had, like, a brass plaque that had the name of the county clerk and her phone number, and that was it. So we looked at these 140 websites and mapped out the words in the major links and headings of graphics on the spreadsheet as a proxy for basically website real estate to look at what we then do the conclusions around what election officials thought were the most important thing for voters to know about anyway. Fast forward. I end up giving presentations about this study, which blew the minds of people, because what election officials thought was important didn't match what voters think about. What voters think about is not registering first. They think about what's on the ballot. What am I signing up for? What am I committing to if I decide that I'm going to vote? So this blew a lot of minds. And somebody who saw me give this very unsexy presentation worked for the White House at the time. And she came up to me afterward and she asked me a question about if we made a style guide for all federal government websites and made all the agencies use it, wouldn't that make everything better for the public? And I'm like, no, that's a stupid idea. That's never going to work.
Melissa Perri - 00:05:52:
Wait, why?
Dana Chisnell - 00:05:54:
Because it's not the design system that's making the sites easier to use. There's a lot of assumptions built into that about, do you actually know what the public is trying to do when they get onto your website? But this led to a conversation at Shake Shack and a long friendship, and she was still working for the White House when she invited me to a roundtable about a year later, which was really the founding of the US digital service.
Melissa Perri - 00:06:23:
Very cool. That's great. Okay, so you joined the US digital Service. What were you doing for the government at that time? What was your purview?
Dana Chisnell - 00:06:32:
So the digital service was founded by President Obama as a reaction to healthcare gov, which when it launched 13, was kind of a fiasco. So the servers didn't stay up. When they did stay up, we learned that there were a lot of usability problems. So like, you had to sign up for an account before you even saw what the site offered, for example. And so President Obama decided he didn't want any more of that and that the people who had come from the private sector to help unstuck that situation had brought in practices that the government hadn't seen before and he wanted more of that. So when I arrived in October of 2014, there were three big projects that the digital service was looking at. One was that immigration, they were going through a massive digital transformation, which included going to Agile from Waterfall. At the same time that they were doing this, there was a big project for Veterans Affairs. Congress had passed a law the previous August that would go into effect, of course, Veterans Day, which is November 11, to allow veterans to use their VA benefits outside the VA network, but nobody had done anything to actually implement that. And then the third project was the second open enrollment for healthcare gov. And I didn't know anything about any of those things, but there were people who I knew who were working on the immigration project and they actually had a project plan. And I was like, okay, I'm going to go do that, and ended up on a super deep dive learning about all kinds of immigration benefits.
Melissa Perri - 00:08:14:
Cool. So you're in the user experience world with Homeland Security now. What? Customer experience? My bad. Not user experience. Customer experience. I did make that mistake before. What does that mean? Who are the customers? What are you building experiences around? What's that look like?
Dana Chisnell - 00:08:31:
What this really looks like for those of us who work in user experience and product management, every day is really service design. So product management is kind of a relatively new concept to the federal government. User experience also in some corners is a fairly new thing too. And so the thing that actually created my job is that President Biden signed an executive order in December of 2021 ordering the federal government to improve customer experiences, which when you look in there, is about the touch points that people have across journeys. Not just like one off digital experiences, but for example, if you're a disaster survivor, you probably are going to interact with FEMA, which is a DHS agency. And that means that you have just survived disaster. You've experienced a hurricane or an earthquake or a fire or something else. FEMA has arrived on the scene, there's a disaster recovery center. What's that experience like? Who are you encountering there? What information do you get? What are the conditions? Like? What kind of shape are you in physically and emotionally? And then how do we talk to you about what your options are to help you recover from that? So that verbal interaction and all of the digital and paper things that we might present you with. Also if you want to get benefits. And then how long is the adjudication process? How long are we making you wait? What do you know during that time? How do you cope in the meantime? And then, ultimately, how do you actually recover? So looking across those holes, that's just one example of the kinds of projects that are named in that order. So at the Department of Homeland Security, there are four big agencies that made commitments under that. So that's FEMA TSA, everybody's favorite.
Melissa Perri - 00:10:37:
Use it all the time.
