An ‘interface first’ bureaucracy : interface design, universal credit and the digital welfare state
Meers, Jed and Halliday, Simon and Tomlinson, Joe (2024) An ‘interface first’ bureaucracy : interface design, universal credit and the digital welfare state. Social Policy and Administration. ISSN 0144-5596 (https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.13053)
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Abstract
The front-line of the welfare state is increasingly not a letter, phone call or face-to-face visit, but an online user-interface. This ‘interface first’ bureaucracy is a fundamental reshaping of social security administration, but the design and operation of these interfaces is poorly understood. Drawing on interview data from senior civil servants, welfare benefits advisors and claimants on the UK's flagship Universal Credit working-age benefit, this paper is a detailed analysis of the role played by interfaces in the modern welfare state. Providing examples from across the Universal Credit system, it sets out a five-fold typology of user-interface design elements in the social security context: (i) structuring data input, (ii) interaction architecture, (iii) operative controls, (iv) prompting and priming, and (v) integrations. The paper concludes by considering the implications of an ‘interface first’ welfare bureaucracy for future research.
ORCID iDs
Meers, Jed, Halliday, Simon ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5107-6783 and Tomlinson, Joe;-
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Item type: Article ID code: 89827 Dates: DateEvent30 June 2024Published30 June 2024Published Online11 June 2024Accepted22 January 2024SubmittedSubjects: Social Sciences > Public Finance
Science > Mathematics > Electronic computers. Computer science > Other topics, A-Z > Human-computer interaction
Social Sciences > Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reformDepartment: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS) > Strathclyde Law School > Law Depositing user: Pure Administrator Date deposited: 03 Jul 2024 11:42 Last modified: 09 Oct 2024 00:41 Related URLs: URI: https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/89827