Designing experiences nobody cares about
As a designer, you’ll be familiar with creating delightful experiences that people love. But have you ever been asked to create a delightful experience that really shouldn’t be? Something as pedestrian as taking out the bins every night? What about retrieving a death certificate, paying a fine, or renewing your drivers license?
For many people, completing these tasks can be painful and serve to make your life more difficult that it needs to be.
These tasks help us realise there are services that don’t require a delightful service experience. They require one that is reliable, robust and invisible. The experience should be so good that the customer forgets about it as soon as they walk away.
Government transactions are a perfect example. The experience shouldn’t be memorable and nor should it be. They can be hurdles that hinder a person’s ability to go about their day. Because they’re compulsory, citizens need to complete them as quickly and easily as possible, then move on.
These types of transactions have very different measures of success and satisfaction compared to private sector services. Citizens who interact with the government engender different thought processes and expectations, mostly because they don’t have a choice whether to complete the transaction or not, and there may be a penalty associated with non compliance.
Thick have recently completed a six month transaction reform project with the Victorian Government. We observed the ways citizens completed transactions, explored the reasons why they succeeded or failed, and prototyped ways to make them better.
As a certified B Corporation, Thick creates products and experiences that create value for business, improve people’s lives and have a positive effect on society and the environment. As a strategic design consultancy that focuses on making delightful experiences for the public service, it was a fantastic example of designing an experience to be invisible and forgetful, for all the right reasons.
