S4E5: When Listening Leads: Lessons from Maryland’s Digital Transformation

Most of us only visit a government website when we really need something—unemployment benefits, a license renewal, or emergency aid. So when the experience is confusing, slow, or just broken, it doesn't just cost time. It quietly erodes something harder to rebuild: trust. 

Marcy Jacobs is Maryland's first chief digital experience officer and the driving force behind the Maryland Digital Service (MDDS)—a team that's spent the last two years redesigning how six million residents experience their state government. In this episode, Marcy digs into what human-centered design actually looks like inside a bureaucracy: the discovery sprints that change everything an agency thought it knew, the veteran who wouldn't click a link because he didn't have a trust fund, and why making it easier to file for unemployment might be one of the most important things the government can do right now. 

This one is for the builders, the public servants, and anyone who's ever rage-clicked a website and wondered if anyone noticed. 

Marcy Jacobs is the State of Maryland’s chief digital experience officer. She was previously the executive director of digital service at the Department of Veterans Affairs and had served over four years with the U.S. Digital Service. She was also an associate partner at McKinsey & Company.  

More Links and Information  

 Check out more Fors Marsh Media  

 Connect or partner with Fors Marsh  

 Explore Maryland Digital Service 

 Dive into the Maryland Digital Playbook and MDDS Impact Report 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Think about the last time you had to deal with a government website. Maybe you were filing for unemployment, renewing a license, trying to figure out if you qualified for a benefit, and clicking through five different pages that all seem to say something slightly different. That experience, confusing, slow, opaque, doesn't just cost you time. It costs something harder to measure. Trust. When a government can't tell its story clearly online, when the application is broken, when the language reads like it was written for a lawyer, not a person, something quietly shifts. You start to wonder, does this institution actually understand me? In January 2024, Maryland Governor Wes Moore created the Maryland Digital Service, a team inside state government with one mission: to make it actually feel like the government was on your side.

SPEAKER_03 0:59

Governor Wes Moore, alongside his IT secretary, announced four new technology initiatives focused on artificial intelligence, a new digital services team, a digital accessibility policy, and a cybersecurity partnership with the Maryland Army National Guard.

SPEAKER_04 1:15

This technology is already here. The only question is whether we are going to be reactive or proactive in this moment. Our administration will always choose to lead.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

In just over two years, that team, now more than 50 people, has redesigned Maryland.gov, rebuilt how the state handles unemployment insurance online, helped veterans find benefits they didn't even know existed, and trained hundreds of state employees to write in plain language. The Digital Services' latest impact report tells the numbers. A 40% reduction in page count, and a 15% increase in task completion rates, so people like you and me can spend less time tangled up on websites and more time with our friends and family. And the real story isn't the numbers. It's what happens when you design a government service around the person using it instead of the agency delivering it. This is Empathy Affect, the Force Marsh Media podcast that explores the human side of government. I'm Melissa Szyzinski, and today I'm joined by Marcy Jacobs, Maryland's first ever Chief Digital Experience Officer, former Executive Director of Digital Service at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the person leading the evolution of how six million Marylanders experience their government. We'll get into what it means to actually build with people instead of for them, what it looks like when research changes everything your agency thought it knew, and what's coming next in Maryland's digital future. This one's for whoever's rage-clicked a government website and wondered if anyone on the other side is paying attention. Marcy, I'm so thrilled to have you on Empathy Affect today. It's an honor to have Maryland's first chief digital experience officer on the show. So thank you for taking the time to talk about some of the progress that you and your team have been making for Marylanders out there. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, so I think that it'd be great to start by looking at the origins of Maryland Digital Service. It was established in January 2024. So it's been just over a couple of years since its launch. So when you look back at what Maryland's digital services were before MDDS, what wasn't working for residents and what problem were you really trying to solve?

SPEAKER_02 3:47

I mean, I think fundamentally we weren't asking that question of what is working or not working for residents. Historically, we had just been building things. We'd been building applications, building websites, and the expertise within the agencies to develop human-centered modern software really wasn't there. So we weren't thinking about how do we design elegant, secure, efficient services that improve the way Marylanders interact with government. It was, I think, much more focused on how are we compliant, how are we meeting legislative mandates, and certainly a focus on agency mission. But I think that that lack of internal technical talent has made us over-reliant on vendors to help drive some of that strategy. And there's definitely a gap in the services that we were delivering.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

As Governor Moore established Maryland Digital Service, Marcy stepped in to lead and help solve these problems. She had spent 20 years in and out of the federal government before coming to Maryland. And what surprised her most was how familiar the problems felt.

