Loved this piece. I also once fell into the "trap" of thinking that there was a need for more modern means of distributing local news to city residents - that if only they had information delivered to them in a better way, people would magically get more involved. But that simply isn't true when involvement requires dozens of hours of unpaid labor simply to understand the questions being discussed, never mind actually propose viable solutions. And even if you get that far - it's very likely the people making decisions won't listen to you anyway! Then you become just another frustrated, disengaged resident who vows never to get involved in that process again. That is not a user problem, that's a system/interface problem.
I've said it before: really the only real way to participate in politics is to devote your career to it. Outside of that there's very little that can be done by political means. High agency and well-meaning residents can do a ton of good by circumventing that channel, but that's a whole different discussion.
Me 3 for falling into the trap of better distribution will solve all the problems. Though I will say the problem has two components in my mind.
1. Making sure everyone knows about the news/policy/project/vote and
2. Making it easy for interested citizens to comment in a way that will be meaningful.
I think this thread is talking about #2 - and my takeaway here is something like "let's limit citizen engagement to high level things, and not even ask about things like what color should the stop sign be (oversimplification but you get the idea)
But I don't think we should ignore #1... I think there are many citizens who don't provide input simply because they weren't notified, not because they don't care or its too complex.
Great callout. I think #1 is related and I agree it's important. #1 also exists in every technology product at scale, not just in a city.
"Educating the customer" is itself a major design challenge and receives significant investment by great companies who build whole departments around it.
Great article on a very important topic. I think the "product <> customer" framing is a significant improvement on the adversarial "government vs citizen" dynamic we have now, but I think we see the limitations of this framing when we get to questions of governance.
We can’t and shouldn’t expect all people to be competent in all technical domains (building a laptop, flying a plane, etc) but we should expect all people to be competent at being people. I would argue that self-organization and governance are core competencies for every citizen in a free society. I think we massively underweight the importance of this and we’re broadly worse off because of it, but that’s a topic for another day.
So the "Don’t Make Me Think!" product mindset isn’t necessarily wrong but it is reductive. The key distinction is the kind of thinking we need people to do - thoughtful engagement is essential, grokking complexity is not. We probably don’t need people to understand all the nuances of zoning, but we should expect citizens to reflect on their experience as users of the city product and give feedback in a way that is fundamentally different from what Dell expects to hear from me about my recent XPS purchase. A free and flourishing society does require some nontrivial amount of effort to maintain, and my concern with the product frame is that it implies we can abstract away this responsibility.
So the balance seems to be that we should use technology to solicit more and better feedback. Then it’s on the administrators (who have the context and understand the complexity) to turn that feedback into a solution. To the extent citizens want to propose solutions instead of just describe problems, they can engage with the complexity of the system to understand where and how to intervene. This is not typically an option or expectation for “closed source” commercial products.
Overall the product/customer perspective is very useful, I just want to iron out the subtleties so I can think more clearly about it. Curious to hear what you think!
Thanks for such a thoughtful comment, really enjoyed it.
"We should expect all people to be competent at being people" and "So the balance seems to be that we should use technology to solicit more and better feedback."
I agree 100% with this. The customer *guides* but management must *lead*.
I'd argue that most cities of today also fail to do UX research, calculate an NPS, and many other behaviors that would show care for customer experience. (More on this soon). But soliciting feedback from your customers and studying their experience isn't the same thing as making them responsible for a good outcome.
One of the first rules of customer research is that you don't ask them for solutions. You ask for problems, open ended stories: "if you had a magic wand, what would you change?" etc. Customers often don't know what they want, and they very often suck at designing solutions. But they sure do know their problems!
"...We should expect citizens to reflect on their experience as users of the city product and give feedback in a way that is fundamentally different from what Dell expects to hear from me about my recent XPS purchase."
Is it that different? Perhaps the questions and feedback must be more complex. But is it so different to get feedback on the nuts and bolts of how a person experiences a city and how they experience a complex digital product?
I keep thinking about neighborhood master plans. Typically the gold standard for the best master plans are ones that involve one or more community workshops. Usually one to identify problems and opportunities in the neighborhood, and then a second workshop where the city planners present 2-5 designs (solutions) where the residents can provide feedback on what they do and don't like.
The second workshop sort of ventures into asking citizens for solutions, but if that part didn't exist... OMG you'd have a lot of angry residents. In some ways its silly to ask average Joe what he thinks about a master plan (what does he know about density, stormwater infrastructure, bus route optimization etc.), but it also seems totally reasonable to give Joe some choice in how his neighborhood will look over the next 30 years.
Curious on how y'all would think about the second workshop!
I want this to be true, but I don't know if it reflects real life government/citizen interactions. I agree it is ridiculous to expect citizens to give meaningful input and feedback on complex government operations and policies. But some citizens think they should be able to be involved in the gory details anyway.
