Day: 14 June 2018
15 principles of good service design
‘What is good service?’ is a question which is simultaneously very easy but remarkably difficult to answer. It’s easy because, as service users, we all have a strong sense of what is good and bad about our own experience – perhaps including those times when the best service is no service. But it’s very hard because those impressions don’t readily translate into a reliable way of telling whether a service is good, still less so whether a given design approach will result in one which will be good.
This post attempts to fill that gap with a set of principles of good service design. It’s presented as a first attempt, with an invitation to make comments and suggestions – but there is nothing sketchy or ill thought out about it and the list very much stands on its own merits. But in the spirit of that invitation, it’s perhaps worth asking a question and making a suggestion.
The question is about the intended scope of these principles. Reasonably enough, their starting point will have been the design of government services and more particularly their design in a modern digital context. But that’s not the only domain of service experience or service design. Are these universal principles, as applicable, say, to the service experience of going to a restaurant as to the service experience of getting a passport? Or is there something sufficiently different about them that different principles apply – and if there is, what is that difference, and what effect should it have?
The suggestion is rather simpler, a candidate additional principle, partly prompted by the idea of a thing avoided as well as of a thing experienced:
Be in the background whenever possible; be in the foreground whenever necessary
Digital Government and Public Service Transformation
This simple and powerful set of slides does an extraordinarily good job of summarising the key issues in digital transformation, not least in being really clear about the extent to which all of this is a technology issue (not as much as it looks) as opposed to an everything else issue (much more than it first appears). The section on ‘deciding how you want to work’ gets twice as many slides as ‘thinking about your technology needs’, which is a pretty strong indicator of the approach being taken.
It’s certainly possible to challenge some of the details. The arresting assertion that ‘we can broadly take for granted that technology can do whatever we want it to do’ perhaps has more power than precision – though the slightly lesser claim the technology needed to support government processes already exists is indeed a useful reminder that appeals for technological exceptionalism are very likely to be misguided. The insistence that agile projects can’t succeed in organisations which retain traditional approaches to funding and governance is both wrong and unhelpful: wrong because there are plenty of example of where it has succeeded, and unhelpful because every organisation has to start somewhere, and if agile can’t work at all unless everything is agile, there is effectively no way of making that start.
Overall, though, the strengths far outweigh the weaknesses – and this is a beautiful example of doing the hard work to make things simple. As a further bonus, the slides are open for comments, and have already sprouted a rich set of observations from Matthew Cain.
Digital Transformation at Scale – a review
It’s probably not news to most readers that some of the leading creators of the Government Digital Service have written a book. Many have been swift to observe the apparent irony that the book in question has been published only on paper, with no digital version available. That’s a fairly major obstacle fort those of us with a strong preference for the latter.
But now an alternative solution presents itself, in the form of a thorough and balanced review by Matthew Cain. The creation of GDS by Mike Bracken and his team was an enormous achievement and, despite its detractors, much good continues to be done there well after the first generation of pioneers moved on. But the founders’ vision was a narrower one than they ever quite acknowledged and the government context in which they found themselves was more unusual than they realised – or as Matthew puts it, ‘The section on political sponsorship basically tells readers to have a political sponsor called Francis Maude.’
Update: 22 June 2018
The publisher have helpfully made contact to share the good news that the book is now available on kindle, and apparently is due to appear in other formats. But that leaves unanswered the perennial mystery of why publishers find it so much harder to produce electrons than paper.