Who Gets a Say? A Two-Part Series on Service Design and Language Access
I am a proud Boricua, a descendant of the island of Puerto Rico. My mother was the first in her family to leave the island and raised our family in the continental United States. From an early age, my mother instilled in me a pride in my heritage, a love for the island, and perhaps most importantly, a deep understanding of the injustice of the colonial relationship between the island and the states. As our enchanted island is devastated yet again by a natural disaster, we see how badly the federal government has neglected Puerto Rico in real-time.
My mother taught me that the federal government treats Puerto Ricans like second-class citizens. She was right. Puerto Ricans have no voice in Washington despite being U.S. citizens for over a century. They cannot vote for President, and their only Congressional Representative cannot vote in Congress. The lack of input from Puerto Ricans in the structure of their government contributed to the devastating humanitarian disaster unfolding in the aftermath of Hurricane Fiona. For example, the Puerto Rican people had no say when Congress passed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA). This law privatized the broken electric grid, resulting in a fragile power system that couldn’t withstand natural disasters.
As a Puerto Rican, I am devastated for my island. As an American, I am ashamed of our inaction. And as a service designer studying how to build a fair and equitable human-centered government, I know this crisis is yet another example of failed design.
Ironically, the federal government is in the midst of an ambitious research project on how citizens interact with federal governments as they recover from natural disasters. How timely!
It’d be necessary for the Biden Administration to hear from Puerto Ricans as they recover from Hurricane Fiona, right? Correct.
But in another case of failed design, the survey isn’t accessible to Puerto Ricans. Why? Because it is only available in English.
How a Human-Centred Design Project Centered English-Speakers
In December 2021, President Biden signed Executive Order 14058, Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government. The EO launched a moon-shot initiative to build a human-centered government built around what works best for people instead of what works best for bureaucracy. It’s sorely needed. Today, citizens must navigate a labyrinth of government agencies and fill out duplicative forms to access the social safety net.
In the Executive Order, President Biden commits to “strengthening the democratic process [by] providing direct lines of feedback and mechanisms for engaging the American people in the design and improvement of Federal Government programs, processes, and services” and stresses that services must be navigable by people from all abilities and backgrounds. Most critically, the Executive Order moves beyond platitudes and enacts real action by charging members of the President’s Management Council to form interagency initiatives to enhance citizens’ experience with public services.
The interagency teams created in response to the Executive Order began an ambitious research program to understand how citizens interact with the government at critical points in life. The team launched a public survey focused on five essential life experiences, including recovering from a disaster. Amira Choueiki Boland, the OMB’s first federal customer experience lead, told the Wall Street Journal that this survey would give the White House the “set of insights from the American public that include the priority pain points that we need to start ticking off” to make the vision behind the Executive Order become a reality.
I was excited to share the survey with my family in Puerto Rico. Finally, it seemed they’d have a chance to have a say in a government that had long left them behind. But they couldn’t access this survey because it was only available in English.
I was shocked. The Executive Order was clear that this project had a specific focus on ensuring equity for “individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment, such as Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Native American persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and other persons of color [and] persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.” Wouldn’t Puerto Rico — where 98.7% of residents are Latino and 40% live in poverty — qualify under this definition? What is fair and just about providing an English-only survey feedback mechanism to a colony where more than two-thirds of people do not speak English very well or at all?
“It makes me feel like a second-class citizen all over again,” my relative said after opening the survey.
I was curious if the survey had been updated with language accessibility since I last checked it a few months ago. Loo and behold, there was a link to a Spanish version! But after clicking it, the survey directed to an English-only login page. And after logging in, it denied me access because I am not a government or military official.
Screenshot of the survey from September 20, 2022. Once I click on the hyperlink to the Spanish version (which noticeably doesn’t translate the word “survey” or include the tilde over the “n” in Espanol”), I am directed to an English language login page. Once I log in, a banner says the survey is only accessible to individuals with a government or military email. There is no mechanism on the page to contact a team member and request an alternative way to provide feedback.
The Limits of Good Intentions in Design Justice
I’m sure the public servants in this project never intended to exclude any citizen from participating in the research effort. But good intentions don’t always result in justice.
Well-intentioned designers often unwittingly create exclusionary services for those on the margins. As Sasha Chock explained in Design Justice, researchers and designers may unconsciously assume that the imagined “end user” of the service or product have the same powerful privileges as them, like English proficiency and access to the internet. This instinct leads to a “spiral of exclusion” as researchers and designers center on the most influential users, leaving the needs and desires of individuals on the margins wholly ignored.
I can’t be sure if the survey team fell into the spiral of exclusion design trap. Perhaps there are other efforts to reach Spanish speakers underway that we don’t know. But that’s the problem: we don’t know much. There is little transparency into who designed the survey or how. There is no contact information for the team who created the survey, so we cannot ask them why it is unavailable in Spanish. There is no information on other research efforts, like focus groups or site visits, available to non-English speakers.
The only thing Spanish speakers knew when they opened this survey was that it wasn’t designed for them. They’re left to assume why the survey excluded them. And I imagine many would be left feeling like my aunt: a second-class citizen.
How We Can Do Better:
I spent much time discussing a problem, and now, it is time to discuss a solution. In Part Two of this blog, I’ll share examples of how other government agencies embed language access in their public services.
If you have examples of governments designing for language access, please send them to me! You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter or email me at lexiegruber@gmail.com.