User Research for the United States

Before you start any product, it is smart to take the time and to research and understanding the audience. When developing a software product typically specialists in User Research are called in. These are the people with curiosity and lots of empathy. They ask questions, they survey, and they build up an understanding of who a population of users are and what they need.

Interviews and questionnaires help build a qualitative picture of the users. Data collected from the product builds a quantitative picture. They create a picture of the personalities and the journeys people take as they find and use the product.

To improve our government and to make it adaptable we need to start with listening. Fortunately we already have the Census Bureau.

About the US Census department

Our Mission: The Census Bureau’s mission is to serve as the nation’s leading provider of quality data about its people and economy.

Our Authority: The Census Bureau operates under Title 13 and Title 26 of the U.S. Code.

Our Goal: Our goal is to provide the best mix of timeliness, relevancy, quality and cost for the data we collect and services we provide.

Source: https://www.census.gov/about/what.html

Where would this begin?

The first Objective I would assign to the US Census Bureau is “To establish communications with the US citizens.”

The communication would work like this.

  1. Surveys would be sent out from the census department.
  2. Data from those surveys would be published as a data source for all citizens to use.

As with most web applications I think we should start with a login. As of right now we have a system that involves our very insecure social security number for a unique key in many government systems. I would love for there to be a well thought out single sign on (SSO) for all US government functions but that will have to be a larger Objective for a Presidential Platform.

This login should be used to create a platform for the US Citizens so we have one login via mobile app and web app to a single platform for all of our federal capabilities.

What happens next?

Looking back at the mission statement; “The Census Bureau’s mission is to serve as the nation’s leading provider of quality data about its people and economy.” tells me that this should be a two way conversation between the citizens and the government. Essentially creating a portal so that questionnaires can be distributed and the data from these can be displayed.

If you look at what User Researchers do, these become the questions that need to be answered routinely.

  1. Who your users are
  2. What their needs are
  3. What they want
  4. How they currently do things
  5. How they’d like to do them

Here is an idea, remember the Wii “Everybody Votes” Channel? It was this quirky experience where they would pose a question and you weigh in on it, after a set time period the answers for how people voted popped up. Sure it wasn’t the most scientific test but it was fun and it started to create a behavior that we would want which is that people actually participate. I’m sure there are other ways to get people to login and use a national service but this would be a pretty low cost way to create public data sets that could be more useful.

This brings me to the next OKR for the US Census department.

  • Objective: “Increase the participation between the US Citizens and the Federal Government”.
    • Key Result: Get 10% of the US Population to login to their accounts.
    • Key Result: Create one survey a month and show an increase by 10% each time.

On the other side the US Census Bureau should be interested in the data sets being consumed. So I would expect a large data library to be established and released to the citizens. The Objective from their own mission statement would be “Provide quality data about its people and economy.” Is this Objective big enough? Shouldn’t they also be making sure that the data is being used? I want a better outcome instead of just the output of providing data.

To this end I would argue that the Objective should be “To provide the most useful quality data about its people and economy”. This could be measured with the Key Results of the following.

Every data set being collected is increasing its number of subscribers.

Time series datasets are being updated regularly.

A larger vision

I believe that the government shouldn’t do the analysis of the data but instead use its position to help its citizens understand themselves. Let private citizens, educational institutes, and companies do the analysis for fame and fortune. Kaggle is a fantastic example. If the data sets generated by a national portal were then offered up as the data sets for larger questions, we could unleash some of our best minds to try to answer tricky questions.

In conclusion we have the first piece, the Census Bureau Already a government agency exists and is funded and tasks with what we all desperately need, a way to figure out what to do next. Right now we are swimming in distrust and having shouting matches over subjective beliefs. Why can’t our government provide a decent source of data so we can start to answer some of the hardest questions?