Compiling vs. Processing Learnings: Revisiting User-Centric Design Through California Food Stamps
Lately, I’ve been having this feeling of prioritizing all the wrong things — busywork, classes, casework prep, and understanding why and how the deadweight loss in the American natural gas industry works.
Maybe “wrong” is not the right way to look at these. They are of great importance in the life of an HKS grad student but as everyone at the Kennedy School believes, being here is really like drinking from a firehose. With so much going on, it’s imperative to prioritize. Only recently, I was discussing this feeling with a colleague — being in the middle of a semester feels like we are compiling information without having the time to really process it or act upon it.
To reiterate, I am extremely fortunate to be where I am. As an applicant, I would’ve killed for the chance to be sitting right here, staring out of my window at the warm glow of the Caspersen Center. As a student here (and this takes a while to sink in, truly), I’m learning to be okay with the idea of not having to “kill it” at every single thing. So here I am, a few hours before my Econ midterm, penning yet another blog post. No, this is not born out of procrastination but a genuine need to prioritize writing more for myself. For the sake of having time to not just compile information but really reflect upon it and process it.
So here goes my personal debrief on a recent, extremely interesting case we had the opportunity to discuss in my Policy Design and Delivery class on California Food Stamps and digital government. The sessions were led by David Eaves (https://medium.com/@daeaves), practitioner and classroom facilitator extraordinaire and a total digital policy wonk. Can’t ever have enough of ’em! And if you’ve read even a single blog post here, you know I’m a wonk about user-centricity in everything. However (and this is one of the best parts about the Kennedy School and international experiences), I also have a lot of reasons for questioning it of late, which I will elaborate upon in a later blog post.
About the Case:
The case dealt with the involvement of Code for America (CfA) fellows in improving the user experience and process around signing up for the food stamps program in the state of California — which was pretty novel to me. There is no parallel to food stamps in India that I know of so it was like grasping a policy from the scratch. And yes, this tends to happen a lot at HKS but more on my disappointment with the American-centric nature of the curriculum later. Feel free to read up more online (don’t think I can legally share the actual case here) but the point was that California residents can currently sign up for food stamps through an independent platform that CfA created, which is not a government website but simply forwards the information collected to be processed by the relevant government agency.
Highlights from Case Discussion (much gratitude to my classmates for an engaging and lively discussion):
- Scaleability Potential: Yes, apps are exciting and easily scaleable BUT. Look at the numbers and assess needs. Are under-coverage rates for food stamps poor in other states or is it just a California thing? Is it really a national problem? California was a good fit because only 66% of the people eligible for food-stamps were receiving them.
- Breadcrumbs to build internal problem-detection capacity: California had the highest administrative costs for implementing the program with the second poorest coverage rate AND had to pay food bank workers for one-third of the applications they received. Both should’ve been clear indicators that people are not having an easy time with the application process.
- Coordinating Across the Board: When you’re dealing with multiple stakeholders — as in this case since there were multiple counties with their own demands of the (original in-house government, not CfA) platform and an external vendor, it helps to have someone looking across the board (like a product manager). Lack of this coordination across the board with someone having a bird’s eye view often leads to good intentions translating into nothing of much value.
- Building Relationships within the Government: People are important. The faster you learn that, the better it is. CfA took time to invest in relationships with the local government — and yes, this was also driven to a large extent by the mandate they had as an external actor coming in, without the other 354433 responsibilities that public servants have. But people are your biggest assets and champions — they are critical to building support and legitimacy, operationalizing capacity, AND bringing more people on board for the public value you aim to create.
- Design Requires Empathy and Humility: A reason for why the CfA team was more successful in immersing itself in user-centric processes and going through the life-cycle of becoming a food stamp beneficiary could be that design is hard, y’all. To meet with your users, many of whom in this situation, are from a very different race and class involves confronting “identity quakes” — it shakes your fundamental belief that you as a public servant are doing good. It forces you to confront if you are even skilled enough to be engaging in public service if you’re not able to understand or connect with the public you serve.
Why I Loved This: Home Run
Digital government in India is in very nascent stages. It will only take you a few seconds to open the IRCTC website and bang your head against the wall trying to book train tickets — personal experiences and the infamous memes say it all.
Admittedly, I know little about digital government products in India but the lessons from this case are so useful and applicable in terms of user-centricity and coordinating across the board. While government websites have undergone massive improvements in the last few years, greater smartphone penetration offers enormous potential for making people a part of people-friendly and participatory governance. According to this projection, smartphones are a growing market in India and by 2022, 36% of mobile phone users are expected to own a smartphone in India.
E-seva kendras, or computer-based kiosks in urban and rural areas managed by the local youth are a great first step in the direction of making internet-based government products accessible to people but it still does not solve the problem of user-centricity. E-seva kendras are touted as a source of job creation for young, entrepreneurial upstarts (mostly men in practice) in villages and offer services like enrolling for various government identifications, pension schemes, updating personal details, and basic photocopying services.
Having interacted extensively with the men who run the E-seva kendras, I believe there is a tension between providing that kind of employment to an unemployed youth in the village to be balanced against the long-term implications of who these kendras, at least in rural India, include and exclude, and how. This institutional arrangement meets the needs of the people largely through an agent of the government without building capacity in the people to access these services on their own. For the agent, it is not a problem that these systems are not very user-friendly — he knows how to make them work. The structure of E-Seva Kendras is not aligned with the incentives of the agent and are in fact fundamentally contrarian. If we do continue with the E-seva kendra model in rural India, it raises the question of whether we are prioritizing certain Indians over others in becoming part of the digital government revolution — those who have the literacy/education/time required to deal with cumbersome online processes, like myself.
Admittedly, India is not very far along the digital government revolution to be thinking through these ideas right now but my personal belief remains that you must start building in preparation for what the world will look like way ahead of when it actually looks like that. In the short-run, the E-seva kendra model is of enormous importance — and its value in job creation of micro-entrepreneurs in small-town India is evident in the explosion of E-seva kendras around every corner in most tier-2 and tier-3 cities.
For now, this is food for thought and very important food for thought as I try to relate what I learn here, in a completely different context, to realistic lessons and implications for back home.
PS: As a bonus, if you managed to stick around this long, sharing some FASCINATING work on design principles for reducing the digital gender gap by Dalberg et al cause I cannot think of any issue divorced from gender implications!
