Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen: From standards to service: Designing digital government for real user needs

Wouter Welling: Thanks. There you go. 

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen: Thank you. So, before I start, a little bit about myself. I’m a bit of a mongrel career-wise. I’m Danish. I live in Portugal. I’m a former civil servant. I’ve worked in consultancy. I’ve worked for the Danish equivalent of TNO. And at the moment, I work for another international organization, like the one I did when I was in Maastricht. So, I used to work for the Institute of European Public Administration in Maastricht. But the last nine years, I’ve been doing a PhD and working for this unknown UN agency called UNU. We’re not a university in the classical sense. We are a think tank supporting UN member states, provincial, regional governments, and large cities in particular, with all things from research, capacity development, capacity building, executive training, advice, assessments. So, in my day job, I’m actually leading a small team on governance and legal and regulatory issues for digital transformation of the public sector. And we advise governments on this. This presentation is linked to some research that we’re doing. So, it’s self-funded research looking at the role that service design standards and governance models play in ensuring user-friendliness in public service delivery. So, with that in mind, what is usability? What is user-friendliness? There’s two specific sort of references to this. There is, it’s a measure of how well a specific end user achieves something in a context. Yeah? But then you have someone like Jacob Nielsen. And no, it’s not a family member. It’s not my dad or my uncle. Nielsen is a mass description. Because we have a population registry that’s quite good on data. 7.3% of all people have Nielsen as a surname. Yeah? It’s the second most common one. But Jacob Nielsen did some stuff in the 1990s where he, through heat mapping and think-aloud tests, came up with these infamous F patterns and universal usability features. It’s like we don’t read online. We click and scan and we do it in this F pattern. The only difference there is on this is things like the pace we’re doing it with. So people who are less comfortable with technology, people who have got lower educational attainment levels tend to do it slower. If something blinks red, my old dad will be under his desk in his home office pulling the plug because he thinks he’s being, you know, attacked by cyberstalkers or something like that. The other universal thing is if our reading lines are different, so Arab speak, etc., they read different than Northwestern Europeans, the F pattern is just reversed. But there is no difference based on educational level, religion, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic background, etc. The only difference is the pace we do it with. So this is how we’re linking some of our research. But essentially, we’re talking about usability as a qualitative assessment. My definition of good service experience differs from everyone in this room. User experience is also a moving target. Great service at the barber or at the restaurant sets our expectations for service the next time we go there. So again, usability and service is qualitative. It’s an indication. It’s an assessment. It also goes beyond graphics and individual solutions when it comes to the public sector and the private sector. A single service in a single organization doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It is part of a wider organizational service portfolio. It is part of a wider public sector service portfolio. All surveys with users indicate that we don’t care who the government agency is responsible, who has the responsibility. We simply don’t care. We just want the service as fast and conveniently as possible. So when we’re looking at service design, we need to look at the full user journey. We need to look at the language use, the functionality, the look and feel, but also the web accessibility. We need to ensure that it’s intuitive and it’s user-centric. This is something we’ve talked about for a day and a half already. And it makes good business sense if we make things easy and intuitive and people understand what they need to do. Because if they don’t, they will resist using an online service or the call center and they will have a second request. So the infamous second touch point. And that costs money, both for me as an individual business or an individual citizen and for the public sector. So good intuitive design makes business sense. It is not just about the quality and the user experience. So again, the usability and the web accessibility also help us to achieve inclusion and equitable access. By writing in everyday language, action-orientated, short, clear sentences, we lower the barrier for everyone to access the service. So when I live in Portugal and I get an unpaid parking fine notification, it’s a pre-printed mail merge letter in font size 8. It refers to legislation, this, find that, this, that, cross-reference two different file numbers, and then it gives me an amount. I do not know what the amount is about and when the fine was incurred. But they threaten me with jail and fines. How easy would it be to say, Morten, you parked illegally on this date, on this location. Here’s the picture. Click here to pay or go here to pay. If you have questions, let us know. Contact this contact number Monday to Friday between 8 and 4. How