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 make sure that people understand what it's asking for. When they don't, 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.
Industry uses a similar approach, "human-centered design." One difference is that they focus on specific groups of customers. Government organizations generally need to meet a wider range of needs than industry does. For example, our standards for digital accessibility and language access tend to be higher.
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 from your teams. Instead, your teams should be able to use their time and expertise for the most 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 time, you sharpen your understanding of your constituents and improve what you create. This includes changing directions if you learn that what you’re doing isn’t valuable.
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 provide a constant stream of easy-to-implement fixes.
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, letters, etc. 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.
What you need
For most organizations, the shift to constituent-centered design is daunting. It helps to begin thinking about the skills you’ll need access to, either through hiring or training or both.
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. Account for all the components that make up a service—the processes, people, and things that help you deliver it.
Content and digital strategy
Create and manage the information you publish for constituents. Make sure your information is easy to find, understand, and use.
Interaction design
Envision and design the interactions that help people achieve their goals. Interaction design is about creating intuitive user interfaces, applications that are easy to use, and visual designs that help people 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.
How to get started
You can take steps toward constituent-centered design right now.
- Pick a team with a constituent-facing initiative
- Empower them to learn about constituents' experiences with that initiative
- Support them in improving that experience, even in small ways
These first steps don’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. The team might conduct regular scenario-based walkthroughs or plain language reviews. They can gather and learn from constituent feedback. Some organizations conduct 5-minute surveys with constituents. Others monitor social media responses.
Eventually, the team will need to act on what they've learned. They may need your help to get approvals, access, and collaboration time from other teams.
You may already be doing some of these things. If so, your next step may be to create a team that's focused on constituent-centered design. This team can work across your organization.
- Staff this team with roles that are a good fit for your context. For example, teams that publish a lot of content might start with a content designer and an experience researcher. Technology-centric teams might start with a researcher and interaction designer.
- Find a constituent-facing project that they can work on
- Focus on delivering an improved constituent experience
Be flexible with where your new team starts. The “discovery” phase of a project might be the most obvious place, since they can help shape products to better meet people’s needs. But they can also join a team that’s already delivered something. For example, if you just launched a new website, they could evaluate it and find opportunities to improve it. It doesn’t matter where in a project’s lifecycle the team begins—just that they do.
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
Build your team’s capacity to do experience research and design
The most common ways to build capacity are training, hiring, or working with a vendor. You could also use some combination of the 3. Some secretariats have centralized teams that supports their organizations in doing constituent-centered projects.
Note that vendors can be expensive. It costs time to onboard and offboard new people. You also often lose knowledge when the vendor offboards.
Doing at least some of research and design work in house is an opportunity to gain experience and skill. You can often reuse study and design templates in future projects.
Integrate constituent-centered design across your organization
In general, organizations use 1 of 2 models.
- They have a centralized team that provides support whenever a project team needs it
- They integrate staff across project teams
It’s common to transition between models as you mature.
A centralized team ensures that teams across an organization have access to skills that they might not have the budget for otherwise. Integrated teams mean that design and research staff build long-term expertise in the projects they’re part of.
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. Developing the muscle memory to regularly evaluate 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 known as a trailblazer in constituent-centered design
- Digital.gov has a guide to human-centered design. (Human-centered design is basically the same thing as constituent-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."