Digital Playbooks for UX Research and Service Design
An underrated tool that will help you design better services and experiences in the public sector (and beyond)
Digital Playbooks are one of my favourite go-to toolkits for a crash course on service design. But what are they?
Playbooks draw upon both the private and public sector’s UX research best practices to understand user experiences beyond the digital interface.
Digital playbooks are the most underrated resources and are hidden gems for user researchers. There is so much value in understanding problems using a holistic lens and considering multiple touch-points to design simpler and better experiences, with the user and for the user.
Let’s walk through the basics first to understand what a digital playbook is and how it can help UX researchers use service design’s best practices to solve common problems:
- What is a digital playbook? 🤷♀️
- Why should UX researchers use it? 🤔
- When should UX researchers use it? 🕐
- Who should be using it? 👥
- Spoiler: scroll to the bottom of the article for a list of digital playbooks from around the world 🙌
What is a digital playbook? 🤷♀️
A digital playbook (aka service manual) provides a set of criteria, standards, UX research and human-centered design tools to guide a multi-disciplinary team on designing services with real users in mind.
The playbook helps organizations think like designers while looking at the delivery of services within a greater context and across multiple touch points. This is a fundamental shift away from an ‘internal needs first’ design mindset to an ‘end-users needs first’ perspective in problem-solving when designing great service experiences.
It includes user research techniques that develop a deeper knowledge of the service users, their motivations, pain-points and wish-lists while continuously seeking feedback to improve services.
Why should you use the Digital Playbook? 🤔
No service or experience should be designed solely behind a desk by yourself 😝
This means that designing a good service requires reaching out to real users in their natural environments to understand them at a deeper level. UX researchers can use the digital playbook to check whether an experience is well-designed and suitable for public use.
The problem-solving techniques shared in the playbook takes researchers into the field to interact with real users and understand their behaviours, motivations and needs. Some of the valuable UX research methods and techniques covered in the digital playbook include how to:
- Capture a research question
- Develop contextual research and observation
- Research user experiences, conduct pop-up research, conduct research remotely by phone or video calls
- Create experience maps
- Run moderated usability testing
- Take notes and record user research sessions
- Analyze UX research and share your findings
Some Playbooks go in-depth such as the BC Public Service Playbook and some, such as the Ontario Digital Playbook, provide a high level overview on the variety of low-cost simple tools that teams with any budget can use.
When should you use the digital playbook? 🕐
When you’re tackling a complex service delivery problem and are not sure how to start. The digital playbook provides designers resources for everything from the fundamentals of building and structuring a service design team to gaining organizational buy-in for support on any given project.
I use the playbook at various phases of the design and research process — it doesn’t have to always start in the beginning in Discovery. Service design is not meant to be in a linear process. Many of the project phases can be messy and overlap — that’s totally normal.
Who should be using digital playbooks? 👥
While the playbooks I have shared below are focused on public services, many of the core concepts in user research and design are universal and can be leveraged by other sectors as well.
One of the things I like the most about these tools is that they are written in plain language. They are so user-friendly that anyone interested in UX research can pick them up and learn the skills needed to understand user needs — from planning research and preparing sessions, to sharing and analyzing findings. The human-centred research and design approach is universal.
Ultimately, the playbooks encourage individuals with little or no user research background to be able to start thinking like a designer and champion human-centred design processes to create better experiences.
List of Digital Playbooks
Here is a guide to access some of my favourite digital playbooks that have been immensely inspirational and helpful in my service design projects.
Government of British Columbia Digital Playbook 🇨🇦
Government of Canada Digital Playbook 🇨🇦
Government of Ontario Service Design Playbook 🇨🇦
The U.S. Digital Services Playbook 🇺🇸
Did I miss any of your favourites Playbooks? I’d love to hear your thoughts 😃
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