What does it mean to "know your constituents"?
The teams in your organization benefit from learning about the constituents that interact with you. This includes:
- Who they are
- What their goals are, including the scenarios that bring them into contact with you. For example, why do they use your website? Why are they applying for your grant?
- What they expect and what they experience from interacting with you
- The outcomes of their interactions
- Their perceptions of your organization
To learn these things, your teams can listen to what people say, observe what they do, and assess how they interact with your organization.
What you learn feeds your priorities. It can help you plan a new service. It helps improve existing processes. It helps you prioritize features to add (or remove) from a product.
Why do it
Knowledge of your constituents is relevant at every level of your organization, from executive leadership to team leads to individual contributors. It guides decisions about staffing, services, products, and processes.
A good understanding of your constituents makes your investments likelier to pay off. Your delivery teams can spend more time on the types of problems that require their expertise and experience. You avoid investing in tools that don’t meet people’s expectations, or that they don’t use. And constituents are more likely to see your organization as responsive and efficient.
Knowing your constituents is also a prerequisite for creating meaningful access for people with different goals and needs. For example, it supports your work with:
- Digital accessibility: Ensuring that the digital world is usable by everyone, equally
- Language access: Making information meaningfully available to everyone who needs it (e.g. creating plain language content that's easier for people to read and translate)
- Usability: Ensuring that different people in different contexts can easily use what you make (e.g. testing across device types and demographics)
What you're aiming for
Your ultimate goals are:
- Have a data-informed understanding of who interacts with you and why
- Be able to say what their needs and expectations are
- Know a lot about what their interactions with you are like
- Have a clear picture of their outcomes
It may take a long time to fully operationalize these. That’s okay. During your journey, you’ll learn a lot about who your constituents are, what they expect, and what they want to do. You’ll be able to use this knowledge to make improvements.
In general, the practices and skills that support these goals fall into 2 buckets: Continuously learning about people’s experiences and acting on what you learn.
Continuously learn about constituents’ experiences
Your understanding of your constituents and their experiences comes from research. You’re aiming to have:
- Researchers capable of multiple methods and approaches. This might be in-house staff, a vendor you’ve developed a good relationship with, or a little of both.
- Insight into the experience of different groups of constituents. You likely have a diverse audience. This might require a series of studies that ask the same questions to different segments.
- Assets generated and honed by your research that documents what you know about your constituents. These include things like personas and journey maps.
- Easy ways for staff who aren’t professional researchers to generate insights about constituents’ experiences. They may use social listening, web surveys, 5-minute in person interviews, etc. to inform their work. They should also be able to include working with researchers in their plans.
- People throughout your organization have what they need to do research, such as documentation, templates, methods, and practices.
Use what you learn to make improvements
Knowing about your constituents’ experience only matters if you can that act on that knowledge.
- Ensure that team plans are shaped by research about their audiences. Teams should make decisions about new technology, features, and processes based on what they know about the people those things affect.
- Make improving experiences and outcomes part of teams’ official goals and processes
- Project teams are empowered to make changes based on what you learn. Sometimes, this requires support from executive sponsors. Teams may need other teams’ approvals or collaboration to act.
What you need
Staff
Government organizations learn about people through experience research. People who do this work are called experience researchers. Other common industry names include user research and user experience (UX) research.
Researchers have different specialties. Some may focus on qualitative research, other on quantitative methods, and still others on research operations.
You can include experience researchers on teams to support their work. You can also have a centralized research team that supports initiatives across your organization.
It’s also valuable for staff who aren’t trained researchers to conduct research. They can do things like:
- Analyze survey data
- Conduct or assist with constituent interviews
- Learn from call center data or social media analysis
Tools and capabilities
Research staff typically use a variety of tools for gathering and working with experience data. What you need varied a great deal depending on your research goals. Here are a few examples of common tools your researchers may need:
- Various ways to gather experience data, e.g. extracting posts from social media, website feedback, and brief in-person surveys.
- Software for conducting usability studies. Tools like Maze allow you to set up and run tests on digital products.
- A way to create and launch surveys. You could use an email platform, a web “intercept” survey, or a web form.
- Data analysis tools. Researchers may use Excel, but other tools can expand your capabilities. Many usability testing platforms have features that makes it easier to work with video recordings.
- A way to recruit participants, e.g. a recruiter or a panel
- Templates for commonly-used research instruments, such as screeners, consent forms, and mod guides
How to get started
Every team or organization can start learning about the people they serve right now, with no additional resources, testing, or expertise. A few basic things to start doing are:
- Chat regularly with teams that interact with constituents. For example, product teams can learn from staff at call centers staff or physical locations.
- Start reviewing and collecting feedback. If you have content on Mass.gov, you already have a web survey on every one of your pages. If you're feeling ambitious, you can even start conducting thematic analysis.