Dana Chisnell - 00:10:38:
US. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Customs and Border Protection. So they all identified at least two services that they were going to try to improve under this executive order. And my team supports those agencies as well as the other four operating components. At DHS, nobody ever knows who they are. That's the Secret Service? The Coast Guard. This is cybersecurity and infrastructure and ice. So we support all those and all their commitments on both the executive order and internal commitments to improve experiences that they are designing and service delivery.
Melissa Perri - 00:11:22:
Cool. So this is a fairly new way of working for the government, right? What you're doing, the human centered design aspect of it. What was it like before? And what kind of shift is required to move the government, like, this crazy, so many different pieces organization right into more of a human centered design approach, into more of a holistic customer experience? It sounds like an even bigger transformation than what we see at some banks or the financial services places that we've all worked at.
Dana Chisnell - 00:11:53:
Yeah, the scale is huge. So just at DHS, we have about 1 billion in person interactions with the public every year. A lot of those are TSA, because about 2 million people come through TSA airport checkpoints every day.
Melissa Perri - 00:12:10:
Really? Every day?
Dana Chisnell - 00:12:11:
Every day. Unless southwest shuts down. Maybe not, but yeah, on the average day. So there's been a lot of customer service over the years, and there have been earlier executive orders from President Clinton and President Bush also around that. And so the big shift that we are encountering is getting a change in the mindset from focusing on the customer service, which is reactive. You have a service out there in the world, somebody's having some trouble with it, they need some help. They need to call you or interact with you online somehow and instead working proactively. So doing the user research up front to understand what the needs of the customers are, who the customers actually are in many cases and reaching the most vulnerable of them. The people who have historically been the most marginalized, to understand what they are trying to do and what their perceptions of the government are and what their experience has been like so far to inform changes that we should be making in the overall services.
Melissa Perri - 00:13:20:
So your team then, who's on it? You mentioned you're doing the user research. What does it look like, the people that you're leading?
Dana Chisnell - 00:13:27:
So, right now I have a really tiny team, four people who are full time equivalents federal career employees, plus me. I just got a new deputy and I'm so excited. So she makes five. We also have a lot of contractor support who are largely UX people. So they're helping us do a lot of user research and usability testing and things like that. Most of the work that we're doing in DHS HQ is really around two things besides supporting the commitments that the agencies made on the executive order. Number one is basically design and research ops. So making it possible for everyone across the department, 250,000 employees, to say yes to understanding customers needs and having no excuses, no blockers for doing that. And there are more creative ones than you might imagine. So that's a big thing. And then expanding the pool of practitioners. So we just ran a big hiring action. That's what they call it, the government, when you hire people. So we are bringing in 14 people to our team over the next few months. And another, we're hoping around 30 or 40 or 50 will actually join DHS across the department in the next twelve months. In many ways, the work right now is sort of, I don't know, it's startup. We're building and trying to scale at the same time.
Melissa Perri - 00:14:58:
I think what you're doing too is really interesting because you've got a small team by comparison, for a place that has so many boots on the ground. You've got all these different agencies, you've got all these different agents, people everywhere, and you really have to help instill that proactive mode into them too, right. It's not just, hey guys, I built this website, go use it. It's actually a lot of human interaction that's built into what you do. So as somebody who's designing what those interactions have to be, and trying to lead a cultural shift in humans interacting with the customers, how do you go about that? How do you get them to start thinking in these different ways?
Dana Chisnell - 00:15:42:
Some of it is by demonstration. So there are pockets of work going on across the department already, and the level of maturity is really different from one agency to the next. So, for example, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is where I landed in my first US Digital Service tour of duty on that massive digital transformation, is the furthest along in terms of their CX and UX capacity. So they have 80 designers now. When I arrived there in 2014, nobody knew the words human centered design or user centered design. That just was not a thing, was just send everybody to training. But now USCIS has 80 designers across the organization and pretty robust practices, whereas customers and border protection has been lucky, I think, mostly in getting respectably, good vendors to help them develop public facing apps and websites that are pretty effective, and now we'll help them level up. FEMA is sort of in the middle where they have had a kind of grassroots community practicing product management and user experience, things that we would roll up into customer experience for a while, but haven't really formally been recognized as a community of practice. But they're about to also, I should say, when we talk about customers in the federal government, to me this is sometimes a little bit awkward. And that's always part of the conversation that we end up having with our stakeholders and our partners across the department. A big question they have is, come on, we don't have customers like the private sector does, although we do in some cases because, like USCIS is fee based. TSA Pre-Check you pay a fee for that. Now generally, though, people are coming to the government for other kinds of services that are not quite so transactional. So DHS, we try to get specific instead of talking about customers all the time. So we talk about travelers and immigrants and merchants and mariners because there's a lot of customs and trade that happens that seems to smooth out conversation a bit, make it more relatable.
