In the world of public service design, benchmarking is a crucial aspect of user research that allows us to explore different governments’ approach to redesigning services and life experiences of residents and citizens. Without it, we would limit our ability to think outside the box and discover ideas that may seriously enhance our efforts to making peoples lives easier and more effortless.
So, what is benchmarking anyway? Benchmarking is the activity of looking at different countries’ services and life experiences that residents and citizens of those countries partake in to accomplish a certain objective. These services and life experiences should be best practice around the world and should be backed up by credible statistics and data.
In my experience doing benchmarking, I was pleasantly surprised by the innovative and proactive measures that different governments take to make the lives of their residents and citizens easier, and certain countries show up again and again in top rankings with regards to government services and life experiences, which goes to show that those governments are doing something right.
In our line of work, we should look up to those governments and learn from their efforts to increase the quality of life of their people by benchmarking against those services and life experiences that make people’s lives easier. A good idea can help us come up with another idea that is even better and more beneficial to people’s lives, and one day, other service designers will be benchmarking against our ideas to enhance their governments’ services/life experiences