difficult is it? It’s not difficult. You can hide all the legislation that the lawyers want to include on the flip page. Yeah? The same with your digital. So, again, we’re talking about service design for us to achieve something. But we’re also talking about two types of change. We’re talking about continuous improvement. So we know people don’t understand the text on the website. Because the call center gets calls about it. Yeah? So the call center needs to tell the web editors, we’re inundated with calls about this issue. How do we fix it? So we minimize the number of calls. Again, eliminate the chance for complaints. Eliminate the time of resource use spent on achieving our objective. Innovation is the complete change of something. So we’ve done continuous improvement. We can no longer beat that dead horse anymore. It just doesn’t work. I know that the Dutch are a bit the same with the tax agency like the Danish one. They’re built on 1960s systems. And they tend to be quite user unfriendly. But again, you may need to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Because it no longer works for us. And then you innovate. So good service design is not a one-off process. It’s something we do continuously. And user testing, back-end feedback loops, indirect assessment through our analytics, gives us information on what works and what doesn’t work. And then we can prioritize what we can fix here and now. And what we may need to fix with the next maintenance window. or when we need to continue and do a decision on completely changing our innovation approach to the services. So the challenges are multiple in this regard. Because we know that the digital services are not used to the extent that we were hoping. And this is not new. This has been the focus of conversations and meetings like this for over 30 years. 24-7 online self-service. It’s available. They will come. We know they don’t come. So it’s not just about access or having the service there. It’s about how the service is designed, how it’s communicated. Research and practice points to that it’s usually a lack of awareness of a service existing. That is a reason for people not using it. Or they don’t understand what it is the service is trying to achieve. There can also be a perceived level of trust or lack of trust in many cases. And this can both be in the organization or in the technology or a combination of the both. So we see actually in Latin America and Africa that there’s higher trust in the technology services than there are in the physical or call center service channels. Because it’s harder to bribe the computer. Yeah? The computer can’t go to lunch. And then suddenly you’re waiting in the wrong queue because the person has gone to lunch and then you have to change queues or you have a number but, oh, it’s now 4 o’clock. Come again tomorrow. Yeah? So there’s different things. But essentially these things result in a lack of behavioral change. When we talk to social security organizations globally, we find that the two things that they battle with is not about technology used within the public sector or in their organizations. It’s two other things. It’s innovation and change management skills within the organization. They are the most impactful type of skills and capacities they have for transforming their service portfolios and the way they work. And they’re in undersupply. And this is global. So a third of social security organizations globally, unemployment agencies, pension agencies, et cetera, tells us this. We asked them again last year, smaller sample. And this has even increased in importance. So again, user friendliness is about the online experience to facilitate behavioral change. The usability improves take-up and usage and satisfaction, but also return on our investments in the service. So productivity gain that can then be used to reallocate resources internally from the back office to the front office. It can save us money, et cetera. Classical things like administrative burden reduction, ease of doing business is part and parcel of this. But it’s also important in terms of national commitments and organizational commitments about universal access, not just for people with disabilities, but for all of us. Web accessibility in the digital world is the foundation on which we build good usability. It’s about contrast colors. 8% of Nordic men are born colorblind. disabilities affect between 8% and 15% of the world’s population to one extent or the other. It can be one-off. I once fell down a set of stairs and broke both arms. No, I didn’t, but my brother did. So he’s temporarily disabled. It can be age-related. You lose your eyesight with age, your hearing, et cetera. So it is not a small challenge, and it affects all of us. So again, that is something we build on. The intervention logic is really quite simple. This is something I stole from the Danish Ministry of Finance when I was a civil servant, and we convinced them why usability should be invested in when we did digital by default. If we have volume of a channel, we can ensure that volume through channel strategies, legislation, and so forth, marketing campaigns. Tax solutions, you must use it. No option. We can close the paper channel. We can do marketing to channel people over. That creates volume on a channel. That gives us an incentive to invest in it. But if it is badly designed, you’re going to have requests for assistance, and that’s going to eat away both your reputation but also your bottom line. Because now you’re handling two