Nobody chooses a government service

The brief that has no market

Commercial product design has a safety net: if the thing is bad enough, people leave, revenue drops and somebody notices. Public services have no such signal. People do not leave. They struggle through, or they give up and lose whatever the service was protecting.

That absence of a market is usually described as making the work easier. It makes it harder. Nothing tells you you are wrong. You have to go and find out on purpose.

Project one: building the lab itself

The Laboratorio de Innovación Digital was the government's innovation lab, and my first job there was the lab, not a service. It needed an identity that read as a group of young people improving the state from inside it, and a site that showed how they worked well enough that other ministries would bring them problems.

Two months on the brand, three on the website, two more on a second version of it. I did product vision, the identity, the site design, the 3D concept and the research, with front end, back end and 3D engineers building alongside.

The second version is the one worth seeing. It is not a page. It is a place you ride a scooter through, where each section of the lab is somewhere you arrive, and it is still live at 3d.laboratorio.gob.do. It existed to break a mindset: to prove the lab could make more than forms.

• 01Define the service before the interface. Who needs what, from whom, and what proves it.
• 02Design for the worst case: old device, slow connection, low bandwidth for patience.
• 03A AAA colour palette, because a public service does not get to choose its users.
• 04Light, low requirement, responsive. A government site that only works on good hardware is not a government site.

After it launched, the lab started receiving proposals for games, AR and VR, which it had never been asked for before. Citizens joining its events tripled, the number of institutions bringing it work doubled, and the lab was formally established as a group that could deliver.

Project two: Reportero de la Gestión Gubernamental

A service for tracking public works and complaints from the citizen who reported them all the way to the institution responsible for fixing them. A reporter opens a case on a citizen's behalf, routes it to the right institution, keeps the thread alive while it moves, and closes it with evidence that the thing was actually done.

That last step is the whole product. Plenty of systems let you file a complaint. What people do not get is being told, by a person, that it was resolved and here is the proof.

I designed the entire app and ran the research over six months, working with a mobile developer, two backend engineers and a data scientist. Short steps and useful information, which is a low bar until you try to hold it across an institution that does not think in steps.

Project three: the city in your pocket

The app for the Ayuntamiento of Santo Domingo Este let residents report the things a city actually breaks: rubbish, asphalt, drainage, street lighting, traffic, fumigation, tree pruning, animal protection. Pick the service, describe what is wrong, and follow it in a list of your own claims.

The constraints were the point. The town hall wanted an alpha ready for an opening date, and there was no backoffice to receive anything, so we cut functions and routed reports to the town hall by email until one existed. Both teams were small enough to coordinate over WhatsApp. The alternative to shipping that was shipping nothing.

In testing, 100 or so people used it and filed more than 250 reports in the first week. What the sessions kept showing was not a usability finding. It was that people love their city and will do unpaid work for it if you give them somewhere to put it.

Plain language is a design decision

The single change with the most effect was never visual. It was refusing to put administrative vocabulary in front of citizens.

Institutions write the way they are organized. A form asks for a document by its internal code, a confirmation screen cites a resolution number, an error says the request could not be processed and stops there. Each of those is a small act of telling someone that this system is not for them.

Rewriting that is unglamorous, slow and political, because every phrase has an owner who chose it for a reason. It is also the work.

What it left me with

Government work sets the standard I still design against. If a service works for someone on an old phone, on a bad connection, under stress, at the end of a working day, it will work for anyone. The reverse is not true.

3×

Citizens joining the lab's events, after the relaunch

2×

Government institutions bringing the lab work

250+

Reports filed in the first week of the Santo Domingo Este app