SPEAKER_02 5:00

I mean, honestly, largely all the same problems. It's a lot of how do we align the money that we're spending to truly solve the problems that are going to help us move the needle, that are going to help make things easier, that are going to help agencies deliver on their mission. So the scale has changed, I would say, from federal to state, but the breadth of services within a state is really a large landscape to work on.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Yeah. Especially looking at the most recent uh digital service impact report that your office released, there were some very big notable wins, also very sprawling, as you were just mentioning, everything from redesigning Maryland.gov to revamping all sorts of websites and building internal workforce capacity. So I want to get down to what this actually looks like for Maryland residents. If I'm a Marylander, what does this transformation actually feel like? What's easier for me or faster or less frustrating today? Show us how the sausage is made. What helped you get there?

SPEAKER_02 6:07

I would say we are still very much in the journey. We have had wonderful partners with agencies and been able to work with them. But I would say that the pressure from the Department of Justice, ADA Title II, the new accessibility guidelines that go into effect in just shy of a month, has been a great opportunity to have conversations with agencies about how to make their services, websites, systems more accessible for their audiences. And that has opened the door to talking about plain language and has opened the door to talking about language access and has opened the door to talking about is this content even still valuable? And how do we how do we really make sure that we aren't just publishing things that we have, but we're aligning that with who's coming to your website? What are they coming to find out? What are they calling you about? What is confusing when you send them a letter and they they don't know what to do about a fraud warning? So they call the contact center. How do we use all of that information to improve all the different steps in a user's journey? That's just a very, I think, different perspective than what we have taken previously. And the the partnership with agencies and really enabling them to be able to ask these questions and do this work is really the big picture goal. I hope that when we work with an agency that we are empowering them to, they can always come back to us if they need us again, but I hope that they don't need us in as load-bearing of a way going forward and that they start to really upskill and take different approaches for their efforts.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

You were mentioning before that Maryland Digital Service prioritizes being human-centered, um, starting with people, not the technology. So while your impact report has a lot of examples, can you walk us through maybe a real example of a service that's been improved and what's different for someone using it? And what feedbacks and stories have you been hearing from users? Sure.

SPEAKER_02 8:13

Yeah, I can I can give you two different examples. One is with the Department of Veterans and Military Families, and they have a trust fund program that provides critical aid to veterans who are in immediate need. They need financial support for rent assistance or utilities or food. That grant program was both hard for veterans to find and understand, but also very hard for the agency to administer. And where they came to us saying we need a back-end technology system to improve this program. And we said, maybe, but can we get a little bit more information? Can we do a quick discovery sprint with you to understand truly what is happening end to end, front stage with the veterans, backstage with the staff who need to process all these applications? And we learned a ton in a two-week sprint with a half a person having the conversations to really understand where is the friction? Where are people getting stuck? We heard from some veterans, I why would I ever click on that link? I don't have a trust fund. Even just the language of what it was called was becoming a barrier to people using a critical benefit. But then what we learned in terms of how the data gets submitted, the process to evaluate the applications, all of those steps were so much more than just implement a new back-end system, which they did need to do. But just doing that would not have solved the pain points that they were really trying to address. So in a very short period of time, we were able to work with the agency, talk to users, talk with staff, redesign the process, redesign the website content, make it much more understandable in plain language, and then implement a system that better supported a much more streamlined, less burdensome process so that they could get grants out much more quickly. So that's one example. Another example is with the unemployment website. And initially the Department of Labor asked for some some help just to make the website content easier to improve that part of their site. They have a very large site. We had two people on the team, design and content experts, who were supporting labor in in rewriting, understanding what where applicants were getting confused, what were the sticking points, and helping to rewrite and restructure that information. And I think what is interesting about this example is the way the agency thought about it. The website was one team, the system, the unemployment portal was another team, the workforce requirement was another team. People applying for unemployment have no idea and and don't care and shouldn't need to care. So it started with working on the website and it evolved into how do we think about the journey of applying for and managing your benefit? And that touched a lot of different things. And we went as far as we could down the path of even changing some of the language in the system. And now part of that team has now moved into labor to work on that as their primary focus because the there's more work to be done. And any type of system like this needs continuous feedback, continuous improvement to to keep it relevant, to keep it current, and to keep reacting based on what we are learning and and being responsive. And if I can just say one more thing about unemployment, I think when you are when you are unemployed, your headspace, mental load, emotional state is you are in a sense of stress. That is a hard time to be processing lots of bureaucratic, not easy to understand information. So really making sure that we that the language was understandable, that it was structured in a way that set people up for success. That is one example of really using user feedback to inform how do we approach the solution, as opposed to coming in and saying, this is the answer, let's just build this out. And there have been a number of engagements with agencies where research with users and research with agency staff has truly pivoted how we have engaged and their approach to what they thought was the most important thing is actually not what is tripping people up. And they could have spent a huge amount of time and money doing something that they thought was was a blocker, but based on the research was really not the problem. And they were able to pivot and solve something that was much more impactful.