touch points for the same service request. That’s how we got the Minister of Finance in Denmark to say, now invest in design standard, invest in ensuring that there’s a minimum usability standard for government websites, government apps, government services in central, regional, and local government. Bottom line. Cherry on top, people rate you better. Another cherry on top, minister and mayor looks good. Politicians are risk adverse. They don’t like bad headlines. They’re allergic to them. This is a way we can convince them to not create bad headlines. Where we are today is generally, and this is globally, in a situation where different organizations, even different departments within an organization, have different channel strategies, different options, and the end user doesn’t really know what to do. In Northern Europe, the average citizen interacts with government four to seven times a year. It is not online banking. It is not booking Ubers. It is not shopping online. People do not recognize the government interaction space because they only see or interact with government a few times a year. So every time they’re there, it’s new. This is the same with our user testing. In Denmark, we used to test on the portal, think aloud testing, heat maps. We had people in. They were representative. We spoke to them for 45 minutes at a time. After 15 minutes, they are expert users of the solution. They know as much as the web editors. So what we did was to change the way we tested and said, no, we get people in for 15 minutes at a time. So they don’t become expert users in the solution while we tested with them. And we got dramatically different outputs. But where we want to go and where we tend to be is this unified access points on different types of devices. And it’s basically, you know, search engine based, menu based. And we facilitate that the one-stop shop solution is there. So we create an online shopping center for government services. But where we all want to be in the public sector is somewhere completely different. We want to focus on the four P’s of service delivery. We want to have preventive service delivery. So failure demand is eliminated. We can figure out how to do services so citizens and businesses don’t need it in the first place. We can do it predictively. We use our experience. We use our insights to predict what services people need at which given time. Yeah? We can personalize these services and we can deliver them proactively. But that requires something that, again, we’re not very good at in the public sector when it comes to innovation. It requires we look at our legal and regulatory framework. Because unlike the private sector, the public sector services are defined in legislation. What is pension? Defined in the legal framework. Who is eligible and when? It’s defined in the legal framework. What are the eligibility criteria and the data that you have to provide to document you’re eligible? It’s defined in the legal and regulatory framework. Who is responsible for it is defined by the legal and regulatory framework. So what we are very good at in the public sector is process innovation. Faster, better, cheaper. Same service, same organization. We do a little bit of lean. Then we fiddle a little bit with the service design and we bundle services so it looks like a new product. Then we do a little bit of organizational change by exchanging data in the back end with our sister agencies. And that has a value. And we are very good at that. But we are not truly innovating the way that we organize ourselves or the way that we deliver services. We can do it. We have the technology. We have the skills. We have the knowledge. But the first thing that goes out the window when we are behind schedule and over budget is the co-design of services and the user testing. This is the case in Sweden as it is in Bangladesh or in Ghana. This is what civil servants tells us. So what can we do to improve it? First, there’s a whole thing on improved communication. If people don’t know the services available, they’re not going to use it. So quite easy. Rethinking service design is another cluster of things that we can do. And this, again, requires language use. This is a low-hanging fruit. No legalese, no bureaucratic, blah, blah. It’s banned. You will see that in some of the service design standards. And there are lots of expertise out there. There’s lots of linguists. There’s licks numbers to define what the readability is. There’s user testing. But there’s also form and functionality. So particularly with weaker IT users, recognition is key. Intuition is key. So how do we ensure that? How do we make it easier for people to not be the carrier pigeon of information between different government departments? Yeah? How do we pre-fill things? How do we avoid that you go to agency A to get a document to take to agency B to get another document that you then take to agency C that delivers the service you actually wanted, which is approval of you doing a garage extension in your back garden? Yeah? How do we do that? How do we get government agencies to design themselves out of service delivery up front and into a back office service production process? Yeah? So again, there’s consistency. There’s less and more principles. So again, the temptation from the politicians and the leadership is we want the mayor’s picture up front. we want the minister there. Actually, most users don’t care. Yeah? Put that on the corporate section. They want to know about libraries, parks, daycare, parking