- Find out what people say about your services on social media (i.e. "social listening")
Send a brief survey to a mailing list
It’s fine if this work is informal. What’s important is that teams build the muscle to ask, “What’s this like for real people?” This means regularly gathering whatever data’s available and reviewing it.
Next, teams should incorporate actionable findings into their plans. They can also begin to develop informed ideas about their audiences and the scenarios that bring people into contact with them.
Once your teams are regularly learning from people and incorporating what they learn into their plans, you’ll know you’ve made real progress.
Maturing your practice
This section focuses on 2 ways to mature your practices:
- Document your audiences, scenarios, and the research practices that help you learn about them
- Conducting experience research studies where you speak with constituents
These tend to be the biggest indicators that you’re making progress.
Document audiences, scenarios, and practices
Documenting knowledge
Teams that regularly review experience data likely have ideas about who they’re serving. The next step is to formally document this knowledge, fill in gaps, and use it to inform work and additional research.
For example, teams might try to document the answers to questions like:
- Who’s going to interact with you?
- Why are they interacting with you? (What are their goals?)
- What might they not know the first time they interact with you?
- How might they be feeling at the start, during, and after the interaction?
- What questions might they have at the start, during, and after the interaction?
Answers to these questions should be as specific as possible. It’s never helpful to think of the people we serve as “the general public.” This term is too vague and includes too many diverse interests.
Imagine a team says its service or product aimed at “business owners.” The team probably hasn’t gone far enough. There are many different types of business owners. Are these prospective business owners? Owners of new businesses? Can the business be a nonprofit? Which businesses are eligible—or even a good fit—for the team’s service?
And what scenarios bring business owners to your service? That is, they must have reasons for seeking it out. Teams should know what those reasons are and how they affect the audiences’ interactions with you.
Alternatively, they may be required to use your service. This also affects teams’ plans. You may want to focus on how to lower administrative burden or make requirements more transparent. This helps improve constituents’ perceptions of your service and organization.
Documenting practices and methods
As your teams develop their research methods, they should also extract templates that they or other teams can reuse. This lowers the barrier for new teams starting research. It also helps ensure consistency across teams.
Documentation is especially important when you begin speaking with real people. Working out how you’ll manage constituents’ interview data can be complicated. Documenting it and following established procedures means teams don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time they conduct a study.
Example documents might include:
- Guidance on compensating research participants
- Guidance on when to use difference methods. For example, a focus group will not help you learn the same things as a usability study.
- A template consent form
- A template screening survey
- Guidance for participant data management
- Example moderation guides, surveys, and other data gathering instruments
Speaking with constituents
Focus groups and interview studies require more operational and logistical expertise than other sources of experience data. But your teams can learn an enormous amount through conversations with people.
Here are 4 scenarios where a research study can drastically improve the results of what a team makes. In all of them, the team is designing a website where constituents can apply for one of your services.
- The team tests 2 prototypes for site design with real people. One drastically outperforms the other. The team can feel confident that it’s making a good investment as it begins development.
- The site’s users include a substantial number of Portuguese speakers. The team tests with just this group to make sure the machine translation widget they’re using works. For the most part it does, but they do catch a couple of instances where the translation provides the wrong information.
- The site launches, and the team receives a lot of negative feedback about one particular flow. They conduct a targeted test to learn more about the issues people are having. They discover that a critical button is easy to miss for people using mobile phones. They release a quick, inexpensive fix that solves the issue.
- The team wants to integrate with a new identity verification service. This will help reduce fraud. Before they launch, they test their integration with real people. Most of these tests go well, but a few people have trouble with the two-factor authentication method. This tells them they need to work on better guidance or a more intuitive interface before they launch.
These scenarios illustrate how products teams can use research to make better investments and meet people’s needs.
Enabling these scenarios requires operational and logistical expertise. You’ll want to hire a researcher or find a vendor who can help you execute tests. As you build your research program, you’ll also want reusable assets that make research easier. For example, teams should be able to use templates for their mod guides or consent forms. You’ll have policies in place for managing data.
And each test should grow your understanding of people. You’ll use them to revise personas, journey maps, and other documents that teams use to document what they know about the people they serve.
From one-off studies to continuous research
Your early efforts at research may include standalone studies. You might do focus groups to gather basic requirements. You might do a usability study before a new application launches. You will eventually want to enable continuous research. This allows data to speak to each other. It helps you better understand specific groups of people that might not be represented in your one-off study. And it helps your team build the instincts to find out about constituents' experiences.
Continuous research does not have to be all interview studies. It can be a combination of methods, such as feedback analysis, usability tests, and community listening. Find a collection of methods that works for you.