Jelena Racković · · 3 min read · Public sector
Designing public services when the rules can’t change
I have spent a good part of my career designing for government and public institutions, from tax services to national portals. People outside that world tend to assume the hardest part is the regulation. In my experience, the rules are rarely what stops progress. They are fixed, they are known, and a good designer can work within them. What stops progress is something else entirely.
The rules are the easy part
Laws and regulations are not negotiable, and they shouldn’t be. A form must ask for what the law requires; a deadline is a deadline; certain steps cannot be skipped however inconvenient they are. But rules are also wonderfully clear. Once you understand them, they become a frame, and design within a frame is still design. Some of my favourite solutions were born precisely because the constraint left no easy way out.
Too many systems, too many voices
The real obstacle is scale. Public institutions run on large, interconnected systems built over decades, and every change touches many of them. Each system has its owners, and each owner has a reasonable concern. The result is a long line of people who can say no, and very few who feel able to say yes. Projects don’t fail; they stall, meeting after meeting, waiting for a decision nobody wants to take alone.
Step in, and propose the decision
What I have learnt is that someone has to step in, calmly but with courage, and put a clear decision on the table. Not a list of options with pros and cons, but a recommendation: this is the direction, this is why, and this is what happens if we wait. It can feel bold in a culture of careful consensus, yet most decision makers are relieved when someone offers them a well-argued position. They want to be convinced. They need something solid to stand behind when they take it further up.
That means doing the homework thoroughly. A recommendation only works if it respects the rules, understands the systems it touches and anticipates the questions each owner will ask. Courage without preparation is just noise.
The story matters as much as the work
This is the part that surprised me most when I started. In the public sector, the way a project is told often matters as much as the work itself. A brilliant design that nobody can explain to a minister or a board will wait in a drawer. A clear story about why the change is big, why it matters to citizens and how it moves the institution forward opens doors that months of meetings could not.
So I spend real effort on that story. I show where the service is today and where it could be in five years. I connect the screen in front of us to the larger vision of a modern administration. I talk about development and progress rather than features. That perspective, the reason behind the work, is the strongest card you can hold in government, and I have learnt to play it deliberately.
Why I keep coming back to it
Public services are used by everyone, including people who never chose them and cannot switch to a competitor. That raises the stakes and the reward. When a service that once required a queue and three forms becomes something a citizen completes in a few minutes from home, the impact is felt by hundreds of thousands of people. The rules didn’t change to make that possible. The decisions did, and helping institutions make them is the part of my work I value most.
Is your design system starting to fade?
I’d like to hear about it →