How we are using Service Patterns to improve efficiency at BT/EE.
Service patterns have helped us unpick some of the complexity of user journeys and our services at BT, they are helping us to gain efficiency in our designs and development.
But what do we mean by service patterns? And how are they different from other types of design patterns such as UI components and interaction patterns?
At BT our definition is:
A service pattern is step or stage of a service that’s similar or repeated across different journeys. It considers the things a user interacts with, and all of the things that make it happen behind the scenes.
Why document service patterns?
We’ve been doing lots of work to identify our design patterns at a UI interface level within our design system ‘Loop’. We know this can help us gain greater efficiency and consistency in the individual designs that we create.
But it only goes so far in helping us to understand the bigger picture.
Service patterns help us to understand the step or chunks of steps that users take across our services to get to their goal. It also helps us to identify the things that underpin those steps. Those things might be content, data, API’s, components, UI components, legal guidance, good practice and the things that we use to measure the success of those services.
Service patterns help us to:
- Create consistent experiences for our users between different journeys, creating familiarity and user confidence
- Bring design teams closer to align and share knowledge
- Provide a starting point for designing steps in new journeys based on existing knowledge
- Help us be more efficient, repeatable and scalable
- Help us consider re-using building blocks for a service ie API’s, data, systems, people, legal.
BT is a large organisation and we have a lot of design teams all designing very similar things in parallel, but they may not be aware of that. Resulting in duplicated efforts in design, development, architecture and support.
Identifying and documenting service patterns across our services is a first point of helping those squads that are designing things and our stakeholders understand what we have already, what is similar and what is repeated. So as a minimum, we can start to understand what exists already. What we’re realising now is just how service patterns can help us to collaborate together to improve these services to improve experiences across all of our services.
What have we done?
We have run workshops across all squads to identify service patterns. As with identifying journeys a decision tree came in useful to help people self-identify. Service Designers were there to guide them through the process.
So far we have identified 40 types of service patterns, we have also identified the variations ie if ‘Book’ is a parent pattern there may be child versions ie ‘book delivery’ ‘book a call back’ this really helps us to understand the frequency and application of a pattern. The pattern with the greatest children is ‘choose and compare’ with a whopping 15 varieties.
What next?
So far we have started to document all of the patterns in Mural and Sharepoint.
Longer term we want this information and guidance to live on our design system ‘Loop’. Having a single source of truth alongside other design patterns will allow internal users to zoom in and out. They can either start with a service pattern and zoom in to understand the detail, or start at a more granular level of UI pattern and zoom out to understand all the service patterns that use that component.
We are also collaborating with colleagues across BT to consider how reflecting service patterns in our organisational structure and engineering processes can help us to be more efficient.
Ultimately we want to make squads lives easier, share learnings when they are creating similar things, and reduce the cognitive load for our users by making steps more familiar.
We are recruiting for Service Designers at all levels if you are interested do reach out to our friendly recruiter richard.hales@bt.com who will set you up with a coffee with a hiring manager.
