Scope 5 (SC-5) Card

Card Details - Five of Scope

Abbreviation

SC-5

Card's focus

The focus of this card is concerns, problems and grievances

Threat to claimants

Imogen excludes features from the implementation which would a) support claimants submit feedback, and/or formal complaints, and/or mandatory reconsiderations, and/or appeals (or separates them into different channels or isolated systems), and/or b) support government officials to address any of these and redress/corrections promptly and efficiently

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).

It is difficult for claimants to collect together all the relevant supporting information, summarise it, submit it and track what is happening in complaints, mandatory reconsiderations, appeals, etc leading to claimants not seeking relevant correction and redress, and therefore missing out on award payments
The processes used by government officials to make adjustments and corrections are less efficient than other parts of the system, leading to long delays and frustrations for claimants who have sought corrections for mistakes and errors that affect them
Claimants have to report changes promptly and in time for monthly payment cycles, yet corrections in their favour take many years to be repaid
Claimants are not given any online access to their own data, because the data is only available in internal databases and is thus unavailable to web-facing systems, making it harder for claimants to request, view and download their own data

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.

Support claimants’ own ecosystems

Generate structured data for visibility and re-use by claimants and other actors
Provide, signpost and explain functionalities to span the fullest range of claimant activities, so as to reduce the need for and use of messaging/chat interactions (like the UC Journal) which result in unstructured data. Ensure the structured data enables re-use to increase wider ecosystem efficiencies: provide for recording and keeping full records of every interaction by every channel (including files, form submissions, all communications), and provide methods to ensure information can be found and referred to, and easily exported or shared with others as required.

Acknowledge claimants as people in digital design

Ensure system and state accountability to claimants
Equalise accountability between claimants and the state. Promote a sense of fairness by enforcing an expectation that service level standards for actions and response times should be similar to those expected of claimants, with related penalties not disproportionately, or only, affecting claimants. Provide tools/methods for claimants to easily check, query and challenge actions and decisions.

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

Design for the needs of claimants’ lives covering their expansive activities
Recognise that service take-up requires more than direct interactions with the state. Ensure design is not restricted to service delivery between interaction points of claimants and the state within a 'user journey', and instead span all actors and mediating instruments that come together to achieve the claimant's goal.

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.

Design to assist claimants across the full span of their own activities

Provide capabilities for activities prior to, during and after direct public service interaction
Consider the temporal aspects of claimants' activities across the whole lifecycle from before making a claim to after ending an award. Acknowledge how earlier and repeated interventions can reduce later harms, empower claimants and increase the capabilities of claimants.

General Notes

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

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