Let's say the government does everything right. They do market research by asking citizens about problems, not asking for solutions like you say. They have well trained economists, policy makers, analysts etc. and they design an elegant solution for the problem, and roll it out to the public. It is still possible, and likely, that some people won't like it. "Why didn't you do it this way?" "Why was the public not involved in your process of developing the policy?"
I work in city government, so I can tell you this reaction is not hypothetical. I've seen it in the last year. Honestly, I wish citizens would let me do my job, because I do know better than someone off the street how to make something happen in government. But there is always push back, always someone (often amplified by the media) saying that there wasn't enough citizen engagement... I really struggle with how to match that reality with your well-argued thoughts!
"some citizens think they should be able to be involved in the gory details anyway". Of course they do. NIMBYism is just the weaponized version of this. There will always be complainers and busybodies.
Again, all of this also happens with other products at scale. Even in relatively small startups you encounter "pathological customers." They use your product but drain everyone's energy and time constantly complaining and demanding things. Part of good leadership is to know how to manage a problematic customer like this.
The bell curves of human traits and interests are wide. There's some guy out there who has the strongest opinions in the world about the Ford F-150 and he goes around the internet demanding Ford listen to him. I complain to my apartment building when they make dumb decisions -- but they go ahead with what they think as right. And, based on my actions, they haven't screwed up enough for me to want to leave yet.
The relevant issue is: can these people actually hurt the city and block progress? Much "local review" stuff seems to give special consideration to such people. I'd argue that's the real problem, not the existence of people who complain.
This is good food for thought... the idea that essentially we should ignore the "pathological customer" citizens. I think that makes sense. And is in general a good life principle too - kind of like Paul Graham describes in the article "Haters"
Also agreed that local review processes are sort of set up to amplify the extremes. Usually people who only mildly like/dislike something won't bother to submit a public comment / go to the meeting. Assuming that for any policy there is a bell curve of citizen sentiment (say a few extreme positive, most mildly positive/negative, and few extreme negative), we'll need figure out a way to draw out that middle chunk, cause what we do now definitely does not. Have you heard of pol.is before? Its an interesting way to get feedback by breaking down complex policies into multiple tweet style statements that are easier to engage with than 100 page candidate summaries :)
Loved this piece. I also once fell into the "trap" of thinking that there was a need for more modern means of distributing local news to city residents - that if only they had information delivered to them in a better way, people would magically get more involved. But that simply isn't true when involvement requires dozens of hours of unpaid labor simply to understand the questions being discussed, never mind actually propose viable solutions. And even if you get that far - it's very likely the people making decisions won't listen to you anyway! Then you become just another frustrated, disengaged resident who vows never to get involved in that process again. That is not a user problem, that's a system/interface problem.
I've said it before: really the only real way to participate in politics is to devote your career to it. Outside of that there's very little that can be done by political means. High agency and well-meaning residents can do a ton of good by circumventing that channel, but that's a whole different discussion.
Me 3 for falling into the trap of better distribution will solve all the problems. Though I will say the problem has two components in my mind.
1. Making sure everyone knows about the news/policy/project/vote and
2. Making it easy for interested citizens to comment in a way that will be meaningful.
I think this thread is talking about #2 - and my takeaway here is something like "let's limit citizen engagement to high level things, and not even ask about things like what color should the stop sign be (oversimplification but you get the idea)
But I don't think we should ignore #1... I think there are many citizens who don't provide input simply because they weren't notified, not because they don't care or its too complex.
Great callout. I think #1 is related and I agree it's important. #1 also exists in every technology product at scale, not just in a city.
"Educating the customer" is itself a major design challenge and receives significant investment by great companies who build whole departments around it.
I've also fallen into this trap. I think it's a really common trap, especially among cerebral people.
Great article on a very important topic. I think the "product <> customer" framing is a significant improvement on the adversarial "government vs citizen" dynamic we have now, but I think we see the limitations of this framing when we get to questions of governance.
We can’t and shouldn’t expect all people to be competent in all technical domains (building a laptop, flying a plane, etc) but we should expect all people to be competent at being people. I would argue that self-organization and governance are core competencies for every citizen in a free society. I think we massively underweight the importance of this and we’re broadly worse off because of it, but that’s a topic for another day.
So the "Don’t Make Me Think!" product mindset isn’t necessarily wrong but it is reductive. The key distinction is the kind of thinking we need people to do - thoughtful engagement is essential, grokking complexity is not. We probably don’t need people to understand all the nuances of zoning, but we should expect citizens to reflect on their experience as users of the city product and give feedback in a way that is fundamentally different from what Dell expects to hear from me about my recent XPS purchase. A free and flourishing society does require some nontrivial amount of effort to maintain, and my concern with the product frame is that it implies we can abstract away this responsibility.
