On a recent trip to the States, I spent forty-five minutes standing in a customs queue at JFK. It was less a security screening than an exercise in stagnation: a line advancing at a snail's pace, overseen by ICE agents in bulletproof vests who seemed entirely held hostage by their own inability to operate the customs terminals in front of them. This frustration was only amplified by the view to my left, where a separate, unhindered lane flowed freely and travellers breezed through without a care in the world, courtesy of an app called CLEAR, which sells precisely one product: the right not to wait.
Somewhere beneath the irritation of watching an elite few buy their way out of the very bureaucratic hell the rest of us were trapped in, my Experience Design brain was already turning cogs (occupational hazard): you can't stand in a queue without seeing it as an experience somebody designed, or failed to. And this queue, for all its physicality, was digital to its core. The terminals defeating those agents were government software, and the lane to my left was a private app, quietly profiting from the difference. It was that difference that started nagging at me, somewhere around minute thirty. Both pieces of software were built in the same country, the US, the country that wrote the UX and CX handbook, and yet only one of them worked. Here was the American state in miniature: a broken queue, and a better one beside it that you had to pay for.
And the queue is no outlier. Venture into almost any US government service online, and you'll find something that looks and feels like a phishing site: so dated, so clumsy, that the genuine article is hard to tell from the scam impersonating it, from the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division to the equally dated Texas Department of Motor Vehicles.
So why is this?
The reason, most people believe, is neglect. Neglect in the form of slow government, poor procurement, and a lack of design talent. This is a comforting diagnosis for people like me operating in the digital experience space, because it implies the cure is us: hire better designers, and that state-owned app will eventually resemble Airbnb.
But standing in that queue, the neglect story stopped making sense. The lane to my left wasn't evidence that someone had forgotten about this queue; it was evidence that someone had found a way to charge for it. CLEAR is not a workaround for a broken system. CLEAR is a business built on top of one, charging rent on a failure it has no interest in seeing fixed. Perhaps you need to be a foreigner to find this remarkable. To Americans, it appears to be simply the water they swim in, but to a New Zealander looking in from the outside the pattern is startling, and it runs right through American life: 'Skip' will deal with the DMV for you, 'TurboTax' will navigate the tax code for you, each for a fee. Call it 'queue-jumping as a service', an entire industry that depends on the free lane staying exactly as miserable as it is.
If that sounds cynical, consider this little insight I recently discovered. In 2024 the IRS, America's answer to Inland Revenue, built its own free tax-filing service 'Direct File', staffed by exactly the design talent the government usually can't attract (Silicon Valley designers), and taxpayers loved it. But in November 2025 it was killed, not because it failed but because it worked: Intuit, the maker of the paid-for tax app 'TurboTax', had lobbied against it since its inception, which ultimately resulted in Trump’s new US Treasury Secretary delivering its eulogy in one sentence: "the private sector can do a better job." And he's right, in a way, but not the way he intend.
There's an obvious rebuttal forming here, and it goes something like this: America is enormous. Three hundred and forty million people, fifty states, endless jurisdictional seams. Of course its public services creak and it needs all the support it can get, even if that support comes unsolicited from the private sector.
But I actually have more understanding for that than you might expect, because I spent twenty years living inside its European cousin Germany. Germany is rich, orderly and superbly administered on paper, yet every time I moved apartments I found myself ensnared in the Kafkaesque trap known as 'die Anmeldung'. By federal law, I had to register my new address within fourteen days or face a steep financial penalty. Yet actually getting registered meant a degrading dawn ritual: turning up at the council buildings at six in the morning (often in my running gear after a morning run), waiting with twenty other people for the doors to open, racing in to grab a numbered ticket, then sitting for another hour, or four, until my number was called. There is a special, maddening indignity in being legally threatened by a state for failing to perform a task the state itself has made all but impossible to complete.
But notice what was missing from my German ordeal: the lane to my left. Nobody was selling me a way out. German services are slow because sixteen 'Länder' each own a shard of every citizen's journey and nobody owns the whole; Germany has one disease, America has two. The tempting conclusion is that this is simply what size does, that any country big enough will fragment into this. But fragmentation isn't a scale problem, it's an ownership problem, and Brazil proves the difference: a sprawling federal state of over two hundred million people shipped one of the decade's best pieces of public infrastructure in Pix, its free instant-payment system that moved 3.75 trillion 'reais' in its first year, essentially by putting one institution, the central bank, in charge of the entire journey from end to end.
Which brings me home. New Zealand accidentally has everything those countries lack. We are a unitary state, so there is no federal seam for a service to fall into, and one agency can own a citizen's entire journey. The examples pile up once you start looking. SmartStart organises the half-dozen agencies involved in having a baby into a single journey built around the parent, something the United States structurally cannot build. NZTA's website will win no beauty contests, but rego and licence renewals take minutes, and Drive walks new drivers through the entire licensing journey in one clean, interactive experience, companion app and all. Immigration New Zealand handles whole visa processes online in a way that is light years ahead of most countries. My Covid Record was stood up in months and, by putting a vaccine pass in every pocket, helped walk the country out of lockdown. And the new Traveller Declaration has turned the old arrival card into a few minutes on your phone before you land; set it beside America's ESTA site, which greets the would-be visitor like a phishing scam and charges them for the privilege. New Zealanders take all of this entirely for granted, but much of the world would give their right arm for it: a country of five million quietly out-designing nations a hundred times its size. And crucially, nobody here makes money when these services fail. There is no Kiwi CLEAR, because we never let the queue get bad enough to sell. Yet.
By now every New Zealander reading this is muttering the same two syllables: “RealMe”. Granted, and I won't defend it. But RealMe proves the point rather than undermining it, because it's precisely what happens when the ownership condition slips: an identity layer no single agency ever fully owned. Australia shows the same thing at national scale; myGov frustrates Australians for exactly the reason 'die Anmeldung' frustrated me: a journey chopped across a federal seam.
The uncomfortable conclusion, for someone in my profession, is that talent was never the active ingredient, because bad public services are not a design problem; they are an ownership problem. New Zealand's public digital services generally work because of two conditions we inherited rather than earned: someone owned the whole journey, and nobody profits when it breaks. But be warned: inheritances can be squandered. Our version of that story would start more quietly: a journey left without an owner here, a queue allowed to rot there, until someone spots the gap and starts selling tickets through it. The only thing keeping a Kiwi CLEAR fictional is a government that keeps hiring people to own its journeys whole. Keeping journeys whole is how a country and a business avoids becoming the cautionary tale above, and it happens to be my daily bread. Twenty years of operating in this field has taught me one thing above all: an experience only holds together when a single overarching vision carries it from the first interaction to the last, with the human at the centre the entire way. Lose that, and the exploitable gap opens.
So the next time you're stuck in a government queue, digital or physical, don't ask where all the designers went, ask who turned their back on ownership.