Designing for Every Constituent: WongDoody's Erica Schenk and Phil Golub on Public Sector Design

Jud Neer:

Welcome to the podcast of the future of work practice at Infosys Public Services. I’m Jud, and in my 25 years of building for governments, I found the hardest part is rarely the technology. It's the people, the policy goals, and the judgment about what to create in the first place. All the stuff required to turn potential into results. I have two guests today, Erica Schenk, Senior Business Development Manager, and Phil Golub, Senior Vice President of Experience Design from WongDoody, a creative technology agency of 2,000 innovators united by one belief, that the best ideas focus on the humans at the center of it all. Backed by Infosys, WongDoody combines global tech capabilities with deep creative expertise to deliver ideas that scale intelligently and connect emotionally. Erica and Phil, welcome to the show.

Erica Schenk:

Thanks for having us.

Phil Golub:

Great to be here, Jud.

Jud Neer:

We're here especially to talk about the work that you all do, especially around a lot of the collaborative effort that goes into UX design and building great experiences for people, and especially how that can intersect with work that is done in the public sector, like what we do here at Infosys Public Services. So I want to start with you, Phil, on this question. When you're thinking about putting together a team that's going to need to collaborate closely with a customer, you've been doing that across, I'm sure, a wide variety of customers. But when you think about doing that with a government, what roles or dynamics really matter most to you, and what's maybe similar and what's different than how you would think about approaching a private sector client?

Phil Golub:

Fun fact, I'm actually based in the Washington, DC area, so I have touched government work in my past. I think more than anything else, the similarities are we’re creating things for people. They’re going to constantly compare the work that we do to their experience with Amazon, their experience with Uber, their experience with Spotify, And I can say this with some credibility that the government is typically about five to maybe even 10 years behind that curve. But that sense of empathy for what people have to experience, either in their jobs or in their lives as constituents or as citizens, and how technology can help them start a restaurant, or get a liquor license, or navigate policy. That stuff remains. But for designers who may be enamored with logos or brands or quote unquote “sexy work,” the script flips a little bit because they're thinking more about impact than sort of portfolio, if that makes sense. Public sector work is ultimately about common good, as opposed to commercial work, which, and I'm painting with a very broad brush, is very much about business impact, sales, conversions, loyalty. Conversion, excuse me, and loyalty, and service to a brand. Designers working in public sector work have to understand commonality, and being a citizen first and foremost, and making life easier as opposed to making it easier to buy. That's a fairly nuanced but significant difference, I find.

Jud Neer:

Great. Erica, anything that you'd add?

Erica Schenk:

I think from a macro lens, when we look at the difference between public sector and private sector, it’s market share, right? When you're a private entity, your market share is never, almost never, 100%. But when you're a public entity, your market share is 100% of the constituents that you're serving. So if you are the state of Arizona, it is 100% of Arizona that you need to be serving. Which is why at WongDoody, we have an entire center of excellence for accessibility specifically. So not just serving the main population, but also all of the outliers, because when you design for that lowest common denominator of how can we make this the most accessible, it serves everyone at the end of the day.

Jud Neer:

Very true. Do you have examples that you can give of a circumstance like that where maybe the thought was to an outlier or a 5% situation, but it ended up benefiting everybody?

Phil Golub:

There are two sort of ways to describe the accessibility ladder that Erica talked about. It used to be sort of designed for the masses and just have a secondary experience for those who don't access digital work the same way. We used to call that graceful degradation. And over years of being more savvy and understanding that designing accessible experiences is actually designing better performing experiences, we called it progressive enhancement. Which is basically the 20/80 rule actually gets you more than the 80/20, because it actually gets you better SEO performance. It gets you better page performance. And so that particular state, using a bespoke design system that baked accessibility into all the various patterns and components, was actually more performant, which increased adoption of that particular platform. So it serves the common good, and it's actually just good design practice.

Jud Neer:

We mentioned a few minutes ago about branding, and I'm curious about both of your thoughts, and Erica, maybe we'll go to you first, about thoughts about branding in government. It's maybe not a word that most people would think about putting together. Do you see that there's a place for that?