SPEAKER_01 12:56

Yeah. As you were talking there, things like this can make or break whether people feel supported by their government or not.

SPEAKER_02 13:03

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

You know, the people are there, but how people experience and interact with their government, that's just as important. So um getting into the the whole feedback mechanism, as you iterate and look to continuously build out tools or or websites, how do you gather user feedback instead of doing just that one and done approach? Show us how you iterate. It looks like a lot of things.

SPEAKER_02 13:31

And all of this is is kind of we are building the plane and flying the plane, as we like to say. So we have not had a robust CX measurement program. We are putting that in place right now. We have sort of gotten data from wherever data lives. So we have partnered with constituent services to see what feedback they are hearing from people and how does that help us understand where there are problems? We use Google Analytics, we have heat mapping through Cloudflare. We're stitching together lots of different data sources, but we also talk with agencies about what are the calls that people are calling your call center about or emailing you about? What are the mistakes that they are making when they submit an application? How do we use that data to say there's obviously something really confusing here if 90% of applications get this piece wrong? How do we use data from wherever it lives to use that to inform how we continually improve? We just launched Maryland.gov. We're doing a lot of reviewing from heat map and analytics of where are people actually going? And what do we, what did we think was going to make sense that we tested and had some small feedback? Now we have a much larger sample size, and that is driving some additional updates, iterations, reprioritizing because there are things that are important that we want people to find that they are struggling with. So that is a that is not a we launched the site and now we're done and we can just ignore it. We launched the site and now we have a team that continually looks at how do we improve the site.

SPEAKER_01 15:03

Yeah. Sometimes I think with feedback, we think like forms or stuff like that. So it's it's cool to see the heat mapping, seeing where people are actually struggling. Because sometimes it's, you know, when I see a website and feel like it's broken, I just want to bounce. I don't even want to, you know, point out what's wrong. And we look at that.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

We look at bounce rates, we look at rage clicking, we look at where are people kind of moving their mouse around, are they clicking on something and then clicking back because they the label did not point them in the right direction and they didn't find what they thought they were going to find?

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Yeah. Since human-centered design is so important to your approach and how you view this work, when you think about success beyond the impact report and beyond the metrics, what tells you that human-centered design is becoming part of how government operates and not just something that your team is driving?

SPEAKER_02 15:59

My team, I think, is different from other digital service teams in that we are responsible for oversight of our major IT portfolio. And that is about 60 projects. And we have seen the lack of human-centered design as a real issue in the success of some of those projects. So part of our reforms to oversight is to require UX leadership, technical leadership, and product leadership on all of those projects. And we are having very interesting conversations with agencies who, in some cases, are initially very skeptical. Why do I need design? It's a COTS product. And then they see the value of having someone who is not there to, I think design is such a loaded term. They're not there to change the color from blue to yellow, but they're there to make sure that a person who is trying to do a thing is able to do what they need to do in the system, that the system is structured and optimized for the human behavior that we are trying to support. The more we get requests for design, is how I see some of this success. We're starting to get agencies asking us for our position description so that they can hire designers. And it absolutely should not be something where one team or my team is managing human-centered design across the whole state. It has to be where the programs sit, it has to be part of how we think about the letters that we send, the call center scripts. It's it's part of the overall service. So we're trying to shift from projects, technology projects, to technology is the backbone of service delivery. And you can't do service delivery without bringing the user research and human center design lens.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

Yeah. So your office is just a couple of years old. I understand that you've grown a ton from a team of less than 10 people to now over 50. You've had a lot of momentum in this latest impact report. But what are you most proud of so far? You're such an impactful leader in this space. What has been, you know, your pride and joy in this work?

