Agency 4 (AG-4) Card

Card Details - Four of Agency

Abbreviation

AG-4

Card's focus

The focus of this card is hurdles for claimants

Threat to claimants

Grayson builds the system with limited ways, or making it difficult, for claimants accomplishing tasks to achieve their goal of claiming an award successfully

Threat to claimants

Grayson builds the system with limited ways, or making it difficult, for claimants accomplishing tasks to achieve their goal of claiming an award successfully.

Some examples of how this threat could lead to harms (negative effects on claimants)

The design recommendations and implications relevant to the card are listed below in the next section, but even those can be somewhat abstract and difficult to think about during practical day-to-day implementation. Therefore, some example harms are provided to complement the more formal research outputs. These examples are unique per card, and are only published on these web pages (i.e. in no other project outputs).

Claimants feel like they cannot do much or anything themselves and become demotivated or give up
Validation of claimant-provided data is undertaken offline, adding long delays to making the initial claim and thus first payment
Claimants are asked for information which they do not have immediately to hand, but which blocks their progress
While physically present face-to-face with a government official, claimants are asked to complete an activity by accessing the online channel with their own device and own internet connection
While remote using a digital channel, claimants are asked to attend a physical government office location to complete an activity

The examples are to help understand the threat on the card, not to suppress thinking and innovation. Incorporating these examples exactly, or closely matching ones, should be scored down when playing DBD Cornucopia as a game.

Applicable design recommendations and implications

These are reproduced here from Research Briefing NO2. Multiple cards reference each design implication.

Design systems which support the division of labour with claimants' ecosystems

Expand claimant autonomy, control and choice, backed up by transparency of actions and activities
Enable claimants to better engage with digital welfare and empower them to make their own choices and decisions. Attribute information sources, other advice and decisions; build in logging and audit trail generation; provide access to records of what information was used to make choices/decisions and by whom; provide mechanisms for claimants to question, discuss and challenge actions, provide feedback, and make complaints.

General Notes

Card values (i.e. '4' for this card) are for game play and are not correlated with the severity of harm. This is because threats cannot be ranked directly since they can affect individuals in different ways due to situations and circumstances, or affect fewer or more claimants, or the harms can arise in claimants' support networks and wider society.

The threat description uses a person's name as the "attacker" (i.e. 'Grayson' for this card), which can be thought of someone involved with implementation. They could have any role which influence digitisation. So they could be a database administrator, or a copy writer, or a quality assurance specialist, etc, or all of these. Everyone could have some influence on the claimant threat described. The names were randomly selected from those currently most popular as given names for boys and girls (UK Office for National Statistics).

The example harms provided are drawn from the research data (which explored not only parts of existing services but also the effects of possible changes to those), from the author's own knowledge of web application development and testing, the author's own experience of helping citizens to claim Universal Credit (UC) and Personal Independence Payment (PIP), and from suggestions submitted by other people (make a suggestion). The threats and example harms do not necessarily exist in the current UC or PIP deployments or in ecosystems around those services, but they might well do.

All the cards in this Agency suit are: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 J Q K A

The other suits in the deck are: Scope, Architecture, Trust, Porosity and Cornucopia (plus Jokers).