Trust 4 (TR-4) Card

Card Details - Four of Trust

Abbreviation

TR-4

Card's focus

The focus of this card is statuses

Threat to claimants

Ellie provides no way for claimants to get an overview of all relevant ongoing activities, requests and decisions related to their claim, and/or who is responsible for each

Threat to claimants

Ellie provides no way for claimants to get an overview of all relevant ongoing activities, requests and decisions related to their claim, and/or who is responsible for each.

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 have no sense of control and feel disconnected because they have trouble keeping track of their claims, what they are meant to be doing, and when they are supposed to do it
Claimants become disengaged because they have no idea what government officials are currently doing on their claim
Contact with ever-changing government officials leads to a lack of continuity and is a barrier to developing trusting personal relationships between government officials and claimants
Claimants are not given timescales/targets about when they can expect something to be completed by government officials, leaving them in limbo and unable to plan or budget

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

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.

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. 'Ellie' 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 Trust 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, Porosity and Cornucopia (plus Jokers).