If you've ever watched a resident struggle to navigate a city website, waited on hold with a department that only takes phone calls, or spent hours chasing down the right form for a simple permit request, you already understand the problem that user experience (UX) work is meant to solve.
This spring, U.S. Digital Response (USDR) partnered with InnovateUS to host a three-session series called Building Better Services: UX Strategy, Practice, and Talent. Across the three sessions, USDR's Cindy Phan and Keith Wilson were joined by USDR volunteers Cristy Rowley, Jillian Gilburne, Dea De Jarisco, and Matte Scheinker — bringing decades of experience in civic tech, federal government, and the private sector. Together, they tackled something that sounds simple but rarely is: how do you actually start making government services easier to use? The series covered three conversations: UX Fundamentals and Why It Matters in Government, Defining Problem Spaces and Developing a UX Plan, and Hiring for UX Roles and Building Agency UX Practices.
Here's what we took away.
Talk to six people before your next meeting about this problem.
Government teams often stall on UX they assume they need a large, representative sample before anything you learn is worth acting on. They don't.
Cindy, who leads USDR's UX work and spent a decade in federal government, put it this way: six to twelve conversations will get you enough to identify patterns and set direction. Jillian shared when her team talked to ten case managers, they all started saying the same things. That repetition means you have enough to move.
A lot of government teams are waiting for conditions that won't arrive. Cristy, who has done user research across both industry and civic tech, said you build confidence by starting. The first round of interviews won't be perfect. It doesn't need to be.
Pick your first UX project carefully: small scope, real pain, visible win.
"The first project decides the second one. If your first UX effort lands well, you get permission to do more. If it doesn't, you spend the next year defending the practice before it ever had a chance," Dea, who has built UX practices inside government, said.
The question isn't just where UX can help. It's where UX can succeed and be seen to succeed.
Defining Problem Spaces and Developing a UX Plan gave teams the tools to get there. A strong problem statement tells you who is affected, what is getting in their way, and what it costs if nothing changes. A weak one: "we need to redesign the website" or "people don't understand the policy" gives you nowhere to start and nothing to measure.
USDR worked with the City of St. Louis Homelessness Division using exactly this approach, starting with listening rather than solutioning. The result: 30 hours per week saved on reporting and resident placement time cut from 90 days to 27.
Audit your hiring process before you post the role.
Nearly half the attendees in Hiring for UX Roles and Building Agency UX Practices had never hired for a UX-specific role before. For many of them, it was their first real look at what that process feels like from the candidate's side.
Dea shared something her team had learned the hard way: UX practitioners are empathetic by nature, and they notice how you communicate during hiring. Her government team found that candidates were not put off by a slow timeline. Most know government hiring takes time. What put them off was silence. "Candidates don't mind that it takes longer," she said. "They just need to be communicated with that it's going to take longer."
Keith added that UX candidates tend to treat the hiring process like a service they are evaluating: Is it clear? Is it responsive? Does the job description reflect an organization that understands what UX is for, or one that is checking a box?
Matte, who has more than 20 years of UX practice-building experience, was specific about the job description: lead with the problems UX is being hired to solve, and explain how research connects to decisions in your organization. A laundry list of tools or AI-generated filler signals the opposite. "It will reveal more about you than you think," he said.
The hire is not the finish line. It is the starting line.
"Most UX practices don't fail because you hired the wrong person,” Matte said. “Most of the time, they fail because you never built the conditions around that person for them to be successful. You didn't try to build UX, you just tried to hire UX, and those are two very different things."
Building those conditions means finding a leadership sponsor who will protect the practice, not just someone who approved the headcount. It means talking across departments before the hire arrives about what space UX will occupy. It means setting up ways to measure outcomes, both to prove value to the organization and to give the UX practitioner a way to see that their work matters.
Dea added thatwhere your first UX hire sits in the org chart is important. Reporting through engineering can keep UX out of product strategy. Reporting through operations can keep them away from where service decisions get made. The right home is wherever a leader is genuinely motivated to sponsor the work, and that first placement should be treated as a starting point, not a permanent one.
Connect with USDR
If any of this resonates with something your team is working through, we'd love to talk. USDR supports city governments on UX work and talent at no cost — whether that means scoping a first project, conducting user research on a specific service, upskilling a staff member, or preparing for a UX hire.
Reach out to start a UX or talent partnership, share this post with a colleague in local government who's facing the same challenges, or raise your hand to volunteer if you're a mid-to-senior UX professional who wants to put your skills to work.
Recordings from all three sessions are available at Innovate-US.org.
About U.S. Digital Response: USDR is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that partners with state, local, and tribal governments to modernize essential digital services. Founded in 2020, USDR has supported the delivery of government services to 50 percent of Americans through more than 650 partnerships across 48 U.S. states and territories. Visit usdigitalresponse.org to learn more or start a partnership.