Melissa Perri - 00:17:56:
Yeah. So you just kind of have to change the lingo a little bit so people don't get into arguments about semantics of whether it's a customer or user. Yeah, that makes sense. So with the human centered design and the government services, can you give an example to us about how maybe one of the services changed or how you're utilizing it in one of these areas?
Dana Chisnell - 00:18:17:
Yeah, so one of the complaints that customers of various kinds across DHS, across government really have is around case and account management. So one thing government does a lot is case management. So whether you're at the Veterans Administration, where you have requested coverage of various services that the VA would give you, or if you're at USCIS trying to get immigration benefits like Naturalization or a green card, there is a case involved. And there are so many case management systems, and most of them are bad. And one of the pitfalls is that it can take a long time to adjudicate your case, and long time is relative, but like, from weeks to months, and in some cases years. And so we haven't been able to give very much information in the meantime about where your case is and what things might be held up. So a thing that everybody at DHS is really focused on now is how to improve the services and the touch points around that. So can we do a better job of making it easy for you to create an account where you can see your own documents and where you have access to them? First of all, so you can upload things, upload updates especially. You'd think that changing your address would be a super simple thing, but it unfortunately is not. And so we're trying to make things like that simpler and more self service than making you call to talk to someone and verify your identity and then change an address so you can manage your own accounts better. But this also means that we have better data for doing things that will help you know how long you can expect to wait. So based on what characteristics your case has, we can now start to tell you in a smaller range how long you can expect it will take. So taking those factors into account, along with whatever else is in the backlog and policy priorities that do shift also. So it's nice to be at that point where in 2014, if you applied for an immigration benefit and you sent your documents in by paper, if you wanted copies back or you wanted to know what was happening with your case, you had to FOIA your own records, which is a Freedom of Information Act application process that basically orders the government agency to go dig up your stuff and send it to you. Now you have access to that yourself. So things have advanced quite a bit over the last 810 years.
Melissa Perri - 00:21:09:
Yeah, it sounds so simple, but I'm sure it makes such a big change from having to submit like 18,000 papers to Freedom of Information Actor and stuff. Just huge.
Dana Chisnell - 00:21:20:
Yeah, it's not the best dynamic, not the best way to set up a relationship with someone who you probably are going to be interacting with for years.
Melissa Perri - 00:21:28:
Right.
Dana Chisnell - 00:21:29:
This is the other thing, of course, in so many of these things, every interaction you have with the federal government, we treat you like we've never met you before. But now with this kind of account management, not only does this mean that you have more access and more control as a customer, as a user, but you can also expedite these other bits.
Melissa Perri - 00:21:53:
Yeah, and I'm sure it helps expedite the whole process too, when you're aware of what did I submit and where am I at, and not having to call people and check the status of things every day. So that's amazing.
Dana Chisnell - 00:22:04:
Yeah, it definitely cuts down on the call center calls.
Melissa Perri - 00:22:06:
That's great. So you've now worked in government for quite a while. You've also, as we said, worked in the private sector. What do you feel like is the biggest difference between working in the private sector, doing user experience or customer experience and the public sector and government in terms of methods?
Dana Chisnell - 00:22:25:
It's really the same. Product management and user experience design looks really similar. You're going to do user research, you're going to do ethnographic studies, you're going to do usability testing of various kinds at different points in the processes. Product decisions are similar technical stack as well as how you're going to market and how you're going to get the word out, how you're going to maintain it, what the governance is. But the incentives are different. So in the private sector, many companies want to maximize stakeholder value and maximize revenue. We don't have those things exactly in the same way in the government. So the incentives are really impact and improving people's lives. And this does change the dynamic that you go into a project with when you start to realize that the way you're instrumenting a website or the way you're tracking a service sign has different kinds of outcomes for people. Rather than trying to get them to spend money, can you get them to save money? Or let's just take immigration as another example. So if you have a green card, you have to have that for at least five years before you can apply to become a citizen. If we were a private sector, the incentives might be to keep people paying for updates to their green card. Every ten years it gets more and more expensive and we have this continuing revenue coming in. But what we would really like is for you to naturalize because this gives you a number of benefits, including options for getting a US. Passport which smooths your way in a whole bunch of other ways as well. So the incentives are certainly different. So we're focused much more on mission and the impact on people's lives.