permits, building permits, how do I pay my tax, how do I get my refund, et cetera. Yeah? So again, innovation and service design goes hand in hand. But again, as I said before, real innovation requires is that we do look at the legal and regulatory framework. So we need to switch the model. We think creatively, get the ideal situation, then we check the legal and regulatory framework. Can we do this? We cannot. Can we change the legislation? Does this legislation still make sense? Oh, it does make sense. There’s some privacy concerns, whatever. Okay, fine. We adjust the design. So again, identity management becomes a key enabler here. Yeah? Because it not only validates who you are and ensures secure access, it also allows us to start looking at different things we know about the user when they request a service. Yeah? So I was at Bada Lanzasarkin yesterday and they talked about the death of a salesman process. So this is someone that’s been a business owner, they die, and they’re trying to simplify that process. And it’s very complicated. But one of the things that I thought was strange was that the link between the National Population Registry and the disease only came sort of halfway through the process. Because what is key here? An ID number is no longer valid. Someone has died. Who needs to know? Not just government, but next of kin. So my ID number can be linked to my parents, to my children, notification. Any government agency in Denmark or in Estonia or in the Netherlands will be used for different public sector authorities that have an interaction with me. So tax, health insurance, et cetera. They need to know that I’m no longer around and they need to know what? Next of kin. Same with the private sector. So moving that up front would allow you to actually proactively let everybody know Morten has deceased. It’s very sad. They can now proactively inform next of kin of Morten is no longer here. This is his vehicle. This is his property. This is his business. These are his accounts. You need a power of attorney. This is who you contact. And then proactively we already start handling the estate. Same with the private sector. Yeah? So there’s ways we can look at the process and rethink it through data. So again, if we’re looking at this and this is actually from the Belgian presidency of the EU that did an event with the OECD and the commission a few months ago. And it’s quite interesting in terms of perspective. So if you’re looking at the gray, this is what government thinks is important. So guidelines, regulations, law, then the processes and responsibilities and then the services and products. But for businesses and citizens, it’s the other way around. Yeah? So it’s an easy way to think about it. What is most important to who? Yeah? But now it’s coming to what I think is interesting in our research. So we’ve looked at 16 different countries design standards globally. We’ve linked it up to academics like Jacob Nielsen and this guy called Ben Schneiderman that also looked at service design in the early 2000s and came up with these universal usability principles. So we’ve looked at 14 countries, 16 countries. Now two of them, Canada and Australia, are federal. And here, the regional level delivers a lot of services. Municipalities, not so much. both countries, municipalities jokingly get told, say that they do fix my street and meals on wheels. That’s what they do. Whereas the state, the regional level, the provinces are doing most service delivery and they then have autonomy. So you have service design guides both at national but also at provincial level. This we see even further exemplified in a lot of countries. in Sweden, some municipalities have design systems. Other organisations also have design systems. So when you’re moving between different public sector organisations, they have different design standards. So fragmentation. So what is it we found when we mapped it up? Well, we see that a number of them, these are the green ones, are looking at development processes. Yeah? The red ones do not look at development process and the yellow ones does it partially. So it’s a scale of zero, no evidence of, one, some evidence, two, all the bells and whistles are in play. So we see that some of them focus on the good development process. So some of them look at the design process only, so the co-design, the testing, the launch. others include the procurement process because smaller government entities do not do in-house development, they outsource it or they insource expertise. So there’s a procurement process. We also see that a number of them, this is the second row, looks at language use. So in Mexico and the UK, language use is not directly in focus in the national design standards. It’s indirectly sometimes mentioned and we all know GDS set the bar for the public sector with their design standard, but language use is not directly mentioned. Well, we see that a lot of countries are beating around the bush. We also see that form and functionality is often in play. We see that reuse of government components, so like PKI, public key infrastructure for secure login, digital signatures, payments, et cetera, data exchange and the back end, different types of privacy standards, the UGDPR is one in question, cybersecurity standard is all in play. We see that reuse of data is mentioned in a number of them, so this is this row here. We see that device independence, so design for one service, not an app for this, not a mobile phone version for that, not a big screen for that, know