Join Community User Needs First!

The goals of the community are:

• Inspiring each other, ensuring that user-centric government services do not just remain an abstract vision, but become a key focus in organizations and tangible for its users.
• Different legislationial contexts per country offer unique perspectives on similar service design challenges. In addition, members can discuss overarching legislation or guidelines, such as EU legislation or accessibility guidelines, which is applicable to multiple countries, and learn from each other.
• Learning from international peers in government bodies (from national governments to local municipalities) by exchanging knowledge, insights, results, experiences and challenges on themes such as: proactive services, UX design, design thinking and customer journey methodology, plain language, accessibility, and user testing.

This community is for professionals working on user-centric services and design within government organizations, like UX designers, researchers or service designers, or colleagues in communications. The topics are also relevant for project managers, digital strategists, and policy makers.

You must work for a government body. This community is not for commercial parties (consultancy agencies, suppliers of service technology). As we are based in the Netherlands, we follow Central European Time (CET) for our activities. A lot of our members are also based in Europe. Originally, the community had a European focus, as it was established as part of a European Horizon2020 project. However, we strongly believe we can develop even more user-centric government services by expanding our efforts beyond Europe.

The community meets regularly in the morning from 10:00 to 11:00h (CET) during Community User Needs First online meetups. In these meetups, a member can present their work or a specific theme to inspire the community. It’s also possible for members to request help from the group or ask a question. We use Microsoft Teams for these meetings.

As a member, you will be invited to the meetups automatically. Our community manager will also try to help with any challenges you have or seek connections that may help you in your work.

We regularly publish interviews with members about their work and organization to inspire the community. If you’d like to share your story, let us know! We would love to conduct an interview with you.

Be sure to follow the User Needs First page on LinkedIn and join the Community LinkedIn-group.

Community User Needs First span-out of Community UserCentriCities; a Horizon2020 project that started in December 2020. Led by the Lisbon Council in partnership with Eurocities and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, it brought together 26 European municipalities and regions; the founding partners – Espoo, Milan, Murcia, Rotterdam, Tallinn and Emilia Romagna – and participating cities and regions: Arezzo, Barcelona, Catalonia Region, Brussels Capital Region, Ghent, Glasgow, Gothenburg, Helsinki, Kronoberg Region, Kyiv, Lisbon, Ljubljana, Madrid, Mataró, Odesa de Montserrat, Paris, Porto, Riga, Terrassa and Utrecht. 

In May 2023, the Horizon project ended and the UserCentriCities network became part of User Needs First.