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27 Sep 2004

What you really really want

Kable’s report into the DWP’s research about welfare claimants’ attitudes towards receiving direct electronic payments is a good example of why we have to worry away more deeply at this question of “what we want” from e-enabled services.

There’s always more to it than meets the eye.

It’s great that DWP asks its customers, and publishes the results like this - it seems that over 90% are satisfied with getting payments electronically, 13% preferred the old paper books, 8% had payments on the wrong date, 3% had had wrong amounts, and one in six felt the system needed improving (eg speeding up, clearer dates, statements).

But this change isnt about whether people prefer paper to electronic: it’s about cost of transaction and managing fraud levels. People are being asked whether they can cope with a symptom of the change, not whether they agree with the underlying cause.

It’s a bit like crude of school league tables, which teach us to ask more sophisticated questions about the value of what schools do, and the context in which they do it.

It’s well worth having the DWP research, just as it’s worth having the league tables. Well done the DWP, and let’s keep thinking about what we really want from welfare longer term, deeper and wider. 

• Posted by William Heath on 27/09/04 at 3:10pm
• Categories · "What do we want?" · Design: Co-creation
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Ideal Government

Let's say what we want from e-enabled government. Let's observe government first-hand. Let's say "Wouldn't It Be Better If" (WIBBI). Become an ethnographer of bureaucracy today! It beats getting frustrated with public services.

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