it’s one solution, HTML, responsive web design, the like. Now, this is an area that may change. Some of you know that the EU ID is specifying that there must be a national wallet for certificates and IDs by 2027, and there’s some work going on in that in a number of countries. We also see that not everybody is looking at web accessibility directly. Very surprisingly, the Mexicans do not actually refer to web accessibility at all in their standard. Some do it partially. Now, in the EU context, all EU member states have signed up to the UN Convention on Universal Accessibility. The EU requires that all government websites and solutions live up to the VCAC AA standard, and there is no exceptions to that in the EU. That means all of us in this room that are from European EU member states must apply and be compliant with VCAC AA. Now, a question we often hear is, but that’s expensive. There’s no evidence of VCAC compliance being expensive unless you retroactively have to retrofit your solutions. But that’s the same as you forgetting to build the garage in your car, in your garage door, at your house. Retrofitting a garage door or window is more expensive than if you built it in from the beginning. Now, what they also have in common is that they try and guide the users of the design standards through a number of things. So, examples and ideas of how to monitor use and usability. So, the classical example is UK’s performance platform. It’s no longer available, but they said all services, all websites from central government must report on how many people are using the service or the site as a percentage of overall volume. So, all channels. What is online? What’s the average time it takes for an end user to complete the transaction? What is the failure rate, i.e. how many people abort the transaction? Because that gives you an indication also about the quality. There’s other user behavior in there that you sometime log in, check it out, not intending to complete it, you will do it later, you just want to orientate yourself. And then, unit cost. So, a pre-calculated unit cost. So, again, this is what they have in common. Minimum accept criteria is what we see varies a lot. So, most design standards have design principles. The first question we all ask ourselves when we see something like design to your user right in a language your user understands is, what does that mean? if I get audited, how do I document that I live up to that design principle? Hard to do. So, we see that some actually did that. User testing is generally in most of them. Examples, toolkits, style sheets, code components are usually all applied in these because that helps the users of the design guides and the developers and the vendors to actually through reuse achieve 80% of the compliance that is required. But one thing that’s very interesting is this last column. Must apply, must apply, must apply but only at federal government level. Should apply, should apply, should apply, must partially apply, etc. So, what they generally have in common and there’s only one exception to this, it usually covers central government only. The exception is Denmark. Granted, it was my last crime as a civil servant to develop the first version of the usability standard but it is mandatory for all levels of government. that’s the only one that’s exempted. If we’re looking at the compliance standards, we also see that there’s quite different examples. So, in Portugal, the first version of the design standard was voluntary. What happened? Nothing. Not even the national portal was fully compliant with the design standard and it was their colleagues in the other office in the same organization that was responsible for the design standard. So, now they’re doing these trust labels and things like that. gov.uk we were very much inspired by. Must apply across central government. Must be tested by GDS staff at various stages. And then we were like, hmm, Denmark. We are also making municipalities apply this. There’s 98 of them. They have 35 different services. They all can choose their own vendors. Oops, we’re talking about thousands of services that we need to check. So, we did something else. We spoke to local government Denmark that represents municipalities. They did a mapping of vendors and we found out that most municipalities would have services developed by one to five different vendors. So, we spoke to the vendors instead and we did the compliance checks on behalf of local government directly with the vendors. And the vendors could then say to their customers saying, we are compliant. our next version is compliant. So, again, different options. So, what does that mean? Recommendations of good design process are in there. I think I’m running out of time. Majority of countries do look strategically at key usability and universal usability criteria like Nielsen and Schneiderman. not all incorporate usability standards within a larger framework of compliance measurement. And what we find is that you need in the early stages a bit of a whip. You need the usability criteria to be measurable because the first thing the vendors are going to ask, what do you mean? And we want to document to the government client that they live up to it and vice versa. But over time, you can loosen it and go design principle because the maturity of organizations change when working on these mandatory requirements. So again, there’s detailed approaches. What we see is the most impactful is that if design standards and usability is linked to strategic