UX – boosting the welfare society

Think about a car which looks ever so cool, takes you very reliably wherever you want to go and is safe and stable to drive.

Now, think about the very same car with both hard-to-follow meters and hard-to-use operation panel with just too many buttons and levers giving no instant feedback of your operations. Would you, at some point, start to feel bad about your car, no matter if your friends were still giving it wows?

Then think about the Nordic model of a welfare society. Yes, this isn’t the most politically correct metaphor, but I’ll go there anyway.

The Nordic model of the welfare society is the reliable wow-car described above. The driver experience – no matter if you are a decision-maker or not – is built on one essential value: Let’s take care of each other together. This has caused wows again and again with the rest of the world.

We as citizens and decision-makers know that the ride is nice but meters and the operation panel – nowadays more and more made with ICT services – is not all good. The challenge is that we are in the middle of a digitalisation process, still stuck in old ways of doing things and reading law as carefully as it is written. The change is slow and a bit painful; decision-makers and citizens have been separated as face-to-face contacts have disappeared and been replaced with web-forms or other remote-services. The citizen identity is in crisis.

So what should the next step be? How to fix our wow-nation’s services? The answer is an inclusive user experience (UX) boost. It means that we are not only giving rebirth to user interfaces, but also concentrating on the entirety – foster issues like transparency, timeliness, straightforwardness, speed, security and reliability. That’s the way to recreate the connection between decision-makers and citizens and strengthen the citizen identity.

Then we could WOW ourselves too.