Erica Schenk:

Absolutely. When we think about branding in the more retail, commercial, traditional space, we're talking about building loyalty. And I think branding is the way that you can do that as a public sector entity. Is showing who you are, what are your values, what do you stand for, and how can you help? So providing all that important information at a very headline, consumable way that people can say, “Oh yeah, my government does want to talk to me, and I can reach out to them, and they are accessible, and they are providing benefit and community.” I think that makes people more excited to live in the cities that they live in, as well as participate.

Jud Neer:

What sort of practical tips might you have for a government agency that's engaging with you or maybe engaging with IPS and building a technical solution of some kind? What advice would you give them for things to think about relative to branding and that application?

Erica Schenk:

I think where I've seen it be really successful is, one, doing your research. Talk to people, ask questions, and then once you pick a direction, stick with it. It might not pay off in the first 30 days, the first 90 days, but building a brand takes time, and once people start to see the value exchange, it will happen over time.

Phil Golub:

Yeah. I would absolutely agree with that. I used to use the aphorism, a brand is a promise, experience is proof. And so, we stand for this, this is what we will do, whether you're at the municipal, state, or federal level, or on the commercial side. But what you actually do for your constituents, for your citizens, it sort of establishes the extent to which you're willing to go to fulfill on that obligation. And so in the work that I've done in public sector, it's usually, quite frankly, a race to the bottom, especially in the federal space. The cheapest vendor with the shortest time to market, oftentimes will win. The differentiator is really the customization of that product to suit the needs of the people. Let the technology serve the needs of the people who are consuming it, not the other way around.

Jud Neer:

What advice might you give for us technology vendors in this space around helping our customers think about branding and what's really behind that, of course, the values and the outcomes. And also, how might we go about being better as vendors to help encourage that? Any thoughts around that?

Erica Schenk:

The use case that I'm thinking of that comes to mind is field workers, for a company that I will not name. But they were having an adoption issue. They had invested tons of money into iPads for all of the field workers to be able to take notes, update accounts, update all their information, and no one wanted to use them. They weren't being used in the way that they had wanted. So we came in, we shadowed them, and just followed them around, was checking out what they were doing, asking questions. And we noticed, one, the glare on the iPads was making them basically unusable because they were all working in the South, in Texas, outdoors. It made the investment kind of useless. Also, the font was too small. They wanted to wear their gloves. They didn't want to take them on and off. And so investing the time and energy and putting the priority on figuring out the person problem before you just try and solve the business problem really does make a difference. Because once we were able to adjust the UX, adjust the screen glare, make the font size larger, change the colors, the usability went up and the adoption went up. And they ended up getting their business problem solved of more timely updates. But it really just needed that human problem to be solved first. And so we can take that back to public sector. What are the people's problems that they're looking to solve? And that's really what we can focus on in order to get our end goal.

Phil Golub:

Technology is the enabler of the experience. That's about as simple as it gets. Technology itself doesn't solve the problem. Technology is an enabler of the solution to the problem. A lot of clients, a lot of, frankly, bosses would say to me, “Don’t come to me with problems, come to me with solutions.” And a lot of IT buyers say the same thing. I encourage them to do the opposite, say, “Don't come to me with solutions, come to me with problems. Let me work with you to help reframe the problem in a way that will get us to the solution faster.” And in that way, what starts off as a capability conversation ends up as a culture conversation. Because you're not just talking about adoption through the lens of how do I use this tool? It's changing ways of working. It's changing mindsets. It's changing behaviors.

Jud Neer:

And speaking of things that potentially could get foisted on someone without their desire or whether it really solves the problem, I think with the remainder of our time, I'd love to talk a little bit about how AI is shaping the work that both of you do. How is AI potentially changing the way that you are approaching your collaborative work and what challenges is it bringing up?

Erica Schenk:

When it comes to AI enablement, obviously there's unlimited use cases at this point. It really does feel, like I said earlier, the Wild West. And there’s a difference between Silicon Valley mentality and the public sector. Silicon Valley can push and push until it breaks, but the public sector doesn’t have the ability to do that because of all of the different people that they serve So they have to move a little bit slower in the adoption and be a little bit more careful because of the constituents that they're serving. So in the private sector, seeing all of these opportunities come up when it comes to databases and all of the search capabilities that we're seeing, it is something that can be implemented in the public sector because people are no longer searching for information like Google and then pulling up a website. Instead, they're going for this no-click accessibility. So making sure all the websites are AEO, not just SEO, I think that's a huge opportunity right now in the public sector. But implementing full widescale AI engines and chatbots, it might not be something to jump into immediately because it might not serve the actual problem that people are facing.

