This is just the kind of sweeping statement about consumer preferences that harms organisations' ability to serve people well in all their diversity. https://twitter.com/SamCoatesSky/status/1273292902257569795

There are groups of consumers for whom - absolutely - an app is incredibly intimidating or simply inaccessible: many older people, those who are digitally excluded, or don't have a smart phone.

But that is not news. It was well known even when they started building an app.

There are also groups of consumers for whom a cold call from the authorities is incredibly intimidating. People who've been the victim of scams or fraud. People with serious mental health problems. People with experience of unfair treatment by immigration officials or police.

Lots of people with mental health problems struggle with opening the post or making phone calls, as @mmhpi work has shown. But others prefer the phone.

If you want to serve all your customers, you have to stop building products or services that meet the needs of the "average" person. You have to design a range of tools that enable different people, with different abilities and preferences, to get what they need.

This is even more important for government, which has to serve all of the people, unlike the private sector.

An app was never going to work for everyone. But a call centre doesn't work for everyone either.

I just wish that, when conceiving Test and Trace, government had, from the start, done some design thinking, and built their service to meet the needs of a diverse population.

When you build systems for human beings, you have to accept that they are human beings, with all the faults and foibles that entails.