Melissa Perri - 00:24:24:
I've had some people ask this question too, so you're probably a good person to ask about it. Your impacts are different, you're not measuring it by revenue. So I've worked with a couple of other people in different government agencies than the ones that you're in and they ask questions about like how do we set our outcomes? What did those look like when you're in a government agency and is there one overarching outcome? Is it a similar process or are you looking at them differently?
Dana Chisnell - 00:24:48:
Now, this is a big question to ask because of course, looking at outcomes for the public is in some ways super individualized because people come to the government for different things. But it is also driven by a whole bunch of different factors. One is whoever is in the administration, the political climate in the executive office, but also the political climate in Congress shapes what the outcomes can possibly be. So over the last couple of years, for example, president Biden and Congress have passed legislation to help people recover from the COVID emergency and that included some programs like the Child Tax credit. So this is awesome. This gives people cash in their pockets before they have to file an income tax return where they would get the money as a refund. But there are a whole bunch of people who really needed that money who are not actually filers and they qualify. And so when you look at the outcomes for those folks and the potential for lowering the poverty level for millions of kids, then you work backwards from there about like, okay, what's the best thing we can do for people? What's the minimum burden we can put on people to get this benefit when they really have no incentive and no reason, legally or otherwise, to file an income tax return? So the challenges around getting my partners and my stakeholders in government to be thinking about those kinds of outcomes are not trivial because we're incentivized for outputs. Like, are we meeting a schedule in a budget, especially in technology?
Melissa Perri - 00:26:37:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it sounds like kind of similar to if you had a new CEO I guess we do. Of the country, like every four years, or sometimes every eight years, depending on it. It sounds like a lot of the different types of outcomes that could be leading the whole charge will change. So that's going to change the strategies.
Dana Chisnell - 00:26:56:
They could easily yeah, there's this sort of baseline level of government service that just has to keep happening no matter what. But yeah, what's prioritized can change from administration to administration. But there are folks who work in the government who've survived many decades worth of presidential administrations, and I admire those folks because they have kept the wheels of government actually turning.
Melissa Perri - 00:27:23:
So now I know another big question that I'm sure people are out there going thinking about, because I hear from them is a lot of people in the private sector have a really hard time trying to sway people's minds to this new outcome focused orientation, just like you were talking about trying to get people in your organization to do it. What have you found works for you? How do you approach that conversation with them?
Dana Chisnell - 00:27:46:
For me, I think I got lucky in terms of timing. So the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, secretary of my Orchest, had been in government before and had seen the digital transformation and the incentives for outputs and now is very, very focused on what are the outcomes, what's the impact that his legacy is going to have on people. The Deputy Secretary, John Ten, was head of customer service for Citibank for ten years, and he has seen that from the business point of view. And the CIO who I work for is a software engineer and a product manager in his previous life. We've worked together on and off for the last ten years, and he's also very much oriented around what are outcomes for people versus output. So for me, for CX at DHS right now, the overton window is wide open and we're just going to run right through it. And where our challenges are is in sort of reprogramming the programs that we are trying to help and getting their mindset shifted around, thinking about what's everyday life going to be like. So the question I keep asking is if we do a really great job on improving this program, how are things better and for who? And that helps us get to visualizing creating an envisionment about what that looks like, which people can get to pretty easily after they get over focusing on the business goals and the business priorities and then backing into what's the best way to deliver that outcome. Is it a website? Is it an app? Maybe nothing digital at all. Maybe it's a network of humans who are out in communities or some combination. Cool.
