Zone’s UX designer Ioannis Karlis reports on ‘Good Services: Building User-Centred Organisations At Scale’ — a SofaConf 2020 talk by Lou Downe…
Service design is an increasingly mainstream activity, but many still find it hard to deliver services that work for users. In this article I will share what good service design looks like, and principles behind this.
I recently attended SofaConf, a five-day online design conference from the folks behind UX London. One of the most valuable talks was delivered by Lou Downe, who has done a huge amount of service design work with the UK government. I have been following Lou since their early days with the Government Digital Service (GDS), where they revolutionised the way the government interacts with businesses and individuals. Lou has made terms like usability, accessibility and user needs matter to senior government officials, which is no mean feat.
One of the most important things in Lou’s presentation was their explanation of service design. Services are invisible and they are spaces connecting things. For example, a seamless appointment system or an airline check-in service. Service design shares similar characteristics and guidelines with product design, such as accessibility, iterative and incremental delivery, with feedback from the users being crucial.
So what is good service design? And how do you achieve it? Here are four key principles to follow:
1. Findability
Let’s go back to basics: a good service should be easy to find. This starts from the obvious — its name! There are loads of UK government services that were given their name in an era where they didn’t have to be indexed and therefore users did not have to actively search for them by their name.
Service names such as ‘Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1995’ or ‘RIDDOR’ made it to the list of worst service names in Lou’s presentation. Changing the service name is one of the obvious, but overlooked things when you are working in service design. It is also one of the easiest things to change, as it’s independent of the team’s processes or tools.
A good service name starts with a verb. ‘Learn to drive’ and ‘Get a pension’ are good examples. This is because they focus on the action the user is trying to achieve and not on the service provider or the government organisation that owns the service. One of the fundamental principles of good service design is that the user shouldn’t have to know the government’s organisational structure in order to be able to find a service.
Another benefit of having a clear service name is that as well as a human finding your service, a robot can. This includes Google, enabling further integration such as serving you the information you’re looking for without you having to click into a webpage.
2. Familiarity
If you want your users to have a smooth experience, your service needs to work in a way that is familiar to them. Try to use established patterns, as people base their understanding on previous experiences. They form mental models, which they use to figure out how things work. Once they’ve created those mental models users will find it difficult or confusing if your service works differently. That’s why it is important for your services to be consistent with one another and provide a cohesive experience.
After the delivery of your service, it is likely that you’ll find out you need to make some changes in order to improve one or more elements of it. Any changes you make need to be both intuitive and ubiquitous. You should aim to align any other similar services to this new change so that standards and consistency are maintained.
3. No dead ends
A good service lets its users complete it without friction and, more importantly, without them getting stuck. Dead ends means that the user is blocked because they don’t have all the information required at hand or they might not understand what they need to do to progress, so users abandon their journey. As a service designer, it is really important you identify such potential dead ends quickly and put solutions in place, otherwise the risk of losing your users’ trust is extremely high.
4. Good services connect
Good service design does not exist in isolation: it exists as part of an ecosystem of other services. Service designers need to think of the wider user context and publish their service as widely as possible. They also need to make it easy for other products or services to integrate with yours, regardless of whether they’re inside or outside your organisation. This way you’ll ensure continuity of user journeys that might occur using different services and you’ll prevent the manual entering of the same information twice, which is a very common pain point.
It was astounding to hear that a huge amount of the government cost is spent on answering calls from the public. More than half of these calls are to ask how to do something, eg how do I get a driving licence? This is a huge number considering that all this information could be accessible and provided in a usable and digestible format to the public.
Good service design can really make a difference on so many different levels. It can influence your organisation’s bottom line, how it is perceived by the outside world, but even more importantly it can affect people’s lives. Like anything else in design, the well-established path of learn, design, test should be followed.
