Service Patterns: Part 1 - History, Opportunity and Challenges
This blog is part of a series from designers at the Ministry of Justice who are making the case for ‘share + reuse’ infrastructure across government. Find out more about that here. If you’d like to get involved please get in touch via email or LinkedIn.
Service Patterns at the Ministry of Justice
Over the last 12 months, myself and other designers at the Ministry of Justice have been investigating Service Patterns as a tool to create consistent high quality user experiences across our different services. This short series of blogs will take you through our work to date and our plans for the future. Part 1 will look at our research into the history of Service Patterns, the opportunity they present, and some of the challenges we’ve encountered.
What are Service Patterns?
If you work in or near digital design you are probably familiar with the idea of design systems that contain reusable components and patterns. These are typically used by Interaction Designers to create consistent digital experiences, specifying anything from the design of a button, a date picker, or multi-page experiences for things like signing into an account.
Service Patterns take this a step further by considering complete user tasks, or the stages of a service, that get built repeatedly across organisations — for example the ability to ‘apply for something’ or ‘book an appointment’. A library of Service Patterns would act as design guides to build these capabilities in repeatable and consistent ways across multiple services. The library entries would deal with what that task means as a digital service, but they would also include consideration of non-digital channels and touchpoints, and their relationship with other tasks, to help you build a complete end-to-end service.
History and Opportunity
The idea of Service Patterns has been floating around UK public sector design for about 10 years. If you’ve ever gone looking for information on the topic, you’ve probably found the same blogs as we have — e.g. this one by Lou Downe from 2016 introducing the topic, this one from 2018 that takes it a little further, or this more recent one from TPXImpact who worked with the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP).
As an approach, especially for Service Designers, it seems incredibly appealing. They are a route to creating consistent user experiences, based on tested designs, that act as a solid foundation to your service. They free up design time to focus on the elements of the service that are new or unique or interesting, instead of designing from scratch the same elements over and over again. It intuitively makes sense to Service Designers how and why this could be a powerful approach to designing better services.
From our research there are a number of organisations that have successfully defined a framework for their Service Patterns, identifying the categories and names of the patterns they would require to describe the services they provide. Some have also been able to catalogue their existing services using that framework — for example at Essex County Council. Some are making links to the work by Kate Tarling on how we should define and organise our services. At the Ministry of Justice, we’ve also defined the potential service patterns we would like to pursue.
The Challenges
There is a problem however — in our research we have struggled to find examples of organisations that have a) built out the detailed guidance that would sit under each potential service pattern and b) successfully used service patterns to build better services. We are hopeful that there are examples out there we just haven’t found yet (please do get in touch if that is you!), but this challenge has forced us to consider whether Service Patterns are likely to be a practical approach that delivers meaningful benefits. There are other questions to answer too, such as what is the difference between a pattern in a typical design system, and a service pattern as we’ve defined it here? We’re also considering whether service patterns as an abstract concept is the right approach, or whether they need to be more closely aligned to repeatable products, representing a complete vertical stack of design and code for a given function.
Our Approach
Part 2 of this blog series will share more details on our approach, but for now here is a summary:
Within the Ministry of Justice we started with a ‘bottom up’ approach, looking at our existing services, and asking the responsible teams to describe in their own words what common actions and tasks are completed by users of those services. From there we identified roughly 30 potential patterns covering things like applying for things and booking appointments (see the image above for the rest). We’ve experimented with taking existing services and retrospectively converting them into service patterns, and with building service patterns in parallel with the development of new services. Both approaches have had challenges — it’s been difficult to reverse engineer completed services into easy-to-use repeatable guidelines, and it’s been difficult to identify a new service at the right stage of the development lifecycle to build a new pattern in parallel. We are continuing to experiment with approaches and hope to make more progress soon.
We’ve also been collaborating with colleagues in other UK Government departments, in particular with Lindsey Stephens from DWP, to prototype a potential cross-government service pattern for ‘apply’. Lindsey and the team at DWP have done some great work on defining their own service patterns, and crucially, have managed to fully define the guidance that would form one of their own service patterns. Along with colleagues from the Department for Education, DEFRA, HMRC, and the Home Office, we have used DWP’s work as a starting point to create a prototype service pattern that could be used across all government departments. We hope to share that prototype for feedback soon.
Next Steps
Part 2 looks at what we’ve been doing in more detail. In the meantime, if you’d like to talk more about this topic, please get in touch via email, LinkedIn.
