4.0 Overview | Feedback Loops

Step 4: Listening to citizen input

“We all have the ability to turn that negative feeling into a positive by allowing our dissatisfaction to give birth to change.”
- Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, OBE, Mayor of Freetown, Sierra Leone⁵³
“All cities have traffic departments and statistics for traffic and parking. Do you know of any city with a department for pedestrians and public life? Hardly any city even has good data concerning the people who use the city. People in cities tend to be invisible and poorly represented in the planning process.”
- Jan Gehl, Danish architect⁵⁴

Summary:

The core team assesses its data governance as well as its data privacy and protection obligations.
The core team develops and implements interviews, focus groups and surveys to collect public feedback.

The goal of this step is to design the public engagements that will be used to collect public feedback and engage in public dialogue.

Note that completing Step 3 – securing a budget – may occur concurrently with or after this step. Your resources limit the scope of public engagement and data collection activities. At the same time, the nature of these activities will impact your budget needs. Be prepared to adapt and collaborate with your team to identify essential needs and “nice to haves,” which can be reduced or removed if budget cuts occur.

Before proceeding, and in line with Step 1, verify whether the information you are seeking already exists. This guide assumes that the information you are seeking does not exist (which is why you need to design public engagements to find it out). You may already have strong indications of public priorities – or be able to learn about them – from public records or generic public complaints mechanisms; recent polls by local universities, newspapers and community groups; and local advocacy campaigns. If the information is already available from a credible source (and is recent enough to still be relevant), then conducting additional research may be unnecessary. If so, it may be more efficient to use engagements to focus on a narrower question, such as better understanding a particular issue or how it manifests for a particular group of residents or neighborhood.

Now that the core team has been confirmed, the objective set, and an operating budget and mandate secured, it is time to design the public engagements to be deployed during the feedback loop process. These engagements serve two purposes, generally reflecting the outward/inward-facing directions of two-way dialogue.

Box 13. Human-centered design principles

There is an increasing push to apply human-centered design principles in governance, originating from problem-solving approaches in business and technical sectors., Human-centered design is an approach to improve products, services or campaigns by focusing on their potential users. It is most often seen in the development and deployment of new digital or technology-driven services, but the approach is relevant to analog, low-cost and more traditional outreach as well. When designing its public engagements – namely, the methods and means through which the government is going to inform citizens about the feedback loop, solicit feedback and provide updates to the public – the core team should consider how people will interact with their outreach methods. This will help to ensure that residents’ preferences, needs and requirements are kept in mind when designing these “touchpoints” where the feedback loop engages the public.

Co/Act: Human Centered Design for Activists, published by NDI, includes a facilitator’s guide and a participant’s guide to human-centered design in the civil society and governance sector. While the guide is explicitly designed for civil society activists, the guide’s modules and exercises can be adapted by a core team when designing the forms, messages and other products for the feedback loop. The guide contains a series of practical exercises and is broken into seven modules, each containing helpful tips and definitions of key concepts:

Ecosystem mapping – This tool is a visual representation of a process, flow or system that highlights relationships in a particular context. Ecosystem mapping can help identify the scope of the project and ensure feasibility of the chosen strategy
Identifying a target audience – Define the group of individuals and communities who are the intended recipients of your product, service or campaign.
User research and user personas – These techniques and exercises develop a richer picture of your target audience that seeks to incorporate their needs, goals and observed behavior patterns.
Revisiting the question and assumption testing – Pause and reflect on what has been done so far to identify missing information, excluded stakeholders or viewpoints, and other gaps.
Brainstorming and ideation – Based on the outputs of earlier steps, generate as many ideas as possible to find the best few ideas that will work for your residents.
Rapid prototyping and usability testing – Bring the top ideas generated in the brainstorming session to life, and then listen to feedback on them from a small sample of stakeholders.
Sustainably building your product, service or campaign – Think critically about prioritizing ideas, timelines, budget and feasibility considerations.

Access the Co/Act facilitator and participant guides in English, Spanish, French and Arabic at NDI’s website through this link: https://www.ndi.org/publications/coact-human-centered-design-activists.

Footnotes

⁵³Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, How to turn your dissatisfaction into action (TEDWomen, 2019), Link.

⁵⁴Phil Stubbs, Jan Gehl Quotes (The Environment Show, 2020), Link.

⁵⁵Jenn Noinaj, Making the Case for Human-Centered Design in Government (GovLoop, 2021), Link.

⁵⁶U.S. Office of Management and Budget, A Human-Centered Design Approach (Performance.gov, 2023), Link.

⁵⁷Co/Act: Human Centered Design for Activists (National Democratic Institute, 2023), Link; PDF Report here.