Cornucopia 7 (CO-7) Card

Card Details - Seven of Cornucopia

Abbreviation

CO-7

Card's focus

The focus of this card is content accessibility

Threat to claimants

Ella's layout/styling/formatting of content is difficult for claimants, and/or there are no simple way for claimants to change these to something more suitable for their own ongoing, or immediate, needs

Threat to claimants

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).

Eye conditions mean claimants cannot read the instructions with ease and miss important information which affect them more than other claimants
Access to a feature relies on a swiping gesture which is impossible to use in the wet and humid conditions of claimants' workplaces, so they have to go to a public library to use the computers which delays responding to notifications, takes time out of the day and adds journey cost
Claimants cannot use the interface elements properly because they are sized and spaced awkwardly, and cannot be adjusted, affecting their ability to do mandated activities and provide information sufficiently or accurately

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.

Reduce claimants’ interaction burdens with digital welfare

Provide full social protection services across wider interoperable channels
Ensure all service provision and modes of assistance (e.g., provision of advice, practical support and self-help guidance) are available through multiple interaction channels (e.g., telephone, web, mobile app) which are accessible to varying resources and capabilities (e.g., communication skills, equipment, language, physical and mental abilities). Permit the use and intermixing of channels without restriction. Consider providing on-demand synchronous interactions through digital as well as other channels.

Embrace a wider ecosystem and fuller claimant activity viewpoint for digitised public services

Legitimise extensibility and customisation of digital infrastructure
Deploy technology in ways that will permit, support and advocate integration with digital welfare by other actors. Provide timely, free and open access to system information, supporting content, and details of upcoming changes and updates to support these efforts.

General Notes

Card values (i.e. '7' 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. 'Ella's' 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 Cornucopia suit are: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 J Q K A

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