What is constituent-centered design?
Constituent-centered design is a way of working that prioritizes constituents' experiences. To practice it, we learn who our constituents are. We learn about their goals and perspectives. We test what we make with them and learn what to improve. Here are some examples of constituent-centered design in practice:
- You're planning on launching a new website. You design prototypes and test them with real people. These tests help you make adjustments before embarking on an expensive development process.
- You run a service where people can apply by mail. You regularly test your paper application to see if people get stuck when they fill it out. When they do, you tweak it to make it easier.
- Constituents must interact with your organization and 2 others to accomplish something. You coordinate with the other organizations to make sure the whole process is seamless and efficient.
Note: In industry, this approach is called "human-centered design." We use "constituent" as a reminder of the context we're working in. People who use government services have a wide variety of needs. As a result, our standards and requirements for digital accessibility and language access should be high. "Constituent" also acknowledges that we serve people, but also towns, businesses, other government organizations, etc.
Why do it
Practice constituent-centered design to make sure that you services work for all constituents. It also makes our work easier and more efficient. The benefits of adopting constituent-centered design include:
- Reduced support requests. People should be able to learn about and use your services without needing “high touch” support. Your teams should be able to use their time and expertise for complicated challenges.
- Reduce risk and waste associated with investing in services.
- Measurably improve constituent outcomes.
- Improve the reach, adoption, and impact of your services. Constituent-centered times have clearer pictures of who, where, and how to communicate.
- Improve constituents’ trust in your organization.
Constituent-centered design can also help you meet standards. For example, your organization may already be working to comply with Title II of the Americans Disabilities Act by the April 2026 deadline. A constituent-centered approach can help you incorporate accessibility into your designs. You may also be working to follow the 2010 Federal Plain Language Act. A constituent-centered approach can help you learn if you're communicating successfully to your various audiences.
What you're aiming for
Learning constituent-centered design is a journey for most government organizations. You’ll need new capabilities, changes in mindset, and new ways of working. Here are a few core principles of constituent-centered design that you'll adopt.
Understand, create, evaluate—and then do it again
Teams that practice constituent-centered design generally follow a cycle like this one:
- Understand the people who use their services. This includes their common challenges and scenarios.
- Create hypotheses, prototypes, and working solutions to address what they know people need.
- Evaluate if their solutions work. Test them with real people.
This process is iterative. Each time you finish it, you’re ready to start again. Each cycle helps you better understand your constituents. Each iteration improves your designs. This includes changing directions if you learn that something isn't working.
Ground yourself in constituents’ experiences
Constituent-centered teams continuously learn from their constituents. You need to understand:
- Who they are
- What their goals are
- The scenarios that bring them to your organization
- Their perception of your organization
- What it’s like to interact with your organization. For example, is it easy to access your services? Can they find what they need on your websites?
- The outcomes of their interactions. For example, do they get what they wanted? Do they give up? Do they have to get lots of extra help to navigate a service?
This kind of understanding keeps you focused on work that makes a real difference for constituents.
Adopt a continuous improvement mindset
Constituent-centered teams make quick, incremental improvements. For example, they create and test prototypes to make sure they invest in solutions that work. They pilot new products and features before releasing to their whole audience. They gather feedback and use it to continually improve.
Consider the entire experience, from end to end
Constituent-centered design looks at whole experiences. This includes everything from the moment a constituent realizes they need to interact with government to what happens after your service is delivered. An "end-to-end" approach accounts for online and offline activities, e.g. websites, phone calls, and letters. Sometimes, you'll collaborate with organizations that offer related services.
Create meaningful access for all people
Many people with different goals and needs will interact with your organization. To meet those needs, you need design processes that take into account concepts like these:
- Digital accessibility: Ensuring that the digital world is usable by everyone, equally
- Language access: Making information meaningfully available to everyone who needs it. (For example, creating plain language content that's easier for people and machine translations to read.)
- Usability: Ensuring that different people in different contexts can use what you make. (For example, testing across device types and demographics)
These perspectives are different, but they overlap. Constituent-centered design should incorporate them all.
How to get started
You can take steps toward constituent-centered design right now. To do this, pick a team with a constituent-facing initiative. Ask them to learn about constituents' experiences with their initiative. It doesn't matter if the team is designing something or works on a mature service.
They could use:
- Web feedback or social media posts
- Conversations with people at your organization who work directly with constituents
- Constituent emails
- Summaries of common call center issues
Next, challenge the team to use what they learn to improve the constituent experience, even in a small way. They may need your help to get approvals, access, and collaboration time from other teams.
These steps help you sketch the outlines of constituent-centered design: Learn about people's experiences and use what you learn to improve something.
Make constituent-centered design a habit
The team can build on its success by doing it again. They may also want to adopt other inexpensive design methods, such
- Conducting regular scenario-based walkthroughs
- Do plain language reviews
- Go from reading to analyzing feedback
Maturing your practice
To mature your organization’s constituent-centered design practice:
- Expand your constituent-centered team’s capacity. Hire staff with skillsets you don’t have. Train staff who want to take on these new roles.
- Integrate constituent-centered design across your organization
- Develop your capacity to evaluate experiences and measure success
Form a team focused on constituent experiences
The most common ways to build capacity are
Scaling constituent-centered design can be a challenge. It requires new skillsets and new ways of working. Many organizations begin with centralized design and research teams that support many projects. These teams include skillsets like these:
- Experience research. Conduct research to understand the people you serve. Learn who they are, why they use your services, and what frictions they experience. This work helps you understand people’s behaviors, experiences, attitudes, etc.
- Service design. Plan and map services from end to end. Help organize the components that make up a service—the processes, people, and things.
- Content and digital strategy. Create and manage the information you publish for constituents. Make sure your information is easy to find, understand, and use.
- Visual and interaction design. Envision and design the interactions that help people achieve their goals. Interaction designers help you create intuitive user interfaces and applications. They also improve visual designs so people can navigate.
- Experience ownership. Champion and organize resources to improve what it's like to use your products and services. Experience owners usually focus on segments of your audience. For example, you might have separate experience owners for “teachers,” “parents,” or “administrators." They may work on several products or services that influence that experience.
The most common ways to build these skillsets are training, hiring, or working with a vendor. Note that vendors can be expensive. It costs time to onboard and offboard new people. You also lose knowledge and experience when the vendor offboards
Start with roles that are a good fit for your context. Teams that publish a lot of content could start with a content designer and an experience researcher. Technology-centric contexts benefit from a researcher and an interaction designer.
Get better at measuring
Your teams need to understand what it’s like for constituents to use what you make. Start with the basics: Review feedback, run basic measurement surveys, and conduct usability testing.
Both qualitative and quantitative data are valuable here. Just figuring out what to measure is itself a journey.
As you mature, you’ll develop practices and templates for testing. Other teams at your organization can use these, too. You’ll also find yourself needing more sophisticated methods, software, and evaluation programs. You may also need to procure tools that help you manage and report on what you find. Don’t rush this evolution. Regularly evaluating experiences is a major step forward for most organizations.
Guidance and resources
Constituent-centered design is a huge, diverse discipline. Here are a few resources where you can begin learning more:
- Gov.uk is a trailblazer in constituent-centered design
- Digital.gov has a guide to human-centered design
- NYC.gov's guide to "Civic Service Design" takes a similar approach to ours. It focuses on "making public services more effective and accessible."