So the balance seems to be that we should use technology to solicit more and better feedback. Then it’s on the administrators (who have the context and understand the complexity) to turn that feedback into a solution. To the extent citizens want to propose solutions instead of just describe problems, they can engage with the complexity of the system to understand where and how to intervene. This is not typically an option or expectation for “closed source” commercial products.
Overall the product/customer perspective is very useful, I just want to iron out the subtleties so I can think more clearly about it. Curious to hear what you think!
Thanks for such a thoughtful comment, really enjoyed it.
"We should expect all people to be competent at being people" and "So the balance seems to be that we should use technology to solicit more and better feedback."
I agree 100% with this. The customer *guides* but management must *lead*.
I'd argue that most cities of today also fail to do UX research, calculate an NPS, and many other behaviors that would show care for customer experience. (More on this soon). But soliciting feedback from your customers and studying their experience isn't the same thing as making them responsible for a good outcome.
One of the first rules of customer research is that you don't ask them for solutions. You ask for problems, open ended stories: "if you had a magic wand, what would you change?" etc. Customers often don't know what they want, and they very often suck at designing solutions. But they sure do know their problems!
"...We should expect citizens to reflect on their experience as users of the city product and give feedback in a way that is fundamentally different from what Dell expects to hear from me about my recent XPS purchase."
Is it that different? Perhaps the questions and feedback must be more complex. But is it so different to get feedback on the nuts and bolts of how a person experiences a city and how they experience a complex digital product?
I keep thinking about neighborhood master plans. Typically the gold standard for the best master plans are ones that involve one or more community workshops. Usually one to identify problems and opportunities in the neighborhood, and then a second workshop where the city planners present 2-5 designs (solutions) where the residents can provide feedback on what they do and don't like.
The second workshop sort of ventures into asking citizens for solutions, but if that part didn't exist... OMG you'd have a lot of angry residents. In some ways its silly to ask average Joe what he thinks about a master plan (what does he know about density, stormwater infrastructure, bus route optimization etc.), but it also seems totally reasonable to give Joe some choice in how his neighborhood will look over the next 30 years.
Curious on how y'all would think about the second workshop!
I'd be curious what Joel Anderson (commenter above) thinks about this, since he has a neighborhood under construction.
I want this to be true, but I don't know if it reflects real life government/citizen interactions. I agree it is ridiculous to expect citizens to give meaningful input and feedback on complex government operations and policies. But some citizens think they should be able to be involved in the gory details anyway.
Let's say the government does everything right. They do market research by asking citizens about problems, not asking for solutions like you say. They have well trained economists, policy makers, analysts etc. and they design an elegant solution for the problem, and roll it out to the public. It is still possible, and likely, that some people won't like it. "Why didn't you do it this way?" "Why was the public not involved in your process of developing the policy?"
I work in city government, so I can tell you this reaction is not hypothetical. I've seen it in the last year. Honestly, I wish citizens would let me do my job, because I do know better than someone off the street how to make something happen in government. But there is always push back, always someone (often amplified by the media) saying that there wasn't enough citizen engagement... I really struggle with how to match that reality with your well-argued thoughts!
"some citizens think they should be able to be involved in the gory details anyway". Of course they do. NIMBYism is just the weaponized version of this. There will always be complainers and busybodies.
Again, all of this also happens with other products at scale. Even in relatively small startups you encounter "pathological customers." They use your product but drain everyone's energy and time constantly complaining and demanding things. Part of good leadership is to know how to manage a problematic customer like this.
The bell curves of human traits and interests are wide. There's some guy out there who has the strongest opinions in the world about the Ford F-150 and he goes around the internet demanding Ford listen to him. I complain to my apartment building when they make dumb decisions -- but they go ahead with what they think as right. And, based on my actions, they haven't screwed up enough for me to want to leave yet.
The relevant issue is: can these people actually hurt the city and block progress? Much "local review" stuff seems to give special consideration to such people. I'd argue that's the real problem, not the existence of people who complain.
This is good food for thought... the idea that essentially we should ignore the "pathological customer" citizens. I think that makes sense. And is in general a good life principle too - kind of like Paul Graham describes in the article "Haters"
Also agreed that local review processes are sort of set up to amplify the extremes. Usually people who only mildly like/dislike something won't bother to submit a public comment / go to the meeting. Assuming that for any policy there is a bell curve of citizen sentiment (say a few extreme positive, most mildly positive/negative, and few extreme negative), we'll need figure out a way to draw out that middle chunk, cause what we do now definitely does not. Have you heard of pol.is before? Its an interesting way to get feedback by breaking down complex policies into multiple tweet style statements that are easier to engage with than 100 page candidate summaries :)
Really appreciate your perspective and I love that you're "from the industry"!
LMFAO @ "A man uses a laptop. Reports suggest that he doesn’t understand Claude Shannon’s information theory..."