objectives, whatever they are, service quality improvement, accessibility, cost saving, they have more impact. Yeah? We also see that voluntary compliance leads to fragmentation. Some people just don’t react. Some people do it on purpose. Some people ignore it. They tend to be voluntary at local and regional level. The fragmentation in federal states lead to fragmented usability experiences when you navigate between levels of government. Compliance levels are obviously higher if it’s mandatory and it’s followed with clear follow-up from the responsible authorities. And cross-governmental models seem to lead to better outcomes. So countries that proactively work with the counterparts that have to comply with the standard and support it with design systems, tools, and advice, particularly for the first movers, achieve better results quicker. Yeah? So you hold the first movers by the hand. And this is what we see with a lot of change managers and design teams within individual organizations. They’re running around chasing their colleagues, holding them by the hand, pushing them off the ledge into good user experience and processes, or pull them draggingly into the room. Yeah? Kicking and screaming sometimes. But that’s what it requires because it’s also about changing behavior within the public sector. So lessons, again, early movers over time simplify the guidelines and move to more general principles because the maturity level and the understanding of what does writing to your target user or design with your target user in mind means in practice. Yeah? So as we mature, we can give more flexibility with the assumption that with flexibility comes responsibility. Very detailed and complex models do not work. India has three design standards, one for websites, one for apps, and one for transactions. When we did the first assessment, each of these were over 300 pages long. Who reads 300 pages of specifications for a website? No one. Not even the vendor. The new versions are less than 100 pages each, but they’re not cross-referenced. So your website is designed differently from the service you activate from that website. Bad user experience. So we also see that a number of countries over time has moved to more compliance, more mandated models because the voluntary application did not result in what was envisaged. So again, we see that. There’s a couple of policy recommendations in here. I’ll make sure that the slides are shared with you. But I think we’d like to have some questions before we have lunch. And I’ll be around today and tomorrow. So if there’s any observations, any critiques, any questions, feel free to contact me. I hope you found it of interest. So the key challenge is really do good design, involve your users, but don’t look at your individual service in isolation. Look at it as part of a larger portfolio within your organization and across the public sector. Thank you. Thank you so much. You can, this is also very courageous. You can contact him. Yeah, I’ve moved my phone number. We have bring your own device and I don’t like being bothered. There was a question being asked if the slides will be shared as a PDF. I’ll make sure that Victor and Jessica has a copy and they will share them out. Otherwise, I think there’s still something called slide share, isn’t there? Yeah, it still exists. And I’m going to ask some questions because there was some upvoting again and you can do it again if you want to in the yellow job. And it also interests me. Is there a correlation between the quality of these design standards you were mentioning and the actual perceived usability of services? Is there a direct correlation? Better design standard, better services? Initially, yes. Okay. So what we see is that in order to get people to use online services, we’re talking about a behavioral change. We don’t like changing the way we do things as individuals. So by saying to people that we’re now forcing you more proactively to use specific channels through our channel strategy, but we’re guaranteeing a minimum level of usability helps that political communication. Because it is also political. Why? Because it’s essentially the mayors and the ministers that often are afraid of bad headlines of little old student being stuck and can’t get their service or the impact on someone with two kids and a single mother. When we talk about service design in Denmark, the pension agency that also handles social security talk about highways and byways. 80 to 90% of users, they just need to get straight through. They know what they’re doing. They know what fits the form, fits the process. Then there’s 10 to 20% that are in unique situations or don’t know how to. And they need the off ramp. They need to talk to someone. But how do we get them onto that off ramp as quickly as possible? So again, it’s about the user experience. So you’re never going to be able to do a design standard that they talk about for the single mother going through a divorce and her ex-husband is a red-headed sailor in jail in Spain. That’s an exception that you will never design a service for. she needs to speak to someone in this case. And that’s the design principle that they apply. But again, we see that over time, as we increase the minimum level of usability, and this is the answer to your question, people’s expectations increase. So again, remember when you go to a restaurant, you get excellent service. You expect the same excellent service the next time you go and a little bit beyond that. And that is something that we also must