Melissa Perri - 00:29:44:
So very much similar to our start at the problem focus that we're trying to do in the private sector still applies. Definitely. So one other thing I wanted to ask you about too. So I had a conversation with Kathy Sam, I think last year. She was on the podcast and you know Kathy, she's great. She's been advising a lot of the larger companies like Airbnb and these different places on more of their ethical ramifications as they scale. And I thought it was really interesting. We're talking about how when you're in the government, you don't get to basically prioritize a perfect persona and only solve for them like you can in a private company. Right. You have to take into account the whole of the population and a lot of those edge cases. How do you get your team to think about that, right. To empathize with all different types of personas and what does that look like when you're actually solving problems? Because I imagine it creates a lot more work, but like a much broader solution for what you have to solve.
Dana Chisnell - 00:30:47:
Yeah, it is a challenge to determine where you're going to focus. So what my team advises programs is to work from the margins in get with the most vulnerable people, the people who are experiencing the worst hardships first, people who have been systemically and historically marginalized for a variety of reasons and understand what their situation is like before you move in towards other groups of personas. Because if you've solved that problem, if you've addressed their issues, same with people who have disabilities and the combinations.
Melissa Perri - 00:31:29:
Right.
Dana Chisnell - 00:31:30:
Because people with disabilities have long been marginalized in all kinds of services. If you can address their needs and their problems, you're going to get a lot of goodwill and a lot of good design for free for everybody else as you do that. Now, the challenge is that the power dynamic is bonkers, right? Like me as a federal employee going to Florida and meeting with people at the Disaster Recovery center. Of course they're going to think that I have some sway that I don't necessarily have. And so trying to do user research with people who are in those kinds of situations is really sensitive. And so. A thing that we work on a lot is how to do that work without tripping the balance. Sometimes that actually means working with third parties who might be vendors, they might also be nonprofits and training them to do the work that we would like to be doing, and we ride along instead, sort of as secondary players listening in. But we want to make sure that we're not making people more vulnerable and more afraid by doing the kind of user research and the design work, code design that we would like everybody to be doing.
Melissa Perri - 00:32:56:
That's really interesting. I think you are one of the first people I've heard talk about it as, like, go from the margins. And I think that's really powerful because I think some people forget that if you do solve for those super specific cases out there that are outliers or edge cases right. The normal bulk of people will be able to use it. It'll satisfy the many in many cases. But a lot of times in the private sector especially, we're like, it's not the majority of people that's the 10% like, who cares? And that's when you get into situations like I was talking about with Kathy, where you get into Airbnb being extremely discriminating against black people and with the hosts and stuff, you run into all these ethical considerations because you never considered, what if this went wrong? Or what are those edge cases? And I think that's so important for product managers and UX designers in whatever context you're actually working in. Yeah.
Dana Chisnell - 00:33:48:
There's also a huge emphasis in this particular administration on equity and ensuring that everyone is getting not only equal treatment, but that we are making sure that people who are in the most impacted places and have been historically, that we bring them up and make sure that they have access.
Melissa Perri - 00:34:11:
Yeah, I think that's really important. The other thing that really hit home with me for what you were just talking about, and I think a thread throughout this is I've gotten into a lot of arguments with people, I guess not arguments, but I feel like people are arguing about it. I'm not arguing about it because I know what the answer is, but they're arguing about does product management or does UX research, or do designers do research? Like, who gets to do the research?
Dana Chisnell - 00:34:37:
Everybody does the research.
Melissa Perri - 00:34:38:
Everybody does the research, right?
Dana Chisnell - 00:34:39:
Yeah. That's funny. When I was going through this hiring action, I was interviewing a lot of product managers and a lot of designers. And my question for the product managers was always one of the questions was, how do you feel about working for a design led team? And one of the candidates is like, what would that even be like? And I was like, I'm a designer. You would be working for me. He didn't get an offer.
Melissa Perri - 00:35:05:
Yeah.
