Everyone has a relationship with the state. It begins before birth, ends after death, and in between it runs through school, work, housing, family, health and retirement. It is made of services, letters, queues and forms, and it plays out across dozens of public bodies that rarely talk to one another. Taken as a whole, that relationship has a name: citizen experience.
The term borrows from customer experience, but the family resemblance is misleading. A customer can choose, and a customer can leave: market pressure works on their behalf even while they sleep. A citizen cannot pick their social security institute or their local council, and the audience of a public service is universal by definition — it includes people who struggle with digital tools, people who speak the language poorly, people with disabilities. I have written about this elsewhere: where users cannot choose, quality of experience stops being a commercial lever and becomes a matter of rights. Which is why citizen experience needs something customer experience never did: someone to represent it formally.
A function, not an aspiration
Inside a company, the customer's experience has an owner — someone with a title, a budget and targets. Inside the state, the citizen's experience is mostly a by-product: each public body looks after its own piece, when it looks after it at all, and nobody owns the whole. The results are familiar to everyone: services that work in isolation and fail in sequence, the same information requested ten times over, a different language for the same thing on every site.
My argument is that citizen experience should be institutionalised as a top-level, cross-government function: formal representation of the citizen's point of view, placed high enough to speak to every public body, with a mandate that covers the whole journey rather than stretches of it.
On placement, a reference point already exists. In 2025 the United States created a federal Chief Design Officer inside the National Design Studio, reporting directly to the White House Chief of Staff. That structure arrived with weak powers — it advises rather than prescribes — but on placement it gets the essential thing right: the experience point of view belongs beside the head of the executive, and a technical department is the wrong home for it. Japan supplies the other half of the picture — authority that cuts across government: its digital agency, headed by law by the Prime Minister, submits a consolidated budget request for the information systems of every national administration — a cross-government point of view with the means to be taken seriously. And France supplies presence on the ground: every ministry must appoint its own design lead. Placement at the top, authority across government, presence in every ministry: all three ingredients exist, just in different countries.
It starts with the law
The most counterintuitive part is where such a function should begin its work: before the services, inside the rules. A public service is the execution of a written rule. When the rule is drafted with no user in mind — layered requirements, exceptions upon exceptions, language for insiders — no designer downstream can ever make it truly simple. The best they can do is lay out the complexity neatly.
I have measured this first-hand. At INPS we simplified over 2,100 administrative texts, bringing them within reach of ten million more people. I am proud of that result, and it remains a downstream fix: we translated the complexity rather than preventing it. Legal design — drafting rules together with the people who will turn them into services — intervenes where the damage is born. Nor is this theory: New Zealand has been doing it since 2018 through its Better Rules programme, where lawyers and service designers write legislation so that it can be implemented as digital services, an approach the OECD and the G7 now point to as a model. A citizen experience function worthy of the name sits at that table: the one where the rules get written.
Down to the individual service
At the other end, the function has to reach all the way down to the individual service. The United Kingdom turned this into a mechanism: for a decade, no transactional central-government service could go live without passing an assessment against a service standard. The principle matters more than the tool: experience is defended service by service, against an explicit bar — or it remains a statement of intent.
What it is organised around: life events
An experience that spans the whole of government needs a shared map, and the right one already exists: life events. Being born, studying, working, moving, starting a family, falling ill, growing old — these are the citizen's units of meaning, and citizens could not care less how the state is organised internally.
That map is already a European standard. The Commission maintains a common vocabulary for describing public services — the Core Public Service Vocabulary (CPSV-AP) — which models them precisely in relation to the life events of people and businesses: having a child, starting school, looking for work, setting up a company. National catalogues in seventeen countries have adopted it, Italy among them, and it underpins the European Single Digital Gateway. Life events are also the yardstick of the eGovernment Benchmark: nine of them — from career to family, from studying to starting a business — assessed in 2025 across 98 services and more than fourteen thousand public websites. In Italy, Designers Italia has brought life events into the model for municipal websites through two taxonomies — "life events of people" and "life events of businesses" — the same two classes found in the European vocabulary. And in Denmark the national portal borger.dk has organised access by areas of life, rather than by agency, for years.
I have seen the logic work first-hand: the INPS per i Giovani project stopped promoting services one by one and spoke to an audience through its life moments — three million visitors, and registrations among young people up fifteen per cent. That was citizen experience logic applied to a single audience. The function I am proposing applies it to the country.
The destination: a single view of the citizen
The technical endpoint of all this has a precise name: the single citizen view. A state that knows you as one person, and that you tell things once. Here too, the precedents exist. The United Kingdom has run Tell Us Once since 2010: report a death once, and the state informs the tax office, social security, the licensing agency, the passport office, the local council. Estonia built its administration on the once-only principle, on top of a data-exchange infrastructure — X-Road — that other countries have since adopted. And the European Union has made it an obligation: the Single Digital Gateway regulation makes the once-only principle mandatory across borders, with the common technical system live since late 2023.
The single view is the material consequence of giving citizen experience representation, far more than an IT project. As long as each public body guards its own fragment of the citizen, integration remains a favour between agencies. Once a single function is accountable for the whole experience, integration becomes its job.
What it would look like
Let us put the design back together — by this point it assembles itself. The citizen experience function I have in mind has four characteristics, and none of them is an invention: each one already exists, road-tested, somewhere in the world.
It sits at the top. Beside the head of the executive, on the American placement model: the citizen's point of view cuts across every public body, and no ministry can represent it on the others' behalf. Cross-government reach must be built in, never negotiated project by project.
Its mandate is end-to-end. From the table where the rules are written — legal design — down to the individual service in production. Experience is decided along the entire chain: a mandate covering only one stretch of it produces patches, and never design.
Its powers are binding. Borrowed from the models that work: the French binding opinion on projects above a threshold, the British service standard with assessment before go-live, the Japanese lever on systems budgets. Placement alone is never enough — the American experience is showing as much.
It is organised around life events and aims at the single view. The grid is the European public service vocabulary; the horizon is the once-only principle: a state that knows you as one person.
And it answers publicly for one thing: experience indicators, measured and published, service by service and life event by life event. A function that represents the citizen should be judged the way anything that truly matters gets judged — by its effects.
And Italy?
Italy's own inventory is richer than most people assume. One PNRR measure is literally called "Citizen experience in public services". Designers Italia has brought life events into the model for municipal websites, and Italy appears among the countries that adopted the European services vocabulary. There is an agency that enforces binding rules on technical standards, interoperability and security, and a department of the Prime Minister's office that coordinates digital strategy. There is a single national registry and a set of enabling platforms. And there is a community of public-sector designers larger and better than it knows.
That is what we have. Whether it adds up to the design described here, I leave for the reader to judge.
Frequently asked questions
What is citizen experience?
The overall experience a person has with the state: every service, every communication and every life moment where the two meet, across every public body.
How does it differ from customer experience?
Citizens cannot choose their provider or walk away, and the audience of a public service is universal by definition — it includes the most vulnerable. Quality of experience is therefore a matter of rights rather than a commercial lever, and with no market pressure to rely on, it needs formal representation.
Where does improving it start?
With the rules themselves, through legal design: legislation written together with the people who will turn it into services. Then service by service, against explicit standards; organising provision around life events; and progressively building a single view of the citizen, along the lines of the European once-only principle.