The psychology of rejection

You're planning your wedding and it's time to send out the invites. You decide you'll email everyone asking them to save the date, and send the invites in the post later. Within seconds of sending your emails you receive a polite and carefully worded reply from one of your invitees explaining they can't attend. It's like they didn't even think about it, they just flat out rejected you there and then.

How would that make you feel?

We've been thinking about this. Thinking about the psychology of rejection and how this relates to services we're redesigning. Digital is efficient, it's fast and cheap, but it can also be cold and uncompromising. Sometimes the steely hard edges of "computer says no" need padding.

With this in mind we're redesigning one of our services so that applications that don't meet the lowest threshold of the acceptance criteria are automatically rejected. Not only does this reduce staff workload, it means that we can make a decision for some applications straight away.

That's pretty standard stuff when it comes to digital transformation, but here's what's different, we're not letting rejected applicants know immediately, we've built a small element of delay into the process. It's still a lot, lot quicker than the current "up to 10 days", but it's not an instant dismissal of their request.

At present it's a theory, we need to test the new service with real people that use it, but it's not a new idea and John Waterworth pointed out it's been around since the 60s

@PhilRumens @pixlz … People didn't enjoy playing the game until developers added some fake 'thinking time'.
— John Waterworth (@jwaterworth) May 10, 2017

I think it shows that when it comes to service redesign, we're not just producing quicker, cheaper services, we're also approaching digital transformation with empathy for users.

Comments

Digital best practice checklist

This week I finished the draft of a digital best practice check-list. It's not digital strategy, in fact I'm increasingly thinking organisations don't need a digital strategy, they need a delivery strategy. My draft has check-list of seven questions and recommendations, with one overall recommendation regarding best practice for delivering digital. Ideally it would be incorporated into a wider service and information delivery strategy. Below I've omitted the bulk of the content, the reasoning behind arriving at the recommendation from the question because it's still in draft, but here are the seven questions and eight recommendations: 1. Is the council properly promoting its digital services and content, to reduce avoidable contact? Recommendation: Establish a “digital first” ethos to the promotion of services and better targeting what, when and where they're promoted. 2. Are the digital services the council offers, especially where the design and

Carl's Conundrum of Internal Influence

I'm writing this partly as a reply to an excellent piece that Carl Haggerty published about the disconnect between internal and external influence and partly due to various conversations over the past month about how to make using tools like collaboration platform Pipeline common practice. This isn't really about Carl though, or Devon County Council, or any other council specifically, it's more a comment on the influence of digital teams in local governments, or lack of, and how to resolve this. So here's the question that prompted this piece. How can someone who's been recognised nationally for their work, first by winning the Guardian's Leadership Excellent Award and who has more recently been placed in the top 100 of the Local Government Chronicle's most influential people in local government , "sometimes feel rather isolated and disconnected to the power and influence internally". First, let's consider whether is this a problem to

Pipeline Alpha

In September 2014, officers from 25 councils met in Guildford to discuss a platform to enable collaboration across Local Government. A "Kickstarter for local government" is the missing part to Makers Project Teams , a concept to enable collaborative working across different organisations put forward by LGMakers the design and development strand of LocalGov Digital . Based on the user needs captured at the event, LGMakers created collaboration platform Pipeline and by October people from over 50 councils had signed up . Pipeline is an Alpha, a prototype set up to evaluate how a Kickstarter for councils might work. It is a working site though, and is being used as the platform it is eventually intended to be, at present without some of finer features a live offer might have. So what have I've learnt in the eight months since we launched Pipeline? There's a strong desire to collaborate LocalGov Digital isn't a funded programme. I wrote about how much it

Superfast highways

You may have seen this slide I put together to help explain digital transformation This week we launched a new beta service to report speeding traffic. It looks fairly simple but to give you an idea of what's happening in the background I thought it might be useful to show you the before and after. So here's the before and as you can see it's completely a manual process. Stuff might be recorded electronically but it takes someone to do something seven time to make the process work and send it to the parish or the district. Here's the after What this doesn't tell you is that it's basing whether the request is for the parish or district on three questions. It's also doing a spatial look up to find the parish and returning the parish clerk details using the Modern.Gov API. Because these are already part of our platform this is data that we currently maintain, so there's no additional work to keep this up to date and we've reduced the h

Defining transformation to a wider audience

For the past month I've been putting together a paper on the next steps of digital transformation, for the organisation I work for. I'm proposing we look at two capabilities and two business areas, and if approved I'll be writing more about it. It's been a great exercise in gathering my thoughts and helping me to define digital transformation to a wider audience and how it fits into the bigger picture of service improvement. Here's some of the stuff I've learnt or had affirmed: Transformation, digital or not, starts with understanding the needs of the user through research. This should be obvious, but in local government too often I've seen "build it and they will come" approach applied. It's unlikely a commercial operation would launch a new product without first researching the market, so why would a digital service be any difference? A couple of years ago I wrote how the phrase "digital transformation" was hindering digit

LG/WWW

Search This Blog