My two cents

The futuregov team (which is now called TPXimpact), in partnership with the Essex county council, have created a service patterns library for local governments.

What is a service pattern?

But you might ask, but Daniele what is a service pattern?

In web design, we say a pattern is like a button. A button is an element that comes again and again and again in many different places on the website.

That's a web design pattern.

An element that we can take and put in many places and that we don't have to reinvent every time.

The same goes for services. There are elements, interactions, components and tasks. That comes again and again in different places in our service.

Once we are aware of them, we can design them once. And reuse them in many different places.

Just like a button, we design one button that we reuse in different places.

And maybe, if you fancy, you maybe have three variations of that button, but you don't have 200!

The same goes for the service pattern.

The seven service patterns

What's interesting to me about the service pattern library built by Futuregov is that they mapped about 150 services. Then based on that mapping, they could identify seven patterns that come again and again.

The seven service patterns are: check, register, tell, request, apply, book, and pay.

1. The "check" pattern is about helping people look up information and understand if it applies to them. Or helps them find something. Just checking, is this for me or not?

2. The "register" pattern is about helping someone to complete a process. Then people will have to create an account with personal and sensitive data. Basically filling out a form.

3. The "tell" pattern is about helping people to share some information. Share a bug, share a change in address.

4. The "request" pattern is about helping people to get some tangible outcomes, like a copy of a certificate. It's about asking: I'd like to get that.

5. The "apply" pattern is about helping people to complete an application process. But before people can go through the "apply" pattern, they usually have to go through the "check" pattern to see if they are eligible for that thing that they want to apply for.

6. The "book" pattern is about helping people to book things, like a room, an item or a person's time. Whenever we are confronted with the booking pattern. The question of the date is particularly important.

7. The "pay" pattern is about helping people to pay for something. That's it.

How to use the service pattern library?

In the service patterns library, you can then see concrete examples of how these patterns are used in local government.

You can just click on an element, for example, the "tell" element, and it will show you that they are 27 services that use that specific pattern.

For each service, you will then see a sequence of how that happens.

That part of the library is obviously more interesting for people working in public services or local government.

But the seven big patterns are still extremely interesting for any type of service designer.

More Service Design questions and answers like this one

Check out all the questions about Service Design in the government.