Reducing friction in public-sector journeys

A woman renewing her trade licence in a Gulf free zone recently told us she had uploaded the same Emirates ID copy four times in one afternoon — once for the licence portal, once for the bank's KYC refresh, once for a municipality form, and once again because the third upload "timed out." Nothing was broken, exactly. Every system worked as designed. That is precisely the problem: government friction is rarely a bug. It is the accumulated residue of forms, sign-offs and departmental boundaries that made sense to whoever built them, one at a time, over twenty years.

Friction in a public-sector journey is any point where the effort a citizen must expend exceeds the value they get in return — and it functions as a regressive tax, because the people with the least time, literacy or bandwidth pay it most. The fix is not another app. It is treating friction as a line item to be measured, budgeted, and cut, the same discipline a finance team applies to cost. That reframing — from "improve the experience" to "audit the burden" — is the argument of this piece, and it borrows its sharpest tool from behavioural economics rather than from IT.

What actually counts as friction in a citizen journey?

Friction is any gap between what a task requires and what it should require. Not all of it is bad. Some friction — a cooling-off period before a large benefit claim, a second signature on a high-value transaction — is deliberate and protective. The economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein drew this line precisely in behavioural economics: useful friction slows people down for their own good, while sludge — the term Sunstein used in his 2021 book Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done (MIT Press) — is friction that serves the institution, not the citizen. A form that requires an in-person visit to submit a document the government already holds is sludge. A confirmation step before permanently deleting a pension record is not.

The practical test is simple: ask who benefits from the extra step. If the answer is "the department's existing process" rather than "the citizen's interest," it is sludge, and it should be the first thing removed.

Why does friction in government cost more than friction in a private company?

A retail customer who finds checkout annoying can abandon the cart and buy from a competitor down the road. A citizen renewing a residency permit, applying for a subsidy, or registering a birth has nowhere else to go. There is no competitive exit valve to punish a clunky government journey — which means friction that would kill a private-sector conversion rate simply sits there, absorbed silently by millions of people, year after year.

The public administration scholars Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan gave this phenomenon a name in their 2018 book Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means (Russell Sage Foundation): they classified the costs citizens absorb into learning costs (finding out a service exists and how it works), compliance costs (gathering documents, filling forms, meeting deadlines), and psychological costs (the stress, stigma or loss of dignity involved in asking for help). Their research showed these burdens fall hardest on people who can least afford the time or emotional toll — exactly the citizens public services exist to serve. That is the moral case for treating friction reduction as core public-sector delivery, not a digital nice-to-have.

Every unnecessary step in a government process is a small, silent tax collected disproportionately from people who already have the least to give.

Where does friction actually hide in public-sector journeys?

Friction rarely announces itself. It hides in the seams between departments, systems and legal mandates that were never designed to talk to each other. In our work mapping citizen journeys, the same patterns turn up again and again:

• Repeated data entry — the same document or identity proof requested by multiple agencies that could share a single verified record.
• Channel mismatch — a digital application that still requires a wet signature or an in-person counter visit to complete.
• Silent status — no confirmation, tracking number, or estimated timeline after submission, leaving citizens to call a hotline out of anxiety rather than need.
• Eligibility ambiguity — rules written in legal language that citizens must interpret themselves before they can even start.
• Dead-end escalation — no clear path when something goes wrong, forcing citizens to restart a process rather than correct it.
• Accessibility gaps — forms and portals that assume fluent literacy, reliable broadband, and a smartphone, excluding exactly the citizens most dependent on the service.

Each of these is a moment of truth in the language of customer experience — a point where trust in the institution is won or lost. In government, that trust compounds: a citizen who is failed by the licensing authority arrives at the tax authority already braced for a fight.

How do you find friction before citizens complain about it?

By the time complaints arrive, the damage to trust is already done — and complaints only capture people who had the energy to complain. The quieter, larger group simply disengages, misses the benefit they were entitled to, or pays a fixer to navigate the system for them. Finding friction proactively means going looking for it.

Two methods do the heaviest lifting. Mystery shopping a public service — sending trained assessors through the actual application, renewal or complaint journey exactly as a citizen would experience it — surfaces the sludge that internal staff have stopped noticing because they never queue at their own counter. Service blueprinting takes the same journey and lays it against the backstage: which department owns each step, which system it touches, and where handoffs create delay. Mapping the journey end to end, rather than department by department, is usually the moment a friction audit becomes uncomfortable — because it makes visible how many separate teams a single citizen task actually crosses.

How do you remove friction without waiting for a five-year IT programme?

