Alchemizing challenges & technical constraints
There are challenges that make designers manically oscillate between cringe and pride at their work during a sprint.
Let’s real talk for a second. Things don’t always go as planned. Some issues may not be resolved within a project cycle. Some defeats must be (somewhat) graciously accepted, and other times, firm pushbacks must be made.
Anyone who has been a part of large public sector organizations usually exchange solidarity or ‘war stories’ (to default to hilariously militant office lingo) over a common challenge:
Frequent constraints from musty, dusty, jurassic “baked-in” technologies, software, third-party vendors or even experiences that will not (and sometimes cannot) be altered during the course of a sprint or project timeline. The bureaucratic process in a large public sector organization, including the long and typically untimely chain of upper management approvals required, and even the simple technical logistics of “legacy” inheritance — how a digital experience was previously built, how future-proofed or quickly transferable it is, or isn’t, how data is currently stored and managed, what resources are available to do the work — can all pose as obstacles, often simultaneously. For my last nugget of brutal honesty, this can be tragically enabled and amplified in a non-competitive public sector environment. The silver lining is that while these are organizational flaws more than they are individual, a system is made up of individuals who can push their influence for a better digital experience, no matter how seemingly small. And you have to get comfortable celebrating the small successes.
Another positive note: there is a lot of nuance and complexity to be absorbed from the service design of such large organizations, especially that of a whole city, who cater to a wide demographic of varying degrees of tech savviness, age groups, backgrounds, as well as top shelf accessibility needs, which are often brushed as lower priority in some private sectors. Something feels undeniably inspiring about being of service to your city’s people - no shareholders, no underlying profit motive, just reacting to people’s needs.
In these enviroments, a designer must swallow the realistic but nonetheless coarse pill that their golden Plan A, needs to somehow alchemize into just as shiny of a plan B… or even C. Challenge accepted?
- Is this an impossible ask?
- How can we still propose and execute the best experiences possible,
even if far from our first approach?
- How can we use this as an opportunity to mature and exert leadership?
- When should we see obstacles as positive redirections rather than blocks,
and when should we see them as blocks meant to be shattered?
While likely to be smoother sailings, there is no rule that a project birthed from tabula rasa, or clean slate, is automatically more noteworthy than a heavily technically-constrained redesign.
City of Vancouver 2022 Elections
The 2022 City of Vancouver municipal elections involved refreshing a series of web resources that rely on time sensitive content changes, as well as effective interlinking between third-party applications and information pages on their home domain.
The kicker is it would still be using the very dated third-party applications that didn’t allow for efficient navigation and content organization in past years.
”If we can’t just do it for the users, we must guide them well.” - Me
When faced with technical constraints such as the inability to:
provide adequate shortcut links
simplify and/or separate different user journeys to align with time sensitive content updates
remove unwanted components
instantly validate user input (despite it reducing user error by more than 50% compared to post-submission error messages)
or, on the bureacratic side, the inability to alter the service design at this stage, a designer’s job is to come up with the best workarounds possible and use effective visual technique combined with well-crafted and concise messaging to best guide users and avoid frustration or lack of clarity. When it comes to government tings, research shows time and time again, people care less about frills, and more about information being clear as day.
In this example, when an application does not allow for any type of input field validation (whether instant or upon page submission), or redirections during the form, it was critical to draw users’ attention to a clearly worded, visually distinct cautionary alert at the very start of the form application to help prevent users from wasting their time:
For my Plan A and the betterment of both the user and the City employee’s experience…
I would have streamlined the service design. There should be no need to rely on messy email communication that leaves room for human error such as address input format inconsistencies, delays, lost emails, back and forth dialogue and difficult to organize messy back-end data. The form and service design should support and validate address changes and include a self-serve experience for the non-resident applications.
Something more like:
The receipts ———————
Don’t just take it from me, usability studies testing over 280 e-commerce platforms also concluded that inline validation saves both end and staff users from unnecessary headaches, and doubles form completion rates while others also noted that companies with strong self-service UX see 30-40% lower support costs due to fewer manual interventions. Even Google’s own research team found that address autocompletion cuts errors by 70%.
