Using service patterns to make it easier to build good services in San Francisco
New legislation or a natural disaster can create the need for the City of San Francisco (“the City”) to rapidly deploy new services that support the needs of residents, visitors, and businesses. At San Francisco Digital and Data Services, we think about how to support our partners throughout the City to design services that meet people’s needs through the thoughtful deployment of technology. Whether or not the City is dealing with a time-sensitive issue, we support our partners by making it easier to build good digital services.
Introducing service patterns
People turn to the City to accomplish a variety of goals like applying for a cannabis business permit, getting help if a business was flooded, or getting a birth certificate. While the particulars of these services may differ, we’ve observed that customers share many common needs and the City meets those needs in many common ways. These observed commonalities are what we call service patterns (a concept made clear by our colleagues at the UK Government Digital Service).
To illustrate the idea, every person applying for a cannabis business permit, getting help recovering from a flood, or getting a birth certificate, needs to share some information with the City. Often this happens towards the beginning of the service, when customers “submit information” — one of the service patterns that we have identified — often via a digital or paper form. The information submitted may differ, but customers’ needs are common: know how and where to enter the correct information, make it simple to correct errors, get clear guidance when something being asked for is unclear, among others.
After a customer has submitted information with the City, staff that support these services need to review the submitted information and, if necessary, allow customers to “update information”, another service pattern. For example, there are many requirements to obtain a cannabis business permit. Customers may miss some of the requirements the first time they submit information to the City. Making it easy for them to give the City updated information about the business, rather than starting a permit application from scratch, removes a burdensome task.
Opportunities in service patterns
For the past year the Service Design practice at San Francisco Digital and Data Services has been exploring how to identify and design with service patterns. We believe they can make it easier for us and our partners at the City to build good digital services for residents and businesses. We can learn about what makes an ideal customer and staff experience for a particular service pattern, and incorporate those findings into the design of the technology products we offer to City partners. By enabling great experiences for a particular pattern, we have a repeatable solution that the City can use again and again.
How are we approaching this work? We started with identification. We mapped common patterns among the variety of different services offered at the City. This resulted in a list of 22 service patterns which we will continue to revise as our exposure broadens.
Currently, we are working on the documentation and evaluation of high-priority patterns. We will do deep discovery work through primary and secondary research to learn more about how particular patterns appear in the City and what makes for a good experience with them.
For example, there are many different ways that people “submit information” to the City. Some departments collect paper forms in person, some provide fillable PDFs that are submitted over email, and others have a digital form that collects responses in a spreadsheet. What can we learn from these experiences about how to make it simple, accessible, and convenient to submit information? And how can we help our partners create the best experience with the tools and technologies available to them?
Where we’re going next
We’ll use what we learn from these deep dives to design a better experience for these patterns. We’ll build these best practices into the tools we’re providing to the partners that we work with directly, and will create guidance that any department can use to approximate that experience within the constraints of their available tools.
This is a long-term, strategic effort for Digital and Data Services. We would love to hear from other practitioners who have explored service patterns. What have you done with service patterns? What challenges did you encounter? What lessons would you like to share with our team?