Most public-sector friction gets blamed on legacy technology, which becomes a convenient excuse to defer action until the next system upgrade. In practice, a large share of friction is procedural, not technical, and can be removed with policy and process changes long before any platform is replaced. A practical sequence:

1. Map the journey as citizens actually live it, not as departments organise it — one continuous line from "I need X" to "I have X," crossing every agency involved.
2. Score each step for effort, time and emotional cost, and flag which steps exist for the citizen's benefit versus the institution's convenience.
3. Apply the once-only test to every data request: has the government already collected this information elsewhere? If yes, the citizen should never be asked again.
4. Kill or merge steps that fail the once-only test or serve no protective purpose — starting with the highest-volume journeys, where the multiplier effect is largest.
5. Redesign what remains using plain language, sensible defaults, and a single channel end to end, rather than forcing a switch between digital and physical.
6. Pilot with real citizens, including those with low digital literacy or limited connectivity, before scaling — the group most likely to reveal remaining sludge.
7. Publish a service standard — a stated time-to-completion and escalation path — so citizens and staff both know what "done well" looks like.

Step three deserves emphasis. The "once-only principle" — the idea that a government should never ask a citizen for information it already holds — is not a slogan; it is an operating standard. Estonia's X-Road data-exchange layer, the backbone of its digital government since the early 2000s, was built explicitly around this principle, allowing agencies to pull a citizen's verified data rather than re-collect it. The lesson for any government, regardless of its digital maturity, is architectural before it is technological: decide which agency owns which fact, and stop every other agency from asking for it again.

What does behavioural economics change about how you redesign a citizen journey?

Behavioural economics matters here because most public-sector friction is not solved by removing a step — it is solved by changing the default around it. The UK's Behavioural Insights Team set out its EAST framework — make it Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely — in a 2014 publication of the same name, and demonstrated its power with a now widely cited trial: adding a simple social-proof line to tax reminder letters ("nine out of ten people in your local area pay their tax on time") measurably improved on-time payment, without changing the underlying process at all. Nothing about the tax obligation changed. The framing of the choice did.

Two levers apply directly to citizen journeys. Defaults exploit the well-documented tendency of people to stick with whatever option requires no action — auto-enrolling eligible citizens into a benefit, rather than requiring an application, dramatically raises take-up because it removes the burden of opting in. Loss aversion, the finding from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's prospect theory that losses loom larger than equivalent gains, explains why a warning phrased as "you will lose your subsidy if you don't renew by [date]" prompts faster action than "renew to keep receiving your subsidy" — same fact, different weight. Neither change requires new infrastructure. Both require someone in the process-design room who understands how citizens actually decide, which is exactly the gap a behavioural economics lens is built to close.

What does "friction removed" actually look like in practice?

Three reference points are worth holding onto, because they show the range of what is achievable at very different levels of digital maturity. Estonia's once-only principle, described above, shows what is possible when interoperability is treated as core infrastructure rather than an add-on. The UK's Government Digital Service has published its Government Design Principles since 2012, anchored on "start with user needs, not government needs" — a discipline that has visibly shaped GOV.UK's plain-language forms and its refusal to ask for information twice within a single transaction. And the Behavioural Insights Team's tax-letter trial shows that even a single sentence, tested rigorously, can move behaviour at national scale without a rebuild of anything.

None of these examples required a single mega-platform. They required a government willing to treat the citizen's time as a real cost, and a discipline for testing what actually reduces it rather than assuming a new portal will.

How do you know friction is actually going down?

Measurement has to move beyond service-level uptime and processing-time averages, which tell you the system is fast but not whether it is easy. Customer Effort Score — asking citizens how much effort a specific task required — is a closer proxy for friction than satisfaction scores, because it isolates the thing you are trying to fix rather than the general mood of the interaction. Pair it with three harder indicators: completion rate (what share of people who start a process finish it without abandoning), repeat-contact rate (how often citizens have to call or visit again for the same issue), and take-up rate among the eligible population, which exposes the citizens who never even attempted the journey. A government running its CX maturity against these markers, alongside structured citizen feedback collection, will find friction long before it shows up as a political headline.

• Track effort, not just satisfaction — CES exposes the step that hurts, CSAT only tells you the mood afterward.
• Segment by digital confidence — an average completion rate hides the citizens being left behind.
• Re-run mystery shopping quarterly on top-volume journeys, because fixes decay as staff turnover and process drift creep back in.
• Publish the numbers internally by department — visibility is what turns a friction audit into an incentive.

Where this leaves public-sector leaders

The instinct in government modernisation is almost always to build something new — a portal, an app, a chatbot. The harder, cheaper, and more honest work is subtractive: finding the step that never needed to exist and removing it, finding the document the state already holds and refusing to ask for it twice, finding the default that punishes inaction and flipping it toward the citizen's interest. None of that requires a procurement cycle. It requires a government willing to measure its own bureaucracy the way it measures everything else it takes seriously.

Treat every citizen journey as a service worth designing on purpose, not one that simply accumulated. Renascence works with public institutions across the region on exactly this kind of service design and public-sector experience transformation — mapping the real journey, finding the sludge, and rebuilding it around the citizens it was meant to serve. The institutions that get this right will not be the ones with the newest app. They will be the ones citizens stop noticing at all, because the process finally got out of their way.