SPEAKER_02 18:15

I have been in meetings recently where I look across the team that we have put together. And it is an incredibly diverse group of incredibly talented and compassionate people who want to make Maryland services better. And that is inspiring to me and what I am honestly most excited about because none of this happens if you don't have the right people, if you aren't partnering with agencies in meaningful ways, if you aren't building trust, if you aren't technically incredible. And I feel so lucky to have a leadership team and the expanded team of just dedicated civil servants who who really feel committed to what we are doing and they bring their strengths every day.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

Yeah. I feel like the people who our our guests work with are always, you know, their highlight. They love shouting them out. And it's great that you also have the leadership buy-in, that, you know, um, having that support from the top down is really amazing. I know we talked a little bit about access and accessibility and the laws around that, but equity and access have been big pillars for your approach. So just to get into that a little bit more, how are you making sure that, you know, these improvements or these pillars that you're focusing on reach people who maybe have historically had the hardest time accessing government services? Where is that coming to life?

SPEAKER_02 19:47

We are expanding the research that we do and offering that as a service to agencies and really thinking very holistically about who we are serving and how do we make sure that both our design teams are inclusive of the people that we serve and the participants in research are inclusive of all sorts of populations. Recruiting is challenging and it should be challenging, but we want to make sure that we are that we are really talking to the groups that are going to be most impacted by what we are putting out. And we learn something every time we have a research session. We learn about new barriers, new challenges that need to be part of our approach and need to be part of how we are thinking about our design process.

SPEAKER_01 20:35

Yeah. Love that you spotlighted that. As, you know, we look at the way digital services have evolved, people are building on them in their own unique ways, private sector, public sector. And especially since you come from both that federal background, you're not state, you've been in the private sector. Are there any companies or other government agencies or states that you've looked up to or have adopted ideas from in your approach?

SPEAKER_02 21:05

I have amazing collaborators and friends at many other states who have been wonderful partners. I think it what I one difference that I see at the state level from the federal level is it feels like we are all there's you know, 50 plus of us working on the same problems. And there are some groups that have formed around people who are thinking about design systems and states that are working on identity, and and we have really meaningful, wonderful conversations, all at different points of maturity. I joined a meeting that was hosted by Georgetown with the digital service leads from multiple states, and I was very much the new kid and asked in that first meeting, what do you wish you knew when you started? and got amazing guidance. So there's a lot of both operational type of support, like how do you think about your your mandate and your organization and then very tactical support like have you negotiated a contract with this vendor and how did you approach it and what did you get and I reached out to the network actually yesterday saying I am hitting a wall with I can't get my account rep from a certain software company to respond. Does anybody have someone who who I can talk to and got immediate responses. So there is wonderful partnership and it it feels very much if a state has done something that they are proud of, they are in most cases very willing to say use what we did. In some cases it's open source code in other cases it's like here's all the thinking that got us to this decision. So that has been a a wonderful help and we are paying that back as much as we can as well.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

Yeah I love that there's that ability to obviously every state is very different, but you all encounter a lot of the same problem. So sharing what's working what's not um I it's really nice to hear that there is that kind of collaboration. We've talked a lot about Maryland so far, but I want to look ahead. What should Marylanders start to notice over the next year? What's coming up next? What might feel meaningfully different tease what's ahead.