Dana Chisnell - 00:35:09:
And the teams that I have been part of in the federal government, they've been cross functional, but they've been pretty flat, not a big hierarchy, and we don't parcel out the roles quite so much. It's so important for everybody on the team to get exposure to who their users and customers are that I'm going to let anybody do design and do research who wants to be part of it. And in fact, my team has created a little initiative that we call the Leadership Observation Initiative. This is super government, but the idea is that there are these senior executives in government who mostly spend their time in offices making policy decisions or other kinds of decisions, and other people carry out those decisions and they don't always see the impact of the decisions that they're making. And so we created this initiative to set up a whole program where these senior executives could go right along on user research and Usability testing without turning it into like a major dog and pony show. Because the thing that happens with senior executives is if folks knew that the Deputy Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security was going to be sitting in on a Usability test, it would fire off all of these processes for briefing, memos, talking points. And we didn't want to do that. We wanted him just to be able to ride along and hear for himself and see for himself what the experience is like for people trying to use whatever is happening. And same way with like, secret shopper things. When I was at the digital service the first time, the head of the Department of Homeland Security actually suited up in a TSA officer uniform and worked the security checkpoint at DCA. And I think I might have been the only person in the place that recognized him, but he got to see what it was like from the point of view of the officers, which was fantastic because we also serve the employees tools that employees have everywhere. I think this is probably true. Banks and insurance companies and tech companies are not great, but the ease of use and the efficiency of using them also affects the external user experience and the customer experience. And so we're working on improving those things all the time, too. So anyway, getting executives exposed to these kinds of situations is helping us make the case quite a bit for the mindset shift and for moving more in this direction.
Melissa Perri - 00:37:53:
I can't see a downside to arming people with the right tools to do good customer research no matter where you sit in an organization.
Dana Chisnell - 00:38:02:
No, exactly. Related the way we measure user experience a lot in government is by this thing called burden. There's a level of burden that you experience when you fill out a form. For example. I feel like this is.
Melissa Perri - 00:38:17:
I feel like this is very burden is a very good word for government services.
Dana Chisnell - 00:38:22:
Yeah, I didn't invent this. This is a regulatory thing. It originated with basically around ROI. But in looking at what is the burden on the public supplying the government with information so that the person can get the benefits that they're looking for that actually gets measured. And there are incentives for lowering that burden. We created my CIO issued a directive last spring to get the people who actually do oversight on that whole process to improve data collections or forms to lower the burden. The Department of Homeland Security puts about 190,000,000 hours of burden on the public every year through forms and various other data collection. And we want to lower that by 20 million hour by May of 2023. And there are a whole bunch of good UX and software design things, service design things that you can do to do that. But one of the things we asked was that each of those collections get usability tested with people who are like the intended audience and everybody's like, what? How do I do that? So we have taught 1000 bureaucrats over the last year how to do super basic usability testing, which has changed their way of estimating what the burden is for the better. It's great.
Melissa Perri - 00:39:54:
Makes me amazing.
Dana Chisnell - 00:39:55:
That's impact.
Melissa Perri - 00:39:56:
That is impact. And that's something I feel like a lot of large private companies could learn too. You've got these banks that have 45,000 employees. Imagine if everybody who works in an actual bank, like walk in, write a check type bank because we still use checks in the United States for those listening in Europe. Imagine if those people knew how to do usability testing and could report back really valuable feedback to the product team so they know how to prioritize and fix their issues. That's amazing. And it sounds like that's what you're doing in the government at scale, which is so cool. We're trying, definitely trying, but I like it. I think that's amazing.
Dana Chisnell - 00:40:35:
Feels like we're making progress, so I'm excited about that.
Melissa Perri - 00:40:38:
What are you most looking forward to coming up next, you think, in your government projects?
Dana Chisnell - 00:40:43:
Well, soon, internally we're holding a demo day, so everybody in DHS who's been working on things to improve things for their customers gets to show one another. I'm very excited about this. It's a massive event and this is sort of a prototype for one that we will do publicly next year.
Melissa Perri - 00:41:04:
That's so cool. I'm looking forward to that too. I can't wait to watch it.
Dana Chisnell - 00:41:09:
Stay tuned for details.
Melissa Perri - 00:41:10:
Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Dana, for joining us. If people want to learn more about your work or even maybe come work for you, how can they find you?
Dana Chisnell - 00:41:19:
The best way is to go to dhs.gov/cx, where we have a beautiful website that talks all about us and why CX matters in government. And there's also a link to sign up there too. If you give us your email address, we'll contact you when we have job openings coming up.
Melissa Perri - 00:41:36:
Amazing. Well, thank you so much for being with us today. And thank you for listening to the Product Thinking podcast. Remember, next week, we're going to have another Dear Melissa, where I answer any of your questions about product management. So please go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what questions you have, and we'll see you next Wednesday.