How Service Patterns are improving our user experience and efficiency at EE — Part II
It’s been a few years since my last blog post on Service Patterns, but during that time, we’ve been actively developing and applying these patterns internally. After a recent discussion with fellow designers at the MoJ who are also working on Service Patterns, we realised it’s about time we provided an update and shared the progress we’ve made.
What are service patterns?
Service patterns are essentially common steps or stages that a user will take to complete a journey. These steps recur across multiple journeys or services. For example, whether you’re buying a mobile phone, broadband, or insurance, stages like configuring your product, paying and tracking your order should be consistent regardless of product type.
- Consistent experience for the customer but also consistent in how it’s designed & built.
- We should be utilising the same systems and code wherever possible.
- We should apply legal and regulatory guidance, user research and accessibility.
- And consistent across channels, omni-channel consistency where possible.
This hasn’t always been the case in many of these areas. Historically, different journeys for different products across BT & EE have resulted in variations, leading to inconsistent user experiences and inefficient productivity.
Why do service patterns matter?
For the customer, consistent experiences mean that whether they are buying a mobile phone, broadband, or insurance package, the journey feels familiar. This familiarity reduces cognitive load, as users don’t have to think as much about how to navigate the process. This inconsistency matters because it impacts the user’s confidence and familiarity with the process.
For the business, the value of service patterns is multifaceted. Primarily, it enhances performance by enabling teams to create new things more quickly and make changes across multiple journeys more seamlessly. This efficiency not only benefits the team, but also improves performance and confidence in the systems used, ultimately enhancing the customer experience and cost of running the service.
Some of the metrics we are monitoring:
Efficiency creating journeys that use service patterns
- % Reduction of Content models (publishing efficiency)
- Time spent publishing content on Configure & Choose
- Time spent engineering code for Configure & Choose
- Decreased cycle time from idea to delivery
- Number of patterns documented on ‘Loop’ (our EE design system)
Effectiveness customer outcomes and business goals
- Increased click-through-rate to basket Get Mobile
- Increased click-through-rate to basket Get Marketplace Products
- Increased click-through-rate to basket Get Broadband + TV
- % Increased journey completed (flow)
Delivering alignment across multiple teams
We are close to delivering full UX alignment across one of our key service patterns and incrementally new components are being released right now. The first service pattern we focused on was ‘configure and choose’. This stage involves the customer selecting and customising a product to suit their needs, right through to adding it to the basket. This pattern was chosen because it had fewer backend or legacy system dependencies and addressed a significant customer pain point.
We identified 15 different variations in this process. Whether buying headphones or configuring a mobile phone, users encountered slightly different components and user flows, different content models were used even if the content structure was the same. Some components were hard coded even if they existed in the design system. As we increase the products we are offering, it’s crucial that these stages are simplified and consistent front and back.
Achieving alignment
Achieving alignment wasn’t easy. Led by service designer, Vanessa Russell, we conducted many workshops with designers and engineers across all our tribes. We brought teams together to understand the mandatory and optional steps in the process, taking a comprehensive look at all the current variations. We consulted colleagues from Trading, Propositions, and Data Analysts to gain their input and steer.
The discovery phase was intensive, involving deep dives into the existing processes before moving towards an improved future state. Ideation sessions, led by Vanessa Russell, helped gather ideas from across teams to converge on what a great customer experience should look like.
Naturally, we tested the new journeys rigorously in the user research lab. Making sure that any changes we were making to gain alignment did not compromise experiences. It was a great way to bring people together across boundaries to observe users completing journeys they wouldn’t typically be responsible for.
Challenges
The journey to deliver these changes is ongoing. It’s not practical to implement a big bang change across all our websites and apps. Instead, we are aligning with ongoing initiatives and planned releases. A group of representatives from across all tribes has been formed to ensure consistency and alignment and meet on a fortnightly basis.
Initially a significant challenge had been securing engineering engagement to fully document and refactor the back-end alongside the front-end. Engineers are under immense pressure, juggling multiple priorities, but in the last few months, we’ve had strong support from both front-end and back-end engineers. We’ve been having positive conversations with a Director of Engineering on how we can organise engineering around service patterns for greater efficiency across channels.
Delivering value
Documenting the first iteration of a service pattern on our design system, delivering change and influencing backlogs, significantly reducing variation of major user stages, and decreasing the time to design and build new products. These are all big achievements that are easier to say than do. I can’t praise the colleagues leading our first service pattern, highly enough. It has taken a great deal of resilience, grit, and determination to bring the teams this far. It is important to tread that delicate line between being highly collaborative and decisive. Without such an approach, there could be a risk of resistance to compromise or reluctance to change at all.
Next steps
Having proven the value with one service pattern (configure and choose), we are now focusing on other service patterns. These include:
• Learn and browse: helping customers discover and understand products
• Track: providing consistent tracking experiences
• Checkout: moving towards a converged checkout process for multiple products
Different service designers are leading each of these patterns, and we’ve learned a lot from our initial efforts on process and governance. We aim to move more quickly and effectively with these next service patterns.
I’m currently having positive discussions on how service patterns can support organisation design changes to achieve greater alignment.
Stay tuned for future blog posts where we will share our progress and insights from delivering these service patterns.
We’d love to hear from others that have been on a similar journey.
