/ JOURNAL
Why we call it interaction design
Shortly after joining Method full-time in 2012, after years freelancing there, what was the user experience team became the interaction design team. I’m going to be honest with you, I was pretty put out about it. As someone who'd spent most of the past ten years with user experience job titles it felt both alienating and a retrograde move away from what had become a hard-fought norm.
Ted Booth, Method’s executive director for interaction design at the time described it differently. As a return to our roots and craft, to Moggridge and all that. Truer to what Method is and was exceptional at. Ted was right. I was wrong.
Three years on, and I’ve found myself pulling the exact same trick at HMRC, where I’m currently interim head of design. Other government departments are set-up slightly differently, but this is how we do it. Our model is that, for every agile delivery team, there’s a content designer, an interaction designer and a researcher. What was ‘UX’ at HMRC is now interaction design, what was a design community is now a single design team of content and interaction designers.
Here’s why. I’m increasingly against one role having effective ownership of user experience in its title. Labels matter. 'User experience designer' unintentionally disenfranchises our content designers - particularly our content designers - but also our researchers, our product owners, our front-end developers. UX designers don’t, ugh, ‘speak for the user’ alone. As a team, we all contribute to the user experience of a service.
Interaction design at HMRC and elsewhere in government doesn’t look quite the same as ‘traditional’ UX roles in the wider world. Content is 95 per cent of the user interface on GOV.UK. That's why we have specialist content designers working right beside our interaction designers, crafting what we say, how we say it, when we say it. Both design roles have to work tightly together, making sure that what the user sees, reads, engages with, interacts with works similarly tightly.
Our designers are heavily involved in research, both as observers and in directing the focus of that work, but they aren’t the researcher. That's not a question of 'marking their own homework' - any designer worthy of the name can separate themselves from the work - but a matter of practicality. It’s fundamental in making design and research in agile work for us at a cadence hight enough to enable the level of design iteration and user participation we need.
Back to Moggridge, then. In his seminal ‘Designing Interactions’, Gill Crampton Smith references four dimensions of interaction design:
- words
- visual representations - typography, icons and more: what the user ‘sees’
- physical objects and space - I think of this as ‘context’, whether - in our world of government services - the interface is sat on a desktop, in the user’s hand, used on a flaky mobile network, in an office or home, in a public space, on the move
- time - things that change over time like sound and video
As a design team at HMRC, that’s what we do, right there.
Further reading
What’s the design process at GDS by Ben Terrett
Full-on
So, six months in then to my current gig as HMRC Digital’s interim head of design. That it’s taken this long to commit words to screen tells you how intense, how full-on those six months have felt.
And to look at me on a typical day, hunched over a laptop screen all furrowed brow, deep sighs and foul-mouthed muttering you wouldn’t necessarily conclude that I’m enjoying it, but you’d be dead wrong.
I’ve never been more proud of a job, fortunate in the designers I inherited from Denise Wilton’s time in the same role and proud of those I’ve been able to bring in since. I don’t need hindsight to see that I’m in the best moment of my career as a designer.
With close to forty designers, HMRC has nearly one in five of the designers working in government. It’s by far the biggest team I’ve been responsible for, stretched over 300 miles between Newcastle and London.
HMRC is hard. We’re dealing with hard design problems, complex interactions and a lot of cultural and infrastructural legacy. There are 30 agile delivery teams across HMRC, building a complex inter-related set of digital services. What we’re building affects the the lives of millions of people - not just the money that HMRC brings in to pay for public services, but the money it gives back out in tax credits to people whose everyday lives rely on HMRC getting it right.
To work for HMRC is to imagine what it’s like to be a doctor. Mention it and you’ll find strangers telling you their life stories. Hours spend on hold, lost logins and unfathomable interfaces. Sorry, everyone.
Design is meetings
The hardest design work at HMRC often isn’t about what we commit to screen, it’s the work that precedes it. Like other government departments, design at HMRC is as much about showing by doing what good design process can and should look like to a department culturally attuned to Gantt charts, functional specifications, fixed requirements and bad outcomes.
Overturning that legacy means facilitating design in a way that lets others in - tax specialists, policy and legal advisers and more. To help them see for themselves, through participation, how to turn their intent, through design, into a digital service that truly meets user need. That’s attritional, worthwhile, rewarding stuff and it takes a special group of designers to make it work.
Us vs them
HMRC Digital is connected to something far bigger, with its neighbouring digital teams in the Home Office, DVLA, Ministry of Justice and more, and in Government Digital Service itself. Part of the next phase of design in government, I think, is about continuing strengthening the links between departments and the embedding of a culture, gifted to it by GDS. I think design has a big role to play in that and it starts with the Digital Service Standard.
