An approach to designing services that improves the experience of the people using them.
What is service design?
Service design is an approach to designing services that improves the experience of the people using them.
It involves an understanding of end-to-end service delivery and looks at services from the eyes of the users of the service, and, where appropriate, those delivering it, with the aim of meeting user needs within the council’s strategic aims and considering known constraints.
Why is it needed?
Service design is essential for customer focused transformation.
It is a critical component of digitally enabled transformation, ensuring that what is developed is easy for people to use and meets their needs.
What capabilities does it need?
To deliver service design, councils need to be able to:
- conduct user research
- apply design thinking
- map customer / user journeys
- develop personas
- create service blueprints
- create service model canvases
- prototype solutions
- apply Agile methods
- ensure accessibility
- create and manage content
- evaluate impact.
Each capability is defined in more detail in the sections that follow.
Capabilities have been defined to be read both in isolation (i.e. If you need to know only about a certain aspect of service design), or in combination (to understand service design in the round).
For this reason, there is a necessary overlap between some of the capabilities.
Related roles
There are multiple roles within local government that support elements of service design. It is important that all roles working on the design of services work collaboratively to ensure a joined-up approach both across different access channels and across the council.
- User Researcher
- Service Designer
- User Experience (UX) Designer
- Business Analyst
- Interaction Designer
- Visual Designer
- Content Designer / Web Designer
- Information Architect
- Customer Experience Manager
- Head of Digital Services
- Head of Customer Services
- Head of HR
Essential enablers
Other than having the right capabilities in place, there are several essential enablers that also need to be in place for service design to have maximum impact.
Service design – maturity index
A related service design maturity index has been created to enable councils to understand their current maturity and to set, and work towards, a target state. This can be downloaded below.
Resources
The following resources have been suggested by councils as references or tools that they have found useful in the framing, planning or delivery of service design activities. The LGA is not able to endorse any particular resources or any individual supplier.
- Service Ddesign 101 (nngroup.com)
- Government Design Principles (www.gov.uk)
- Service Design – Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (oecd-opsi.org)
- Engaging People with Lived Experience Toolkit - Community Commons
- Design in the public sector programme | Local Government Association
- Learn design thinking (mailchi.mp)
