Who we are
The Constituent Experience Center of Excellence (CX COE) is run by a team of experience researchers, experience designers, and content strategists. We work with state organizations to improve their ability to deliver great constituent experiences. We also have a growing community of practitioners, learners and advocates from across the state who are learning and applying best practices in constituent-centered design.
The CX COE is part of the Massachusetts Digital Service, which sits within the Executive Office of Technology Services and Security (EOTSS).
Our mission
We want state organizations to have the people, skills, practices, and insights to deliver great experiences for constituents. We work with people, teams, and organizations to:
- Improve experiences and outcomes for the people we serve
- Deliver more effectively and efficiently
- Reduce the risk of creating solutions that don’t work and waste time and effort
- Solve problems and innovate faster
- Understand and build trust with constituents
Our vision
We’re working toward a future where constituent-centered design is core to the way government organizations work. Here’s what we imagine this looks like:
- Each organization benefits from experience research. What they learn from constituents informs how they design services and the solutions they build or buy.
- Organizational leaders set goals for constituent experiences and standards (e.g., outcomes, quality, accessibility, equity) and hold themselves and their teams accountable for achieving those goals and standards
- Organizations have well-established ways to measure what is and isn’t working for constituents. They use what they learn to inform service and experience improvements.
- When working with vendors, organizations can guide and optimize work to make sure they get excellent solutions for their constituents
- Large organizations have dedicated experience design and research teams. These function as strategic resources and force multipliers.
- Organizations communicate with constituents in ways that help them find, understand, and use information
- Teams iteratively design, prototype, test with and learn from real constituents, and continuously improve. This helps them produce better products, services, data, and information.
- Government staff have access and engage with constituent experience resources and communities of practice where they can learn, collaborate, and contribute back.
Approach and strategy
We work with people, teams, and organizations that want to learn about constituents’ experiences and improve them. Here's what this looks like:
- Apply an iterative, constituent-centered approach to everything we do. Our work prioritizes continuous improvement for constituent experiences, services, and outcomes. This includes how we approach enablement, community building, and the creation of useful resources.
- Enabling by collaborating. Our partnerships address real problems and goals while promoting learning. Staff and teams adopt new practices and skills while making progress toward their goals.
- Help organizations build teams with specialized experience design and research (XDR) skills. Organizations need a right-sized team of dedicated research and design specialists. This team knows your domain, your services, your constituents.
- Focus on building relationships and community in state government. Constituent-centered government means supporting constituents across related services and touchpoints. This requires teams to share knowledge and work together. We support partnerships between teams and communities of practitioners who learn from and help one another.
Our history
The CX COE is a key initiative of the Commonwealth Digital Roadmap — a plan to provide accessible, simple, and secure experiences for everyone in Massachusetts. However, we know that a small, centralized team in one secretariat can't scale to do all the constituent experience work that needs to be done. For the roadmap to succeed, organizations across the commonwealth need to build capacity to learn about and improve constituent experiences.
That's what the CX COE aims to do. Since our team formed in 2024, we've worked on enablement engagements with people and teams across the commonwealth. In these, we provided support so that organizations could accomplish their goals while building skills and capacity. For example, we worked with the Department of Unemployment Assistance (DUA) to hire a content strategist and redesign its Mass.gov content in preparation for launching their new Unemployment Services site. We collaborated on stakeholder research with the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness program (part of EEA). And we worked with a team at MassHealth to incorporate iterative usability testing into content design.
Based on what we learned in collaborations like these, we began to develop other programs and resources. We established Communities of practice to help people across government build critical skills, such as writing and research, for improving constituent experiences. They also help staff build relationships and learn from one another. We're imagining additional communities in the future, such as one for people using the Massachusetts Design System and another for service design.
We've also started a resource library based on what we learned from collaborating with other organizations. It provides guide and templates so teams can accelerate their work and growth. For example, you can find guidance on compensating research participants and archiving documents, a tutorial on conducting a plain language review, and template job descriptions for XDR roles.
We've also helped some secretariats start their own Experience Design and Research (XDR) teams. These teams of designers, researchers, and writers are positioned to know the context and goals for their teams' work. As of today, the Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development (EOLWD), the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities (EOHLC), and the Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) have all begun to build these teams. In the long term, we hope XDR teams will be positioned throughout our government, helping each organization design and deliver great constituent experiences and contributing to our collective knowledge and communities.