By André Regtop, Director of the ICTU and ambassador for the ‘User Needs First’ community, and Victor Zuydweg, ICTU consultant and co-initiator of the ‘User Needs First’ community.
Reading time: 3 minutes
Be sure to read the other articles in the Decent Digitisation series.
Digital independence depends on mastering digital skills. Millions of people in the Netherlands are supposedly not digitally skilled enough. They are indeed missing the e-boat, a problem recently highlighted in a report by the National Ombudsman of the Netherlands. But that does not mean that these people are ‘digitally un-skilled’. Indeed, it says more about the extent to which digital services meet the needs of those who use them. After all, ‘[T]he share of the population that can manage their affairs independently in the digital domain and/or that require assistance doing so naturally also depends on the complexity of the service itself.’ (Translation of passage from Digitale Zelfredzaamheid van de burger).
ICTU is an independent government foundation that works with and for authorities at all levels to build a better digital government. We too find it important to ask ‘What can government do to optimise its digital services?’
We concur with the 2017 report Maak Waar by the Information Society and Government Study Group, which states that the digitisation of government requires a radical change in attitude. And: ‘Digital service delivery is at the core of the primary process of government organisations. It must be actively organised around the wishes and requirements of the public and businesses.’
But how?
The ‘User Needs First’ community thinks that online services can and should be more user-friendly. It is calling for government organisations to take a good look at those who use their services instead of putting the systems or the services themselves first. Looking at what users really need also helps boost people’s confidence in their digital skills and in government as a whole.
The ‘User Needs First’ community has drawn up a list of design principles for more user-friendly government services. Similar principles already underpin the service delivery of such commercial organisations as Android, Windows and Facebook and the governments of the UK and the US.
The five design principles for more user-friendly government services are:
Let’s stop talking about how to help people become digitally skilled or digitally independent; let’s talk instead about how to improve our digital service delivery. Because maybe there’s no such thing as digital illiteracy. At most, there are ‘people-illiterate’ systems, i.e. systems that don’t know how to deal with real people.
We can only increase the public’s digital independence by making digital facilities more people-literate. Once we manage to do that, we may well see an automatic improvement in the people skills of digital government services.
Visit the User Needs First and ICTU websites, or contact Victor Zuydweg.
Be sure to read the other articles in the Decent Digitisation series, and the related reports: