Constituent experience is something I think about every day. It shows up in the interview guides I write, the research questions I wrestle with, and the way I try to frame findings so that the person behind the data doesn’t disappear into a bullet point. For me, keeping the user at the center isn’t a methodology, it’s foundational to our work. What I hadn’t realized is that not everyone starts from the same place.
On June 10, 2026, Massachusetts held its inaugural Constituent Experience (CX) Showcase — a day-long event brought together by Mass Digital and the Executive Office of Technology Services and Security (EOTSS) and attended by more than 100 state employees across agencies. The day’s agenda had project panels, hands-on workshops, and science fair style booths, all showcasing the progress of the Commonwealth’s Digital Roadmap. It wasn't just about celebrating how far the work had come — it was about energizing the people driving it forward and expanding what's possible through constituent-centered thinking. A central theme of the showcase was that improving constituent experience is not the sole responsibility of a single team. CX should be understood and practiced by everyone who plays a role in how a resident applies for benefits, renews a license, or navigates any of the hundreds of touchpoints between a person and their government. The more agencies build this shared muscle, the better the experience for the millions of people relying on those services every day.
“For me, keeping the user at the center isn’t a methodology, it’s foundational to our work.”
I attended as an experience research (XR) intern with the Constituent Experience Center of Excellence (CXCOE), expecting the ideas in the room to be familiar territory – and they were. What caught me off guard was the room itself. I was surprised by how full it was and who filled it. They weren’t just researchers or designers, but agency leaders, operations staff, and policy makers. These are people who decide where resources go, how programs are structured, and what gets prioritized. Constituent experience tends to move quietly in the background while other institutional priorities take the lead. So, seeing that many decision-makers showed up for a day centered entirely on the people they serve was significant in a way that’s hard to overstate. It meant constituent experience was no longer a conversation happening on the edge. It was in the room where decisions get made, with the people who make them.
The Welcome Plenary set the tone early. EOTSS Secretary Jason Snyder grounded the room in something worth saying out loud: People now expect government service to work the way the rest of their digital lives do — quickly, simply, and without friction. When that standard isn’t met, it’s not a hypothetical failure. It ripples onto a real person trying to get something done. He pushed for constituent experience centered into IT projects from the start, not patched in afterward.
Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll spoke next, and where Snyder spoke to a standard, she expanded on what happens when governments don’t meet it. According to Driscoll, “People love to think government is about buildings, but it’s really about people and solving problems, and creating opportunities. The only way to do that is by all the work that you all do. There’s 7 million people that don’t know you and you don’t know them but are relying on each other and us.” In that moment, her words transformed 7 million from an abstract statistic into a tangible reminder of the people our work serves.
The moment that moved me most came during the Integrated Eligibility & Enrollment (IE&E) and CXCOE Partnership panel. The Integrated Eligibility & Enrollment team shared how the CXCOE, my team, partnered with the Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) to help them build their own in-house experience research and design capability. The point was not to do the research for them, but to grow their capacity to do it themselves, understand why it matters, and sustain it beyond any single project or vendor relationship.
Hearing the journey of the how the EOHSS built their own research team from scratch made me proud in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Makaela Stephens, their Experience Research and Design Lead, shared what building from nothing actually looked like, and what it produced. Eight months in, her team had already spoken with 56 constituents. A team that didn’t exist before now had a process and real people behind their decisions. This panel reaffirmed to me the entire reason the CXCOE exists: to spread the knowledge, build the muscle in other teams, and make constituent-centered thinking a core capability so that understanding constituents isn’t something outsourced. It’s something everyone is equipped to do continuously and on their own terms. Seeing it reflected as a success story, in front of an audience that could take that model and carry it somewhere new, felt like exactly the kind of ripple the Showcase was designed to create.
The Enabling Constituent-Centered Design workshop gave me a quieter version of the same lesson. Mass Digital’s Director of Experience Design & Research Mark Burrell and Experience Research Lead Kevin Markgren walked participants through the fundamentals of constituent-centered design: what it is, why it’s essential, and how to grow and apply it within your own organization. My colleague, Beryl Oranga, and I helped facilitate the workshop portion of the session. We had a smaller group than expected, but what we lost in size we gained in intimacy.
At one point, two attendees from Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA) realized they worked in the same department and had never spoken to each other. They had been operating separately on work that overlapped in ways neither had known. Watching them start to connect was one of those moments that makes you realize the methods aren’t just tools. Sometimes the most important relationship the work exposes isn’t between an agency and a constituent. It’s between two coworkers who just needed a reason to talk. It was a small moment, but a reminder that collaboration isn’t just good internal practice. Rather it’s what makes constituent-centered work actually possible. You can’t build a seamless experience for the public when the people building it aren’t connected to each other.
“You can’t build a seamless experience for the public when the people building it aren’t connected to each other.”
The same energy was lingering around in adjacent workshops and panels. The vocabulary that I use without thinking twice, such as empathy mapping or journey frameworks, was new territory for several people in the room. However rather than feeling like a gap, it felt like an opening. Every person who encounters these tools for the first time and recognizes their potential is another person who can bring that thinking back to their team. That is exactly the kind of reach the CXCOE exists to build and being in the space where it was happening in real time reminded me how much impact this work still has room to make.
Robert Gordon, Executive VP of State Initiatives at the Recoding America Fund, named the thread connecting all of it during the fireside chat. “Delivering the thing is not the goal,” he said. “The goal is meeting their needs.” He described shifting away from a model centered on planners and toward one centered on the people being served where we are listening, adjusting over time, and treating technology as a tool rather than the destination. Together, this framing was exactly what the IE&E panel had shown and the workshop had practiced: Improving constituent experience isn’t the final project. It’s collaboration and continuous learning built into how agencies work rather than included afterwards.
I left the Showcase with a fuller understanding of what my daily work is a part of. The research questions I write, the sessions I facilitate, the findings I try to make legible to people who hold decision-making power, all of it connects to something larger than any one project. The CXCOE’s mission to grow constituent-centered capacity across the Commonwealth isn’t a background initiative, but a connective tissue between everything the Showcase put in the room that day.
Lieutenant Governor Driscoll closed her remarks at the beginning of the day with a line that stayed with me not as a quote but as a challenge, “What happens here, other states will follow.” What happens here starts with us. With the teams, the researchers, the policymakers, the practitioners who showed up on June 10 and will carry that momentum back into their work. I left ready to do exactly that, and more convinced that constituent experience is not an initiative with an end date. It is a standard worth holding ourselves to every day.