An ‘interface first’ bureaucracy: interface design, universal credit and the digital welfare state

The front-line of the welfare state is increasingly not a letter, phone call or face-to-face visit, but an online user-interface. This ‘interface first’ bureaucracy is a fundamental reshaping of social security administration, but the design and operation of these interfaces is poorly understood. Drawing on interview data from senior civil servants, welfare benefits advisors and claimants on the UK's flagship Universal Credit working-age benefit, this paper is a detailed analysis of the role played by interfaces in the modern welfare state. Providing examples from across the Universal Credit system, it sets out a five-fold typology of user-interface design elements in the social security context: (i) structuring data input, (ii) interaction architecture, (iii) operative controls, (iv) prompting and priming, and (v) integrations. The paper concludes by considering the implications of an ‘interface first’ welfare bureaucracy for future research.