SPEAKER_02 23:19

I think that it will be lots of small things that hopefully people don't have the the giant whiplash of like everything's different. But the feeling of that was easier or engaging with the state to get my permit renewed or to get my occupational license was a faster process. And it was very easy and transparent for me to be able to see what my status was or I didn't get another new username and password for this system. I could use one username and password to access multiple things. So there are there are efforts that we are undertaking around how do we centralize things that make sense to centralize and kind of reduce some of the fragmentation of every application as its own thing. And really trying to take some of the foundational work that we've done with accessibility and language access and Drupal and start to roll that out in much more scalable ways so that that impact can be felt more broadly. The websites are great and there are many of them that we are working on. And that should help with the learn about phase, but the apply for phase is still also very difficult in the tracking phase and the managing phase of whether it's a benefit or a permit or whatever it is. And we are kind of moving our way across that journey and partnering with agencies for different phases of the life cycle.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

Yeah I like how you framed it as a lot of little things too because you know Rome, it wasn't built in a day you're learning from your users, you're working with the different agencies that you're delivering for so it's a lot of conversations and it's a lot of time to actually make it work for people. So I appreciate that that perspective and that approach we've talked a lot today about how you know getting a digital experience right for people can, you know, make or break their trust in their government agencies and institutions. So I want to just hear from you today after this this conversation how does getting that experience right for people change how they feel about their government and not just how they interact with it?

SPEAKER_02 25:34

I saw this a lot when I was at Department of Veterans Affairs and we measured the trust score. And that was something that was really kind of one of our North stars was when we are working on an application, are we making it easier for veterans to engage? Does that impact the way they think about both the VA but also federal government more broadly and we saw a huge impact from user-centered well-designed services healthcare application, disability claims really having a material effect on how veterans thought about the services that they were getting and their overall trust. And I think that that same playbook is what we are working to do in Maryland. The easier it is for someone to file for unemployment, the the more respected they feel the more they feel like I pay into this system and I applied for a thing and it worked and I feel better about my state services. There are many, many state services that we are working with agencies and agencies are working on to improve that experience so that overall that trust level starts to increase.

SPEAKER_01 26:43

Yeah. I know that the VA I think had an 80% trust from veterans and it's been you know jumping up in years. And it it comes from a lot of that intention making sure that you know the VA is showing up for veterans in the right way. So it's interesting seeing how you know you're still thinking of that and you know are trying to apply that kind of vision to Maryland as well. Marcy, is there anything else we're missing today that you wanted to share? That we're hiring because we are always hiring.

SPEAKER_02 27:16

No, it is it's wonderful it's wonderful to talk with you. It's wonderful to be able to to brag about my team and the wonderful accomplishments that they've been able to deliver and just the great partnerships that we've had with so many state agencies who have really opened their arms and said I know you guys are new here but I I am ready to try some things and I'm willing to work with you. And it's just been a great journey so far. So I'm very excited to see what comes next.

SPEAKER_01 27:43

Us as well and it's great to see that you're hiring that that growth of your team shows the buy-in shows that you're working and working for you know the folks in the state of Maryland who are working as uh civil servants but for the people as well so Marcy thank you so much again for joining us it's been really exciting to hear about the progress so far and also what's ahead for for Marylanders and to see what they can start to feel and experience as this work continues. Thank you so much for having me. This was great what strikes me most about this conversation is something Marcy said almost in passing that when it was easy to file a disability claim or apply for healthcare through the VA, veterans' trust in the whole institution went up not because the agency changed its policy, not because it made bigger promises, just because the experience said, we see you and we made this for you. That's the power of design. That's the quiet power of empathy. If you want to dig into the numbers and the work yourself, you can find Maryland Digital Services latest impact report in the show notes. And if you're a designer, technologist or someone who cares about how institutions show up for people, Maryland Digital Service is hiring. Marcy made sure we didn't let that go unmentioned. If this episode resonated with you make sure to share the show with someone who's fighting the same fight inside governments, companies, cities, or schools. The work of making systems actually human is happening everywhere and the people doing it deserve to find each other. Subscribe to EmpathyAffect wherever you listen and make sure to leave a review if you want to give us some extra love. It all genuinely helps. In the meantime I hope you'll join us next time.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Thanks y'all Empathy Effect is a product of Forrest Marsh. You can reach us at Forzmarshmedia at forzmarsh.com with any feedback, questions or inquiries. If you want to know more about today's guest, are interested in participating with Forrest Marsh or becoming part of our community, check out our show notes for more information