User-centered policy design: challenges and opportunities of its application for social policy in Canada

Access to policy development is typically limited and exclusive, seldom including stakeholder groups representing marginalized individuals. The voices of end-users, however, are essential to creating effective, accurate, and targeted policies and services that truly consider the perspectives of those who are the most impacted. User-centered design (UCD) is considered by scholars and practitioners to be a potential solution to this issue. Central to this is the idea that individuals directly impacted by government policies are actively involved in identifying policy solutions. Practical application of UCD, however, yielded mixed results with the recent literature noting that marginalized populations continue to be excluded from the opportunity to participate or their perspective are excluded as being not representative of general population. This paper examines UCD potential to address existing service delivery challenges within the child welfare system in Ontario, Canada. It offers important insights on benefits and limitations on UCD’s potential for policy development and design involving marginalized populations. We conclude that recruitment of representatives from marginalized groups on its own is not sufficient to develop fully implementable policy solution(s). Nevertheless, voices of marginalized individuals are crucial for advancing our understanding why they are disproportionately impacted by the “color-blind” public policies.