“Is the user able to achieve his goal?”: According to Joyce Lee, a former Apple designer, the usability of a service is the answer to this question. A sort of “ease to use” index. This is exactly the empathy experiment put in place to put the users at the center of Cloudify NoiPA's design: we have put ourselves in the users’ shoes and designed interfaces, processes and solutions able to empower them with the tools to perform their work effectively and swiftly. Such an approach has required the adoption of a new strategic vision for Public Administration: that of co-design, a modus operandi based on the involvement of people, on collaboration and on the sharing of skills.

The activities have been therefore focused mainly on the needs of the PA users and on their experiences, aiming to obtain ideas and insights on the interfaces to be created for Cloudify. The top-down approach, in which innovations are coercively imposed from the top, has been definitively abandoned, embracing the bottom-up culture. Such a culture enhances the skills and work of the most important asset of any public body: the people. While we often talk about team building, Cloudify NoiPA has taken a step further focusing on network building: the creation of a network of people and of skills able to interact in a synchronized and effective way.

Thanks to this working method, the interfaces design process has been sometimes characterized by a sort of “learning by doing” experience. In such occasions, the workflow has been continuously integrated by suggestions and indications exchanged between the workgroups in a horizontal and no longer hierarchical way.

Indeed, innovating the human resources management of the PA through Cloudify was not considered a purely creative action, but the outcome of a planned and intense project of real change. According to this new concept, users are at the heart of the innovation process right from the beginning. They have indeed the opportunity to participate directly in all the development phases of the system, helping to channel their experiences in the final outputs of the program and contributing this way concretely to the development of the services they will use. The user stories planned and monitored in real time by the end users in the final interfaces will therefore be the result of a collective design process.

One of the concrete results of this approach is, for example, the emphasis given to the sharing of the program’s progresses on Cloudify NoiPA’s portal. The change of approach starts from the language used. In the information architecture summit held in Bologna last November, Yvonne Bindi, an information architect and web writer, focused on the theme of words and more generally of the language used in the design process. "Words are interfaces", she said, "a meeting point between people and the experiences they want to live. Working on language is an act of design ". The architecture of a system is indeed above all the architecture of the relations between its users. The words are the primary tool available to shape the communication flow. To get down to basics, in this perspective, the program portal has put emphasis on articles and contents related the progress of Cloudify NoiPA’s activities; the document section has followed an organization by tag, facilitating the search for documents; dialogue spaces, such as the "Proposals and Suggestions" section have been set up, allowing the users to provide useful ideas for the development of the services.

Such communication choices aim at fueling the user centricity also through knowledge and transparency. Words and architecture act as design labs in which designers, developers, users and stakeholders are involved at the same level.