How the ‘Voice of the Client’ drives efficiency
This is the first in a three-part series about the value of human-centered design in government agency digital modernization.
The key to maximizing ROI in digital modernization isn’t just about the technology—it’s about the people who use it. Human-centered design (HCD) can help unlock the insights an agency needs to drive efficiency, innovation, and value in its modernization efforts. By adopting an HCD approach, agencies and partners like ICF can bridge the gap between what they know and what they never thought achievable.
When ICF partners with an agency, we take time to discover the Voice of the Client (VoC). This is a term we use to encompass users’ needs, preferences, and pain points. Staying attuned to the VoC throughout a client partnership ensures that the end products align with both the agency’s mission and what the users want from their experience, further driving innovation.
The interviews, surveys, and observations that make up the VoC help our team and the agency fully understand the challenges users face. It also increases the likelihood that the solutions the teams co-create properly address those challenges efficiently.
At first glance, following an HCD approach and prioritizing the VoC may seem more labor intensive and costly than developing new systems independently. But off-the-shelf products or solutions that are created in a vacuum often fail to meet users’ needs or are cumbersome to use. As a result, the agency may see lower adoption rates of the product and need to invest in costly upgrades or a new system entirely. ICF regularly builds government systems used by hundreds of thousands of users. Saving each user just a few minutes each year can save literally thousands of hours of time for users – time that can be better on spent treating patients, uncovering fraud, or other agency mission goals.
In our experience, adhering to the VoC speeds up digital modernizations while delivering greater long-term value. The deployed solutions have a better chance of being adopted by agency users because they have had a hand in every step of development.
“Human-centered design goes beyond functionality—it cultivates trust through collaboration. Modern technology stacks support the ability to rapidly prototype, which ensures a continuous feedback cycle between the designer and the user. Through interactive prototypes, we transform ideation into reality. These hands-on moments reveal deeper insights and spark conversations that transform abstract ideas into stellar solutions.”
For example: ICF partnered with a federal agency client to help modernize a two-decade-old platform used to process quality assessment data. The project involved improving both the agency-facing and public-facing sides of the service or application. Our teams began by attuning themselves to the VoC: listening to users’ pain points, needs, wants, and wishes. Then, the teams used what they learned to re-map the user journey through the app.
The new cloud-based platform delivers an intuitive user experience from every angle. Since February 2023,
- 95% reduction in time for delivering key digital deliverables to end users.
- 90% reduction in yearly operational costs.
Interested in learning more about how our approach to human-centered design can drive efficiency and value for government agencies? Read this article and stay tuned for the second post in this series.