Cornucopia 9 (CO-9) Card

Card Details - Nine of Cornucopia

Abbreviation

CO-9

Card's focus

The focus of this card is notifications

Threat to claimants

Willow generates notifications to claimants which do not include any indication of topic, and/or importance and/or urgency, and do not include the full message, call to action and/or link to complete any required action, and/or cannot be customised (e.g. types, content, frequency, time of day) and/or consumed by other applications

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).

Claimants get distressed by notifications if they have to log on to find out what they are about, but cannot do so immediately
Claimants feel harassed by notifications because they have no control over which types to receive or when to receive them
Claimants know they are accountable themselves and thus experience worry and guilt being in the situation of having received an alert, but having no idea of its importance or its content

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.

Acknowledge claimants as people in digital design

Provide clear and configurable communications about process and decision statuses
Use methods proactively, such as internal notifications and external alerts, to help people understand what they need to do/when, and what is in progress by others. Provide confirmations when actions have been completed, information received, decisions made and statuses changed. To accommodate people's individual needs and preferences, provide choices about what, when and how these are re- ceived, who they are sent to and copied to. Offer content options such as whether to have a topic, priority and hyperlink, and ensure it is clear where and how to complete any required action.

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. '9' 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. 'Willow' 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).