User Experience (UX)
Designing clarity into everyday public interactions
This is entry 1 of 10 in the Experience Tapestry™—a series on how public systems shape trust through experience—featured in our Civic Glossary.
What UX means
User experience (UX) is about what it feels like to interact with a tool, service, or system. At its simplest, it’s whether something works—whether a form is understandable, a portal is navigable, or a process is accessible.
In civic life, “users” aren’t customers shopping in a marketplace. They’re residents applying for benefits, patients filling out intake forms, or employees logging into internal systems. Their dignity and trust are bound up in how well those experiences are designed.
Some practitioners use the term Product Experience (ProdX) to describe how a digital product feels as a whole. In civic systems, ProdX often overlaps with UX, since clarity and usability of forms, portals, and tools define whether a product supports or frustrates residents.
Why UX matters in public systems
When UX is poor, services don’t just frustrate—they fail. A confusing benefits application can mean families miss critical support. An inaccessible portal can lock out people with disabilities. A clunky staff system can waste hours of public time. Small usability issues compound into big trust issues.
Good UX, by contrast, signals care. It saves time, reduces errors, and strengthens confidence in institutions. Every clear instruction, accessible feature, and working button is a promise kept.
What makes UX impactful
UX isn’t one discipline. It’s a set of practices that come together to shape how people interact with systems:
UX is more than visuals—it’s research, writing, design, and accessibility working together.
UX research — interviewing, testing, and observing real people to uncover needs and pain points.
UX writing — crafting clear, concise, human-centered language so instructions, labels, and feedback make sense.
Interaction design — structuring flows so tasks can be completed without confusion or dead ends.
Visual and information design — organizing information so it’s legible and accessible.
Accessibility design — ensuring services work for people with disabilities, on different devices, and in diverse contexts.
When woven together, these practices transform experiences from frustrating to functional, and from functional to respectful.
Participation and research
Strong UX doesn’t emerge from theory. It comes from engaging the people who will actually use the system.
Strong UX doesn’t emerge from theory. It comes from engaging the people who will actually use the system. In government and nonprofit contexts, that means:
Running usability testing with residents, not just staff.
Conducting accessibility audits to meet, and go beyond, Section 508 standards.
Involving employees in testing back-end systems, since their workflows shape resident experience.
And UX research isn’t the only way participation shows up. Every subcomponent of UX depends on listening and co-design:
UX writing is refined through testing whether words resonate and instructions make sense.
Interaction design depends on observing how people move through flows.
Visual and information design improve when residents help confirm how information is grouped and prioritized.
Accessibility design requires people with disabilities actively shaping the process, not being checked against at the end.
Participation makes each layer of UX more credible and effective—ensuring systems are designed with people, not just for them.
Policy connections to UX
There’s precedent: the U.S. government has recognized UX as infrastructure.
The U.S. government has recognized UX as infrastructure. The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides patterns and templates for more usable, accessible websites. Compliance with Section 508 requires agencies to design for accessibility. Together, these standards anchor UX not only in good design practice but in civil rights and legal obligation.
Connections to other experiences
UX is the foundation: without usable interactions, larger journeys Customer Experience (CX), Service Experience (SX), and Resident Experience (RX) crumble.
Broken UX burdens employees [Employee Experience (EX)] and erodes trust in public systems.
Good UX, by contrast, reinforces trust, enabling better civic participation [Civic Experience (CivX)] and healthier public outcomes.
Public Servants’ lens on user experience
UX is often dismissed as surface-level polish. In civic systems, it’s anything but. Broken UX breaks promises, damages trust, and widens inequities. Clear, accessible, respectful UX is infrastructure. It’s how people know their government is listening.
User Experience (UX) is one strand of the Experience Tapestry™—a series on how public systems shape trust through experience—featured in our Civic Glossary. Explore the next entry on Customer Experience (CX) to see how individual interactions build into journeys across public services:
Design clear interactions with us
Public Servants helps organizations design systems that work with, not against, the people they serve. Get in touch or explore our Trust Signals Scorecard to see where your systems are earning—or eroding—trust.