recognize, that usability change, innovation, continuous improvement is a moving target. We might have done the world’s best service today, gets 10 stars, but then tomorrow, something better is experienced, and that 10 star is now an 8 star, or 5 star in 5 years. So we can’t rest on our laurels. But we see that the design standards, particularly the measurable, very mandated ones that are very prescriptive, helps increase that level of usability over time, and quite quickly, particularly if the whip is out. And then, when that maturity is there, the processes and feedback loops are ingrained in organizations, then they continue doing this on their own, and they will follow in, and we can loosen up the principles. I have a follow-up question, which was also upvoted a lot, and it relates to what we were doing before. It is, how do you engage the decision makers to cooperate in advance before there is a go-life? Because I would understand if I’m a decision maker or a politician, I would be involved if I am responsible for a shitty service. But before the go-life moment, or before the legal framework is in cement, and you can’t change it anymore, how do you convince them that you need to be involved in user-centric design? And how do you make sure that the mayor or the minister doesn’t run away from responsibility if something happens? Because things will happen. The designers fuck up. So in GDC in the UK, one of the early versions of the design standard actually has the last requirement principle, must be successfully completed by the minister. That means that the minister can’t run away from the responsibility from the new launch service. We looked at that in Denmark, and we thought it was a really good idea, but politically it would not work. because it would just, yeah, personalities. But again, in Denmark and globally, what we see is that countries where usability is not a political issue, but an administrative issue, and an administrative quality and service delivery issue, you have more consistency on it. So again, the intervention logic was how we got the political layers in Denmark to think about usability as it’s not just because we like to do good services and have good quality ratings by citizens and entrepreneurs. It makes financial sense. And we did that just after the 2008-9 crisis. So the key focus of digital by default in Denmark was cost saving. But also with keeping the level of quality. Raising. So getting that quality up, but making it more of an administrative issue and a business as usual actually makes this more palatable. It seems to me like you also have like a playbook in your pocket of how to gain attention or time or to get it on the agenda. And sometimes you do it with cost saving. Sometimes you do it with citizen satisfaction. In other countries in the Middle East they do it with annual awards. Best website. Best this. And in Denmark we used to do that with web accessibility for websites. So in the late 1990s web accessibility in Denmark on government websites was absolutely atrocious. You know, flashing things and font size five and no miles over text, etc. So there was top of the boat it was called. And it was basically focusing on web design. And they did it for about 10 years. And then they closed it down because they no longer needed to award good websites because all websites were now compliant. The national broadcaster did a spoof on this and it’s called the Amanda Awards. And it’s basically an award for the worst IT project every year. And Amanda was the name of the Copenhagen of University management system that was three times of a budget. 10 years delayed and then was scrapped because it never did what it was supposed to do. So there was basically this sort of exhibition of bad projects. And that’s where the governance model come in again. So what we see is that countries where the escalation mechanism in the project team up to higher level, if there’s lack of collaboration or lack of follow-up actually works really well. Even if it’s a closed group. And on national level this is a unique feature of Denmark is that the national steering committee for digital strategies includes all levels of government. Not just federal government or national government but all levels. So it’s co-ownership and co-design. And the peer pressure ministers or on the city council as in, oh shit, my ministry is in trouble or my department is not looking very good. It’s what you want to avoid. So they will help prioritize in the teams to ensure that the teams get the resources they need and the collaboration they need by putting pressure on their fellow peers. As you might have noticed, we could go on talking about this for hours, but we do have some other activities planned for today. So I’m going to ask you to give an incredibly warm welcome. 

Wouter Welling: Our thanks to Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen. Thank you. 

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen: Thanks a lot. 

Jeroen Schalk: Thank you for listening to this audio recording. This keynote was delivered at the User Needs First International Conference 2025 in Amsterdam. You can find all about this conference on gebruikercentraal.nl slash recap2025. Don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast through Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your other podcast app of choice. You want to learn more about the User Needs First community? Check out international. gebruikercentraal.nl or for Dutch listeners gebruikercentraal.nl. Till next time.