What do we think about service patterns for local government?
At FutureGov we’ve been giving some thought to the idea of service patterns in local public services for some time now.
In a different context, the design team at the Government Digital Service (GDS) have led work on service patterns for central government — and are now thinking about service patterns for local government (latest blog post). They describe service patterns as the “practice for providing services that meet user needs [meaning] the design of the pages, user journeys and government components needed to build the service are all specified”.
Here’s our latest thinking.
Patterns should be about how services work
The biggest challenge we see in local government is with how it operates services.
We think that for a service pattern to be useful it has to be a way of documenting or sharing a common user experience or user journey, and, as importantly, a supporting business process.
Although many councils now have adequate digital channels (mostly forms on websites), these services haven’t transformed back office processes or the way that policy is handled. Despite some well implemented user journeys and interface design, most services still take considerable time and effort to operate. They’re dependent on manual interventions, handovers and many time consuming interactions across different channels including face-to-face and over the phone.
We think that a pattern at a service level such as ‘applying for a license’, or ‘paying a parking fine’, must also help shape the design of the organisation operating the service. This means capturing the best practices or potential uses of technology and automation applied to how a service works across all interactions (not just on screen).
When this doesn’t happen patterns fail to go beyond good practice for content and interaction design — it means that they typically only document screen-based or ‘online’ activities.
The real opportunity here is apply pattern thinking to the internal mechanics of how organisations work to enable organisations to become more digital. This is what we’ve been helping organisations think about using digital maturity assessments.
Moving beyond better forms
The answer is never a better form unless you’re asking the wrong questions.
When we’re designing forms and digital transactions usability and accessibility matter to users. But this can often hide the fact that many interactions with government are unnecessary and only exist because we don’t have ways to share data or help people connect together the different services that they need (often with a unique set of circumstances only applicable to their individual situation).
We believe that helping local government solve operational problems is the best way to work towards significantly improving these services for users. This doesn’t just mean simpler, clearer, faster transactions with government, but should eventually mean that some services become completely invisible to users.
Working together
The simplicity of a documented service pattern is attractive but doesn’t address the complexity introduced by what really happens in the lives of the individuals having to interact with government.
At FutureGov we completely agree that co-design and closer working between different councils and local authorities is the way forward. As the latest blog post by the GOV.UK Verify local design team sets out co-designing and researching the same types of services, potentially even building them at the same time makes it possible to achieve far more together than we can have individually.
Facilitation across similar types of services is a great opportunity for local government and co-design is a proven approach that many agencies including FutureGov have used to make this work. Co-design should also mean work happening across organisations and different levels of government (when appropriate) and is the focus of projects we’re supporting such as setting up a London office of Technology and Innovation.
We believe that not losing sight of context across all services is just as important. Testing and iterating solutions based on real service delivery in different places. For example, although they’ll have much in common, the challenges for housing in the London borough of Hackney and for rural district councils is very different when exposed to the realities of user needs in local communities.
It’s all just good service design
Instead of focusing on service patterns we think it might be better to start by focusing on patterns for good service design in local government.
As a summary, this is the approach we’re taking to make this happen:
- Focusing on fixing services, not websites.
This means prioritising service outcomes, and first and foremost focusing on people. It’s designing how organisations operate to make sure services work for everyone — providing flexibility and choice when and where it’s needed (not just screen based transactions). We believe that it should be possible to share solutions built on digital working practices that become alternative patterns to better web forms. - Working together, and beyond boundaries
This means working across organisations at all levels of government and in the 3rd sector — encouraging people to work beyond their own organisational boundaries. We believe that more local government services in the future will be the result of co-design (and research) and also shared operational platforms built around emerging digital business models. - Documenting and sharing.
This means helping local government find effective ways to share work on services, with the potential for reuse. We think that the GDS service pattern examples are useful (especially the publishing format) and we intend to reuse or find ways to contribute patterns for services that we’ve already created. There are other agencies doing good work in local government that we hope will do the same.
Let us know what you think and how service patterns are being used in your organisation. It would be great to learn more about other people’s experiences working with patterns. We’re always open to collaboration. Email benholliday@wearefuturegov.com.
