Dana Chisnell (USDS) Tackles the Citizen Experience

A longtime friend will close the Saturday festivities.

Redesigning the Citizen Experience
Nov 12, 4:10pm / 45 MINUTES

Every day, millions of people interact with the United States government. People apply for Social Security benefits and small business loans. They look for affordable health insurance and financial aid to attend university. They need passports and tax refunds. But these interactions are often frustrating and cumbersome because of outdated tools and unreliable systems.

Modernizing government, understandably, feels like a huge task. This is because government acts like it is in the business of carrying out legislation, rather than providing services and benefits to the public. It uses IT as a necessary evil for collecting data off of application forms. That’s a 20th Century (or maybe even at 19th Century) notion of government. A modern government is in the business of delivering services to the public over the Internet, mediated by technology. This is a fundamental shift in mindset, and it drives all of the change, from procurement to design. Dana will describe her key observations from working with enterprises large and small: large projects almost always fail, engineering problems are design problems, and delivering great experiences relies on improving the user experience for internal workers.

Speaker Bio: Dana Chisnell

For those of you who have attended our early UXcamp events, Dana Chisnell is a very familiar face. She is the first ever international keynote speaker that graced our stage and we’re thrilled that she will return for the third time this year. She just wrapped up a 2-year term as a design researcher at the United States Digital Service (USDS), where she was on loan from the Center for Civic Design. She’s also co-author of The Handbook of Usability Testing (Wiley, 2008). According to Dana, “Seeing federal government from the inside was… instructive. When you’re on the outside, it seems obvious what to do to make government better. But it turns out that bringing government services into the 21st century, building systems to support the best possible experience for the public — well, it’s just wicked hard.”

Dana is an elections geek and UX research nerd (her words) who has trained thousands of people, including government workers, how to experience the experience their users are having. She really loves is giving design literacy to the world. She’s the lead on a project to develop a series of Field Guides To Ensuring Voter Intent. The Field Guides, originally funded by a Kickstarter project, are designed to be quick, easy, and accessible help for local election officials to do the best possible design.

You can find Dana on twitter @danachis.

Prior Presentations:

DEMOCRACY IS A DESIGN PROBLEM (UXcamp 2011)
Oct 13, 2011 10:05am / 45 min / Slides

DECONSTRUCTING DELIGHT: PLEASURE, FLOW and MEANING (UXcamp 2012)
Oct 13, 2012 11:45am / 45 min / Slides