Serve

Providing good quality interfaces to transactional services is key.

All interfaces to transactional services should provide citizens with confidence that their time is valued, their information will be safe and their needs are understood. The interface to the service should reflect the quality of the service.

To achieve this, transactional service interfaces should be designed to meet the needs and situation of the users rather than simply providing a mechanism for information to be gathered. These user needs can be understood through both qualitative and quantitative user research techniques and user feedback. Findings should be applied iteratively through a process of continuous improvement.

Digital Inclusion

Ensuring that the all sections of the community are able to take advantages of using the web.

Web usage is not evenly distributed across all sections of society. Unless positive action is taken the people who use council service the most won’t be able to take advantage of them online.

Such is the importance of digital inclusion that it warrants the appointment of a Digital inclusion Champion within the local authority. Their role will be to ensure that digital inclusion is tackled using all of the available support from national and local programmes and initiatives.

Service improvement is part of the service

Service improvement (with involvement from the community) must be an integral part of service provision. All transactions should offer citizens the opportunity to use commenting and feedback to suggest service improvements as part of the process. Analytics and metrics should be used as part of an in depth user experience strategy to find and fix points that cause high dropouts. Services need to be provided via as many channels as appropriate and an engaging practical website will bring more people towards the self service end of the spectrum.

Inter-language connection

Language differences are a barrier to connecting people and information.  Providing the following facilities for language translation will improve the cohesion across Local Authority services.

• Commercial translation services.
• Automated free translation tools.
• User community provided translations.
• Live chat (audio, video and text) transcription and translation services.

Psychology

When digital communications is seen as a technology issue, psychological dimensions are often overlooked to the detriment of adoption and effectiveness.

There are psychological concepts that relate to design and consumption of digital technology that have an enormous influence on the outcomes of online (and offline) interactions, and their adoption. These concepts include such ideas as cognitive load, incentives, last mile problems, authenticity, recognition, conversion, etc. Providing Local Authority staff with a toolset of language and knowledge of such concepts will help to produce better designs, better solutions, better interventions and better outcomes.

Inclusion

Inclusion at its heart is about dealing with a diversity of behaviours, knowledge and access.

We think there are three aspects to ‘inclusion’:

Firstly, making sure no citizen is significantly excluded due to the implementation of a particular initiative; Secondly encouraging people to adopt digital behaviours wherever appropriate for the person involved; Thirdly, making sure that no staff are themselves excluded by virtue of having a poor or incomplete understanding of the potential of technology and the range of tools that are available.