Sheffield City Council

The biggest barrier facing the roll-out of digital public services is adoption – actually getting people to use the tools that are built. There are many, well understood, adoption barriers but there are two overarching linked factors that stand out: trust and usability.

Without trust users won’t feel comfortable using a service in the first place, and if the usability is poor, they will still struggle even if they want to use it. Furthermore, these two values often sit in opposition to each other

However, this is increasingly looking like a false dichotomy, and could be avoided if applications were designed for privacy from the ground up, for instance using MIT’s “Solid” data framework as recently announced by Tim Berners-Lee.

Sheffield City Council would like to undertake a discovery on the establishment of a Privacy and Usability Living Lab (PULL) which will engage partners including local government, the wider public sector, academia and application providers and developers.

It will research best practice and develop new design and architecture patterns that provide ground-up privacy, reduce the need to bolt on security and enable new frictionless user experiences which could be adopted by public sector and ‘smart city’ developers.