What is the Constituent Experience Center of Excellence?
The Constituent Experience Center of Excellence (CX COE) is 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’re part of Massachusetts Digital Service, which sits within the Executive Office of Technology Services and Security (EOTSS).
Our mission
We want state organizations to have the skills, people, 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
- 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 what they buy.
- Organizational leaders set goals for constituent experiences and standards (e.g., outcomes, quality, accessibility, equity)
- 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, test, learn, and continuously improve. This helps them produce better products, services, data, and information.
- Government staff have access to 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:
- Take an iterative, constituent-centered approach. Our work prioritizes continuous improvement for constituent experiences, services, and outcomes.
- 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. Following our launch in 2024, we worked on enablement engagements with people and teams across the commonwealth. In these, we provided support so that organizations could accomplish their goals and build capacity. For example, we worked with 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. Communities of practice 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, LWD, EOHLC, and EHS have all begun to build these teams. In the long term, we hope XDR teams will be positioned throughout government, contributing to our collective communities and knowledge.