In reading this excellent summary of ordeals by Sam Freedman, it struck me just how counter-purpose this type of policy is to the effort to deliver great government services. It reminds me of when I had a toddler and I would spend ages cleaning and tidying bits of the house only for him to come in like Godzilla and wreck the place, leaving it covered in a trail of jam and glitter. It was hard not to feel a growing sense of futility and yet I kept going in my efforts to keep a clear path through the playroom for the adults to walk through. This is how I often feel when working to improve services in the face of policy like ordeals.
Ordeals are government bureaucratic overhead put in place as part of policy, sometimes as an effort to ensure proper benefits eligibility and other times as part of a means to discourage further applicants to an already strained system. One of the most common examples of an ordeal that is put in place to receive government benefits is requiring recipients to fill out extensive paperwork, provide multiple forms of identification, and submit to rigorous background checks.
While these measures can help to prevent fraud and abuse, they can also be time-consuming and confusing, particularly for those who are already struggling to make ends meet. In some cases, the paperwork can be so daunting that people give up on applying for benefits altogether.
Human centred design seeks to understand these burdens faced by a user. It’s an approach to service design and software development that puts the needs, wants, and limitations of people at the centre of the design process. It involves understanding the users’ perspectives and lived experiences, as well as involving them in the design and testing of solutions. Trauma-informed design takes the concept a step further and brings in the psychological impacts of traumatic events on the ability of the person to bear a cognitive load.
All of the user research I have been involved with while working on government services has directly uncovered the massive burden on the public which comes from unwieldy bureaucracy. Whether it is a mother on a Native American reservation in the southwest US who has to drive into town once a week to connect to wifi at McDonald’s to get her benefits, or the man in Hull who feels ashamed to discuss the very personal health reasons why he can’t leave the house (and the toilet) to go work on a building site. these burdens are very real and very difficult to bear.
When I worked at the US Digital Service, we talked a lot about integrated benefits eligibility. Having a means to share eligibility data between government agencies at the state and federal levels would mean that applicants could be less burdened and possibly receive their benefits more quickly and easily. It seemed that this holy grail could actually be possible given the right combination of legislation, policy and technical implementation, but even with proper funding in place, data sharing often doesn’t make the top priority.
For example, when I led the USDS team based at the US Department of Agriculture, we conducted thorough generative research which clearly demonstrated that data sharing for automated benefits eligibility would make a huge impact on applicants for the WIC programme, a nutrition benefit for women, infants and children. The problem was that this kind of burden reduction didn’t fit the bill with the policy team, and other interventions were prioritised instead.
All of this is to say that there are so many obstacles to making well-functioning government services. The stars all have to align with legislation, policy, funding, technology and the willingness/awareness of those in charge of services to make the right priority calls. For those of us fighting to remove burden from citizens from a digital perspective, the last thing we need is the additional load that is ordeals.
The USDS value of “design with users, not for them”, lends itself to having real empathy for those in greatest need of benefits. And if you are able to walk a mile in those shoes, you would see that removing all cognitive load, either from poorly designed services or from ordeals, is the way to free a person up so they can focus on becoming more independent, returning to the workforce or other ways to reduce their need for benefits.