»I needed to remind myself what could be done«
Helen Mott, currently the central government sector lead in Netcompany UK, has dedicated her career to creating excellent digital services. Working for eight years in the UK government’s Ministry of Justice, she ultimately sought a faster pace. Here, she shares her lessons from working on both sides of a government contract, emphasising the critical importance of a user-centred approach to delivery.
The project is the first of its kind in the UK.
»It’s a bit like Digital Post and how it works in Denmark, but it doesn’t do it full justice«, Helen Mott explains.
If all goes well, it will transform how UK citizens and government communicate with each other.
It’s the latest in a long career of creating digital services, often catering to the most vulnerable or hard-to-reach groups in society.
»My hope is that people will come away with the feeling of a truly excellent service«
Helen Mott
A beginning in mathematics
Helen was born in London. One of her earliest memories is doing logic puzzles with her father. She credits her interest in human behaviour to her mother.
»As a kid, whenever I wanted to respond emotionally to a situation, my mother encouraged me to take a step back and understand the other person’s motivations«, Helen says.
At university, Helen Mott studied mathematics and Spanish, but her first job was at a customer-centred retail design agency. That was in 2003, when the world of digital was emerging.
»Working on their website redesign project, it became evident that the physical retail world was dying, and there was so much scope for transformation in the digital world«, Helen remembers.
Helen doubled down on the digital path by getting a job at a user-centred digital agency. She worked hard to understand not only her client’s customers and the design process but also how the tech behind the front end worked.
»I placed myself right next to the developers. They would talk me through what they were doing and why«, Helen remembers.
It wasn’t until Helen entered government, however, that she understood just how complex design problems can be and how essential a user-centred approach is to drive meaningful change.
Helen’s journey into government
The UK government’s digital service, GDS, was launched in 2011. Studies such as Dunleavy et al. (2006: 70) had found the UK emerging as “a world leader in ineffective IT schemes for government”, and the GDS was set up to remedy that.
When Helen arrived at the Ministry of Justice, GDS had been going for a year. At that point, the change in approach had not made much headway into departments and the term ‘user needs’ was still a dirty word.
»The prevailing logic was that if we started listening to users, we would not be able to meet the department’s service delivery obligations«, Helen says.
Working in different roles, Helen started to make delivering user-centred, digital government services the norm at the MoJ.
One of Helen’s proudest achievements is building the digital team for HM Prisons and Probation Service. It used to take a minimum of six months from the idea of a needed change to its actual delivery and around 90% of the costs were on governance rather than delivery.
»I had seen so many teams getting stuck in discovery mode, unsure if they’d understood enough of the facts or the user needs, leading to a kind of analysis paralysis«, Helen explains.
Helen’s idea was that if she could get a first version of a service into users’ hands quickly, the problem of user need complexity would naturally be reduced.
»In some of these services, the problem space is so complex that the only way you’re really going to learn what works is by putting something into somebody’s hands that they can use«, Helen Mott says.
The transition to Netcompany
By getting the right skills, autonomy and culture in place, teams could now make and deploy changes within hours and take ownership of continuously improving the user experience of the systems so prison officers could spend more time helping prisoners.
Building on such successes, Helen was made Deputy Director of Digital when the MoJ decided to centralise 5 digital teams that had grown up in each of the areas of the MoJ. She worked to establish a structure to deliver more efficiently across the organisation, aligning the work of 500 digital specialists to shared professional standards, delivering re-usable platforms, and growing the product, delivery, user research and design professions to nearly 200 civil servants.
Helen’s time in government was one of many successes, but she also realised that some things that she believed needed changing were still unchanged after eight years.
»I was increasingly frustrated with the pace of change«, Helen remembers.
»I felt I had preadjusted my ambition levels, knowing that something I knew could be done within 6-12 months outside of government would take 2 or 3 years within government.«
When Helen read about the Danish government’s approach to digital government services, she knew Netcompany would be somewhere she could regain that ambition and bring that learning back into UK government.
»I needed to remind myself what could be done«, Helen Mott reflects on her decision to join Netcompany UK in January 2022.
»In an ideal world, UK citizens and the government would communicate with each other in a structured, secure, and seamless way«
Helen Mott
Usability is not lipstick on a pig
At Netcompany, Helen continues to focus on user-centred design in government, with plenty of transformation left to deliver. One of her current projects is exploring how cross-government infrastructure for two-way communication with citizens could enable the transformation of end-to-end service journeys, join-up the citizen experience across departments and enable big savings for government.
»In an ideal world, UK citizens and the government would communicate with each other in a structured, secure, and seamless way. The right services would be surfaced to citizens based on what government knows they are eligible for, tailoring guidance to their specific context. Information exchanged would integrate directly into back-office case work systems, reaching the right case worker«, Helen says.
»For instance, if we have data that someone needs a service, we should just provide that service. I should not have to fill in a form and prove my eligibility to get paid child benefits. If I’ve had the baby and government knows I’m eligible, just put the money in my account. Removing friction like this is exactly how it works in Denmark, but we’re only really at the beginning of that journey in the UK«, Helen explains.
One take-away from Helen’s work in and for government is that user-centred design is not about a pretty front end; it’s about approaching everything from the view of the person whose behaviour you want to change – from policy design through to technology and data – and then making sure the service happens proactively and automatically.
»I often use the ‘lipstick on a pig’ analogy to explain this. If you’ve done a beautiful usability job on the front end but the policy is so complex people access the wrong service or when someone hits submit, the application goes into a mailbox where someone prints it out and then types it into another system, you haven’t really done the job«, Helen explains.
»We can build beautiful, clever technology, but if no one uses it and it doesn’t have the desired impact on behaviour change, then it’s pointless«
Helen Mott
