Why making Toronto City Hall more like Walmart would be good for democracy

Thestar.com
August 6, 2019
Jennifer Pagliaro

The problem: City services and communications, not to mention the workings of city council, are impenetrable for many Toronto residents.

Dave Meslin tells a story about a woman named Melissa, who came to city hall to speak in favour of a simple community proposal.

He and his neighbours wanted the city to allow painted road murals on their local streets. So, they gathered some speakers to make their case.

But on the day of the committee meeting, Melissa didn’t show up. When Meslin, a longtime community activist, texted her to find out what was up, she told him she’d had trouble finding the second-floor committee room.

“And when she did find the right door, it was closed,” Meslin writes in his new book Teardown: Rebuilding Democracy from the Ground Up.

Toronto has flirted with giving residents a say in city policy. In Barcelona, they’ve gone all-in

Like the best designed apps on your phone or your favourite store that you spend too much time in, Meslin argues that a “healthy democracy must be accessible, comfortable, understandable and convenient.”

Something as simple as a welcome sign at the door would have made a difference for Melissa and countless others, Meslin writes.

He concludes: “Our democratic institutions can feel inviting, alienating, even invisible, depending on how they’re designed.”

Not one for complaining, Meslin proposed a solution: a dedicated, independent “user experience” team at city hall that looks at everything from public meetings to voting and have a “substantial and stable budget” free from council interference.

User experience, or UX as it’s called in the innovation and technology sector, applies to far more than just the latest gadget or iPhone, but can and should be employed in civic spaces, experts told the Star. More than that, those experts said cities have even more of an obligation than Fortune 500 companies to get it right.

In a commercial context, private companies probably have competition, said independent civic design consultant Cyd Harrell, forcing them to improve upon the design of their services and the user experience to ensure customer satisfaction and repeat business.

“The interesting thing about government is that, of course, it’s a monopoly for a lot of things that we need to do,” said Harrell, who is based in San Francisco. “I can’t go get my business permit from a city down the road because I don’t like the service.”

For that reason, she said governments have a “moral obligation” to provide an “accessible and respectful and appropriate” experience to the public.

User experience, she said, is a subfield in the technology industry. The idea is to look at how well an app or website or some other experience works for the person using it.

“The term started getting used with respect to technology, to websites to digital design but it fairly quickly became clear that you could apply it to a lot of other things,” she said. “Service design” has become a broader term associated with the public sector, she said.

Consider how the most profitable retail stores in the country function.

Walmart Canada spokesperson Felicia Fefer said in an emailed statement that their stores are designed to “maximize the customer experience, including helpful signage, clear sight lines and a layout to make products easy to find.”

Paula Kwan leads the city's Civic Innovation Office.

Then there are the greeters at the door and continual improvements to the checkout process and regular study of the customer experience through surveys and other means.

Companies like Walmart are also often re-evaluating the customer experience. Recently, Walmart announced they’d be eliminating greeter roles at 1,000 U.S. stores, the Associated Press reported, and replacing them with more robust “customer host” positions.

The same experience is not often a focus at city hall or other civic spaces.

“It would be nice, at our city halls, to be greeted by a smile instead of a security badge,” Meslin says, noting the efforts employed by Walmart, Apple and other Fortune 500 companies.

Olivier St-Cyr, assistant professor at the University of Toronto in the faculty of information who specializes in user experience, said in the field there is now a focus on “end-to-end” experience. He explained how that could apply to cities and the type of services provided:

“You have a problem with your garbage pickup , The experience starts there. So, do you know where to call? Do you have maybe a flyer or a piece of information or a website that you can go to in order to diagnose your problem?” he said. “After that, you need to talk with people and when you need to talk with people there’s another set of experiences , Are you going to wait very long in line? Are you going to be told for like three hours that ‘your call is very important to us’ but nobody really picks up your call?”

All of the components to how people interact with city government involve a design of user experience or lack thereof, he said.

In his book, Meslin outlines several other areas that could use a redesign, from meetings to public notices.

He laments how public notices for meetings the city is legally obligated to hold -- like when a development is proposed that exceeds city zoning rules -- are often full of jargon.

For example, a full-page advertisement from the city that ran in the May 31 edition of the Toronto Sun for a “notice of open house and notice of special public meeting” said the city had initiated an “official plan amendment pertaining to the set of transportation policies related to transit, cycling, automated vehicles and shared mobility.” It listed the time and place of a “statutory open house” and went on at length to note sections of the city’s official plan that would be amended by the changes as well as referencing the provincial Planning Act several times.

In another recent example, a public notice about a development application began with this impenetrable line: “Request to Amend Zoning By-law Application No. 13 247713 ESC 44 OZ.”

“One surefire way to decrease attendance at a statutory public meeting is to call it a ‘statutory public meeting,’” Meslin writes. “What’s wrong with calling it a town hall? Or just a public meeting? Or a neighbourhood meeting?”

He says plain, inviting language and the use of graphics are “fundamental” to securing public participation.

There are other simple fixes, he points out, like better way-finding and signage inside city hall that points to an open room where the public is clearly welcome. Or snacks and daycare provided at meetings.

Also, timing is crucial. People are more likely to attend council or committee meetings outside regular work hours, he notes. When people do show up, it’s usually difficult to know when the item they’re interested in might be and they can end up waiting hours -- a deterrent to participating in the first place. A simple change, Meslin says, like allowing citizens to schedule an item to be debated at a specific time by way of petition -- enough signatures automatically warrants a timed item -- could see more people participate in issues that matter to them.

Jess McMullin, an Edmonton-based consultant who advocates for improved citizen experiences and better service design, says city staff should be an integral part of the design process because of their experience serving the public daily.

He says when he works with public sector clients as a design consultant there’s something he calls the “Hogwart’s Moment,” referring to a central setting in the Harry Potter series.

“The Hogwart’s moment is when a public servant realizes that they are a designer too. It’s like, ‘You’re a wizard, Harry,’” he says. “What it does, is it gives them permission to address the shortcomings in the system that they already see in their work but have not been empowered to fix.”

He says having a team of experts in user experience and design as a “centre of gravity” could guide those changes.

Harrell says Meslin’s idea of a dedicated team within city hall is a good one. The question, she says, is how to give that team enough influence to be effective. She says the team would need buy-in from high-level executive leadership and a stable budget.

A team to better design those processes, is “fairly cheap,” St-Cyr says to address and solve the city’s service design problems -- off the cuff, he estimates perhaps $1 million a year.

Stores like Walmart, by contrast, have staff devoted to helping shoppers and are continually evaluating the customer experience.

The city may already have a way forward built into the ground floor of city hall.

A team of three, led by director Paula Kwan, runs the city’s Civic Innovation Office, born out of three-year seed funding of $500,000 (U.S.) annually from Bloomberg Philanthropies to develop “innovative approaches to problem solving within city government,” the city’s website says.

Most of their time to date has been spent on a project to increase city engagement, including testing a digital translation tool in hopes of helping overcome language barriers to public participation in city services and governance, Kwan tells the Star.

Even in their glassed-in office full of white boards and sticky notes, Kwan says she and her team, with user design expertise, see the need for such tools all the time. “It’s the unshiny things,” she says, that need fixing at the city.

Already the office is partnering with city divisions to do training and help with internal projects, Kwan says, and they have the “full support” of the mayor’s and city manager’s office.

She notes there is also a city full of talented innovators and designers they can tap to help.

The office’s Bloomberg grant runs out at the end of this year.