Phil Golub:

Oh, it's a brave new world, my friends. Look, everything Erica said is true. The pace of change, whether you're just talking purely about technology and purely about the way that AI is disrupting very basic things about society. I was on with a client, and they said something to the effect of, “Hey, we just saw platform Y,” I won't name the platform, “just did their huge reveal, and there's so many new features and functionality coming out, and I feel like we're not responding to it quickly enough. Business doesn't keep up with technology these days.” I said, “That is true, but both of those things are outpacing culture.” I like to think of design as the rendering of intent and the rendering of culture, right? Because it works at the pace of the humans who are willing to adapt and adopt. And so, yes, the government runs at an even slower pace than business, and both of them are faster than culture. What AI is forcing designers, creators, creatives, technologists to do is converge skill sets and mindsets. The traditional lines between what a strategist does, what a designer does, what a brand person does, what a content person does, technologists, et cetera, are blurrier than they have ever been. And I actually see that as an opportunity, because that allows teams like mine to push farther up and further in to the value chain.

Jud Neer:

Yeah, Yeah. I have thought to myself that in the past where you might be sitting around a table with a customer and saying something like, “That's a really great idea. We'll go call back to our UX designers and they'll whip something up, and we'll come back in a couple of days and talk about it.” Where now it could be, “Hey, let's take a five-minute bathroom break, grab a cup of coffee, and come back and we'll see what the new render looks like.”

Phil Golub:

Yes.

Jud Neer:

That kind of quick iteration is something that we haven't always had in the past.

Phil Golub:

Absolutely. And it's really great. It's exciting. It's super fast-paced. We do a lot of workshops. That’s how we thrive. It’s called participatory design. We get real-time input from real people facing these problems, both users, stakeholders, and other parts of the value chain. And to collaborate on an idea is priceless. That thing we were talking about earlier about sort of ownership and accountability, if everyone is part of that idea and can see it happen in real time, you get faster buy-in. Our co-founder, Tracy Wong, is literally writing a book on a concept that he invented back in the ‘90s called Creative Democracy. That’s essentially what AI enables us to do, collectively, is practice creative democracy. Good ideas come from anywhere, and experience design in the modern age is much more about orchestration than it is about pixel pushing. And that's an exciting place to be.

Jud Neer:

I think that's a good place to wrap things up. Our final question: why should someone want to do what you do?

Erica Schenk:

What we do is, one, so special because we get to work with so many different clients across verticals, across industries, and having the chance to cross-pollinate ideas and be able to take what we learn here and move it over here and ask the big questions. I think as an outside perspective, asking questions is one of the most important things. And your question earlier, what can vendors do differently? I think ask more questions. And one of our favorite workshop activities, or at least mine, is the how-why ladder. And you basically work down a questions ladder. You come up with one problem statement that the client gives you, and you say, “Okay, why? Why? Why?” And you just keep working through that why to find the need behind the need, and then you work your way back up. “Okay, how do we fix this? How do we fix this?” And you work your way back up to the main problem. And that is one thing that I feel so special that I get to come in and help discover not only more problems, but the solution that will actually fix the main problem and all of the underlying.

Phil Golub:

Look, I'll speak on both sides, so the pro and the con. No two days are ever the same. Actually, no two hours are ever the same. For some people, that's amazing. For other people, it's disconcerting. So if you are the kind of person who likes variety, who thrives in ambiguity, who lives for the unexpected, this type of work in this environment at this time is perfect for you. Here in the agency space, it's a lot of different problems all at once, and the context switching, and the need to constantly learn. Boy, you have to have a learner’s mindset when you do what we do. So if you like that kind of fast-paced, constant context switching, this kind of work is perfectly fit for you.

Jud Neer:

If you're in the business of turning capability into results for the public sector, we'd love to hear from you. This podcast is brought to you by the Infosys Knowledge Institute. You can find show notes and transcript in the podcast section at infosys.com/IKI. The show is produced by Christine Calhoun and Yulia De Bari. Audio engineering by Dode Bigley. I'm your host, Jud Neer. Thanks so much for listening.