Digital

Designing with purpose and empathy

January 15, 2025 by deborahamzil No Comments | Category Client communications, Content Design, Digital, Digital Public Services, Social Security Scotland, User-centred design

Guest blog post from Emma Jones, Content Design Lead, Social Security Scotland.

Good content design is about making the user experience simple.  We need to design to help people do what they need to do, and no more. We need to focus on the purpose.

Finding (and sticking to) the true purpose can be hard among all the competing business and user needs. Empathy is the key to unlocking the true purpose of your content. When you empathise with the user you can clearly understand what they need, why they need it and when. Empathy also gives you a compelling narrative to persuade stakeholders.

Make the journey simple

At Social Security Scotland, we have a duty to make it as easy as possible for clients to get the money they are entitled to. We need to minimise the steps they take and avoid anything that could delay or complicate their journey.

Content design in the public sector isn’t about creating delightful experiences or tempting people to buy things. But we can learn from commercial settings. Businesses work hard to convert browsing into sales and spend a lot of time making this step as efficient as possible (called checkout optimisation). We need to do the same to help move clients though our online journey as quickly and as easily as possible. Rather than a sale, for us the goal is getting the user to complete the task. From browsing mygov.scot to getting the money they need, without jumping between websites, letters and portals.

Less is more

It is hard to stick to the key purpose of each element of the design. Sometimes content design that has been done bit by bit doesn’t work when you put all the bits together to make a whole service. Keeping it simple can help the client get money quicker. This might mean removing content, not adding more. This can be a tough sell to stakeholders. But content designers are perfectly positioned to do this. This is our craft.

Clients don’t have time to decipher what we are trying to say, they need the action up front, and to know how to do what we are asking. They don’t need platitudes or bureaucratic phraseology; we know people find that patronising and unnecessary.

This ties to the first principle of our client communications strategy:

‘Only communicate when we are meeting user needs’.

There are two main reasons for sending a notification: asking a client to do something or making a client aware of something. The communication needs to either move the client onwards in their journey or give them essential information about our service.

An example of needing less content to help move our clients forward was when we sent an SMS (Short Message Service) to clients with unspent balances on their Best Start Foods cards. We initially tried to reach these clients via letters. This had some success, but the letter was over complicating it. The purpose of the content was very clear, and the message and action was simple. By sending a text instead we were able to simplify the journey for the user.

Put yourself in the user’s shoes

The first step in simplifying this Best Start Foods journey was to empathise with the user and understand what they needed. We were able to use this understanding of their situation to design content to get them the money they needed.

Cambridge Dictionary: empathy: the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation.

By imagining what it is like to be in a user’s situation we can clearly focus on the purpose of our content. This might seem obvious; focusing on user needs has been a content design principle since the early days of the Government Digital Service. But the proliferation user needs has diluted their potency. We need to protect and advocate for the specific purpose of our design and how it impacts the user at that time.

I have also seen how competing needs of the business have been given the same weight as the user needs. This can make the content difficult to navigate, complex and full of information that doesn’t help the client complete the action, or move through the journey.

Building empathy

Business needs are important, but we need to make sure they don’t overshadow user needs. We need to get stakeholders to empathise with our users too.

As content designers we are uniquely positioned to hold the user at the centre of our work. This is because we have to consider the whole journey. We have to think about all the other benefits, or government interactions a user might be having, and put it into context.  We can:

• use this understanding to advocate for the user
• tell stories that illustrate the difficulties people face in getting the money they are entitled to
• use data to show how long and convoluted user journeys can be

The magic of simplicity

As content designers we know when the ‘words’ are going to help people get things done. But we think bigger than the words in front of us. We are designers: innovative, curious, questioning. We can make short term fixes but are always strategising and looking at the bigger picture.

Above all, we make the purpose clear and keep the content and process as simple as possible. We do this by focusing on one purpose and sticking to it throughout our design.

Doing this isn’t easy. And it’s not always popular with stakeholders. But it’s what makes it easier for the client to move from not having money to getting money. Which is their human right. We shouldn’t be making that any slower or more difficult. We need to make it so easy it seems like magic.

Get in touch at contentdesign@socialsecurity.gov.scot if you’d like to hear more about our work on client communications.

Tags: communications, content design, digital, digital public services, scottish government, user centred design

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