Batapa-Sigue: Much ado about UX

March 11, 2022 by No Comments

IN THE Digital Age, size does not matter. It is all about agility. The ability to adapt to disruptions in a timely manner. Departments of government with good leaders, chief information officers (CIO), information and communication (ICT) teams, and growth and innovation mindset will lead the race.This week, voices of Filipinos around the world have surfaced as part of the much-needed insights that government agencies need very much to improve their online systems. There is no pressure for these public service portals to be stupendous or complex. It is, however, important that they satisfactorily meet the needs of the users the portals are built to serve.The social media behavior of Filipinos in coming out and expressing their thoughts about the passport appointment portal is just astonishing. My first post last March 1 earned almost 2,000 shares and nearly 4,000 shares. But the post I made last March 9 earned nearly 6,000 likes and 10,000 shares.I wish more Filipinos who are software engineers, documentation specialists, programmers, usability and systems analysts, graphic designers, marketing personnel, project managers and graphic designers, will visit government portals and share their feedback to help improve these platforms. Because if we only rely on the ordinary laymen, as part of our culture, we will always just only resort to fixers or middlemen to help process papers we need from the government or just endure all the difficulties until we secure the licenses or papers we need. This is contrary to user design, or user experience (UX) principles. In this era, the user is king. That is why systems are built to satisfy and respond to users’ needs. The public sector in the Philippines is struggling to embrace this concept. And I am trying to understand why. It would seem the government is behaving like we always owe them for services they need to perform. We seem to be treated not as users but as slaves whose opinion do not really matter unless we come in throngs.In other countries, feedback is systematically gathered to improve public services. In the Philippines, we resort to social media such as Facebook or Twitter to share our ideas on how government systems should be improved. Government agencies then go on the defensive, instead of fixing the problem. This speaks volume of the kind of digital ecosystem we have in the country – one that is not led by any leader or digital transformation team or teams. No design or UX framework. Leaving government agencies to fend for themselves.Design thinker Don Norman coined the term UX in the early nineties when he was still with Apple, looking at human interface and usability, as well as other aspects of the person’s experience with the system, including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual. Along the way, the term UX became too concentrated only in the digital sphere. In reality, UX embraces a multidisciplinary approach. It is the method of using multiple perspectives when tackling a design issue leads to the best outcomes. It incorporates contributions from various disciplines, such as computer science, psychology, sociology, industrial design, anthropology, interaction design, graphic design, human factors engineering, and cognitive science. It is not as simple as just “the look and feel” of the system, the applications or the website. This is the discussion of Steven Miller in his 2021 book, UX Design: A Field Guide To Process And Methodology For Timeless User Experience.Miller says UX brings together all these elements and cuts across digital and non-digital experiences. This approach makes a logical point when considering the varying perspectives around definitions in different sectors: when defining what a customer is can cause confusion among industries; the marketing department might define customer experience differently from, say, an industrial designer, yet both may be correct based on what they know and on what the goals of the systems are. Design tailored for non-digital user-product experiences is called experience design, while the famous cousin of the two is called customer experience, which also refers to the sum of interactions a person has with an organization, a brand, or a system. UX is suitable and necessary for the government if public service is a product that citizens pay with their taxes. There should be a quid pro quo anchored on the ancient social contract theory as to why governments exist in the first place.Why do I give much ado about UX? Because we need to move forward as a country. We need to keep moving. Government offices such as the Department of Foreign Affairs need to take advantage of all the user feedback they are now getting from different levels of society or from people from all walks of life. These will not come as massively as this and often. This scenario saves the DFA time and resources to test their systems, because now they have actual users who provide them insights covering all aspects of their appointment system, both online and offline. This also saves the DFA resources to pay for a full-blown study on how they can lead the race towards digital transformation as one of the departments of government that heavily serve not only Filipinos but foreign nationals. I hope the DFA and the rest of the government agencies realize this as soon as possible.