There’s been an understandable tendency for all departments, including HMRC, to see the Digital Service Standard as GDS’s, rather than something that is of the government, our own.
‘What we need to do for GDS’ rather than ‘what we need to deliver a quality digital service’ is still a thing I hear far too often.
By externalising the service standard - and GDS - in this way, it becomes easy for other parts of government to see GDS as a digital Ofsted, with all the echoes of compliance, perceived injustice and adversarial resentment that can sometimes come with it. But worse, it’s outsourcing responsibility for quality.
As design in government matures, it’s important for designers wherever they are to play their part by thinking and working as designers in government beyond departmental silos. It’s what Mike Bracken described as looking sideways.
We need everyone involved in making digital services in government to take the service standard and service design manual as their own, to talk less about them, more about us. Our digital service standard, our service design manual.
‘What’s next?’
The last few months have seen huge changes in GDS, and in design teams across government. But we retain in government, more design talent than anywhere I’ve ever worked. And there’s much to be done. As Louise Downe, GDS’s new director of design, succintly put it government services aren’t done yet, so neither am I. Not by a long way.
All that you learned
“I’ve always thought there are a number of things that you have achieved at the end of a project. There’s the object, the actual product itself, and then there’s all that you learned. What you learned is as tangible as the product itself, but much more valuable because that’s your future. You can see where that goes and demand more of yourself, being so unreasonable in what you expect of yourself and what we can expect of each other, that it yields these even more amazing results, not just in the product but in what you’ve learned.”
— Jony Ive, speaking in Becoming Steve Jobs by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
A couple of pages earlier, Ive was berating himself for not being as articulate as he'd like...
Man, running
I used to ride and now I run. And what I learned from those days on a bike was the value of form. Form gets you up climbs, reduces the pain and the doubt and focusses the mind. And so it is with running.
And when I run I think about, well… nothing. Except form. The soundtrack of my breath. Watching, feeling the surface underneath my feet. A level chin, torso held straight. Lowering that forever-tensing left shoulder. The rhythm of my arms. Thumbs resting softly on lightly curled fingers. Shortening my stride pattern. Landing quietly, predictably.
I am listening and adjusting, refining, repeating: learning. Stillness, motion and nothingness. These are my only true moments of solitude.
Wednesday night, League Cup
Sat deep in Selhurst Park’s main stand, look above you and you see the graceful ironwork skeleton of one of Archibald Leitch’s lesser known works, now dressed and disguised in the makeshift refurb of corrugated roofing, make-do-and-mend extensions and blue plastic seats. Beneath your feet the wooden floor is still there, dampening the footsteps of those creeping in late, making their way bent and apologetic towards their seats. Architecturally it’s undeniably ugly now but sat low and dark in this South London bowl, surrounded by unkempt terraces of London stock brick it’s everything a football stand should be: drawing 13 thousand pairs of eyes on this low-key Wednesday night cup tie inexorably towards an open gleaming rectangle of grass.
In the narrow technical areas by the side of the pitch stand the managers in symmetry. Pardew, hands stuffed in suit pockets, is all tension and anxiety. Brisk encouraging hand-claps, anguished glances over his shoulder at his assistant John Carver. A Palace old boy under pressure, he stiffly, briefly acknowledges a sympathetic old chant in his direction from the home fans. Later on when Newcastle are reduced to ten men, the red carded player walks off seeking the reassurance of support from his manager. Pardew can’t bear to look at him. Warnock meanwhile, to his right, stands forever one foot forward yet slumped like a some worn teddy bear in oversized leisure wear. His body straightening only to howl calibrated indignation at perceived injustice, to jab a frantic finger at space unoccupied.
On the pitch, understudies being given their chance, maybe their only chance. Just go out and express yourself son. Fresh faces nod sincerely at the urging of their boss’s boss, endeavour to do better. Every touch affects the players confidence, the misplaced pass slumps young shoulders, the clever turn or through pass pushes the chin up and the chest out. Just go out and express yourself son. Confidence rises and falls, the game swings back and forth. It’s the League Cup and the crowd is patient and supportive. We’re all playing Football Manager tonight, trying to spot the raw kid with potential, the under-appreciated reserve deserving of his first team spot.
Johnson, the returning Palace darling, back after eight long years away, older, slower, wiser now, is practically hugged onto the pitch by an indulgent crowd. But it’s not enough. Palace succumb in extra time in a game that stayed competitive for 120 minutes. Leaving the pitch, hands clapping above their heads, mirroring the supporters, I look on wondering how many of the unfamiliar faces we saw tonight we’ll see again, when the pressure’s on and the stakes are high.
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