Using service patterns
Changing the conversation in local government
Local government is complicated. Essex is one of the largest county councils in the country, and we work in partnership with 12 district councils and 2 unitary councils to deliver local services. As a two-tiered authority, we are responsible for the services that span the county such as social care, education and roads. Our district partners look after more local services like parks and leisure, housing and planning. We also share the responsibility for some services like waste, where our district partners are responsible for kerbside collections and we are responsible for the bulk disposal. Our workaround social care is also coordinated with local health partners who are organised in ways that span across county borders. This means that providing information that helps people to access the services they need in ways that are intuitive and understandable can be difficult, as responsibilities are shared across multiple organisations.
We wanted to explore how service patterns might help us to improve services in Essex, with an eye on how this approach might also support wider efforts to standardise services across local government coordinated by the UK’s Government Digital Service.
Services are always being improved, but it is often driven by short-term savings targets or the promise of ‘improved technology = a better service’. As a service design team in Essex County Council, we are part of the central Organisation Development and People function. We work to support teams from across the organisation to understand the value in improving the end-to-end user experience across council services, while also managing costs.
Our goal is to create standards and guidance that will help teams understand what good looks like for modern services that enable a consistent and accessible user experience across channels and organisations.
Starting with a service-oriented map
As a small team, we started out by mapping transactional services for residents that are available online. With the help of our strategic partner FutureGov we have managed to identify over 150 services. We sat down with service teams to capture what role the council plays, how much authentication is required, any data pain points and the technology that is used.
We also had a think about the wider context of how and when people would use each service. Understanding these key life events helped us think about how these services are described and organised.
From this service-oriented mapping we identified seven common things that people were trying to do. Our initial list of common service patterns were: check something, apply for something, book something, pay for something, register for something, request something, tell something.
It got really interesting when we created a summary for each pattern, which for the first time enabled us to show how many times each pattern appeared, across which service areas; and which technologies were in use.
Finding the right level
We went on to group the services under each pattern by scenario, to enable us to create guidance and flows for an optimised user experience at the right level of detail: enough to be useful, but not too specific to any individual service.
Service teams often focus on improving the services that they are responsible for. However, when we show teams that 35 different services are taking bookings, across 5 different functional areas, and that these are managed in 6 different systems with completely different (and generally poor) user experiences, it is hard not to see the opportunity to simplify things to make them better for users and service teams. These ‘lightbulb moments’ enable us to make a compelling case for a more user-centred, service-oriented approach.
Horizontal across all verticals
As we do this work, we are learning about the tension between making things more consistent across the organisation and delivering an excellent individual experience focused on a single service.
We work horizontally across services to understand what is happening and design best practice flows and guidance for each scenario. We then take this guidance into the vertical context of an individual service to improve or redesign the service experience, balancing the needs of the user with the best practice guidance and the constraints around the service. We then loop back to update the guidance based on what we have learned.
It’s hard work but at this early stage, it’s the only way we can be sure that our guidance and flows are useful, relevant and represent the best of what we’re learning.
We’ve created guidance that supports 5 scenarios across the ‘check’, ‘apply’ and ‘book’ patterns, and will be working to test this against live services over the next few months.
Beyond the patterns
As well as opening the door for more user-focused design, our work with service patterns is helping us to understand much more about the levels of digital maturity across the organisation. It is also helping us to reflect on how we work within the team, and we are learning that we need to better define where some roles end and others start. We have to think carefully about how we can create the right foundations now to build on later.
We want to share the tools that we have created with colleagues and the wider public sector in Essex and beyond. We have therefore partnered with FutureGov to launch a shared library of service patterns for local government.
For more, vist the blog: servicedesign.blog.essex.gov.uk
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Nicholas Ward is Lead Service Designer at Essex County Council and has been working to establish one of the first service design teams in UK local government since 2015.
