In 2020 the Ministry of Digital Governance of Greece published the Digital Transformation Strategy 2020-2025.The strategy places great emphasis on using human-centered design practices to understand user needs, co-design and test different service concepts before even writing any code. The Digital Governance Directorate of GRNet, as one of the main partners of the Ministry is responsible for designing and delivering a portfolio of public digital services. The paper will present the transformation phase the Directorate is undergoing while trying to utilize and incorporate a design-led approach; moving from an engineering mindset to a decision making (design) process which is highly led by user insight. Using case studies from current projects we discuss how a full fledged service design and UX methodology is not feasible. The paper presents the empirical, and constantly evolving model we currently use to help project teams become more user-centered. A rapid UI prototyping workflow that (a) allows a realistic experience for users to give feedback on, (b) is immediately useful for owner and stakeholder "business / functionality" feedback, and (c) is simple and complete for hand-off to developers. We treat this process as an MVP in it’s very initial stages in our attempt to plant the seeds of a user centric design mentality. The paper concludes that embedding such kind of approaches, especially in big, bureaucratic organizations, such as public sector organizations, means changing our thinking, as people and professionals and ways of working while creating hybrid design methodologies to fit the context and its needs.
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A lightweight, adaptable approach to gathering user and product owner feedback to (re)designing public digital services
CHI Greece
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