I’ve written before, back in the before-times of 2015, about the idea of ‘composite services’. It was slightly clunky thinking then, premised on the idea of signing-in to multiple services getting easier through things like oAuth and physical security tokens like Yubikeys.
Covid has made composite services in the UK public sector a reality. Here, for example, are some steps from when I went to get a Covid test earlier this year:
- Book at test on my local authority’s website
- Visit a test site operated by the local authority and present a QR code / reference number
- Scan the barcode on an NHS branded test card
- Enter some details on GOV.UK
- Sign in using NHS single sign-on
- Use a physical test branded at HM Government, scanning a QR code to register the test
- Get notified of the test result via GOV.UK Notify
Lambeth Council sign at entrance to test site, an NHS test card with barcode and QR code, and a GOV.UK page with a blue NHS sign-in button
The full journey includes interactions with the NHS, central government and local government. It’s a journey through multiple products and services, physical and digital. In a world where you can interact with multiple parts of government in a single transaction, and there are multiple paths through a web of services, there is no single ‘end-to-end’ user journey. Each of those components were are glued together in lots of different ways in other contexts e.g. my local test-centre was a walk-in one, if I’d done the test at home, some, but not all, of the steps would have been the same.
I wonder how public sector design might change if interoperable or permeable services became the north star, rather than end-to-end service design? Similarly, digital identity is often premised on the idea of linking primary keys in back-end systems. Composite services move that linking closer to the end user, in the form of barcodes and permissions.
Composite services also provide a challenge to minimalist ‘just make it work’ design approaches - they ask users to do a bit more work, but with that comes flexibility and (maybe) control.
It strikes me that Apple’s privacy labels ….
Apple AppStore privacy label for the Ulyssess writing app
… are the same class of thing as …
Transport for London poster featuring information on how to complain about a bus service
… scribblings in the margins of a service that give context, help build a bigger picture about the ecosystem the service operates in, provide escape routes when things go wrong, or surface the rules that govern its use.
Digital design in the public sector doesn’t really make space for things like these. That’s hard to do if the design ethos is minimalist or reductive (which are generally good approaches if you are designing for task completion, maybe less so for signposting recourse or explaining who operates a service and how they do it).
Photograph of two small plastic scoops, one blue, one yellow
These two plastic scoops came packaged with our dog’s food. It’s one of those monthly subscription services and the scoops came in the welcome pack. The food is dehydrated, you mix it one-to-one with water before serving it. One scoop is blue (for water), and one is yellow (for the dried food). But the scoops are the same size and have a volume of 4 tablespoons (save a millimetre or two). It doesn’t actually matter which one you use, or if you use one or both of them. The purpose of the two different scoops is not functional, it’s to communicate how the concept works straight out of the box. It says ‘here’s how these parts fit together’. It’s an example of self-explanatory design, of legible design.
I realise it’s a bit of a jump from dog food to complex public services, but those scoops are currently a daily reminder to me that one of the things I value about the design is its ability to explain and contextualise. This, I think, is at the root of my frustrations with the approach to design in the UK public sector. The ability for design to explain where something fits within in a larger system, not just design to achieve immediate outcomes, is under used.
I’ve copied these questions over from this thread.
- There are projects where you need to try and ship something early (even if it’s slightly the wrong thing) to understand the domain and get first users. How do we make space for those classes of problem?
- Government digital UCD is optimised for the assumption that people commissioning work don’t know what they doing (the classic of the genre being: minister wants an app). How should the stance of delivery teams change when there is more digital competency at the top?
- There are needs that government will never meet. How can services be designed in a way that allows others to help meet them, while minimising the risk of disintermediation?
- Discovery-itus / celebrating not building something has become almost idealised. That is not healthy in an organisation that genuinely needs to deliver to deadline. How do you create a culture that can prioritise delivery early and learn in parallel rather than in series?
- ‘What’s the user need?’, used as a way of discounting anything where value creation is indirect, or where needs met via proxies, is a regular anti-pattern. How do we value needs that are met indirectly?
- Effective digital teams create information asymmetries. How should teams show their workings so that experts from outside can understand their work? How can we ensure teams are as likely to fail a service assessment for lack of open-source code as they are for accessibility?
- There is a real impact of digital/design on people’s access to their rights to access public services. These often get lost in a task based view of government. Where should rule of law/rights fit in government UCD?
- Utilitarian focused UCD in government has been poor at creating data infrastructure and shared tooling. How can those things be prioritised when end-user + policy intent determines prioritisation?
- Not everything is a service. How can we make space for understanding when the service paradigm is helpful and when it is not?
- The legacy of ‘fix the basics’/‘no innovation’ is often that any mention of technology is seen as solutionism. Sometimes it is about the technology. How can we make space for understanding how technology can allow problems to be solved in different ways?
- The design system is a brilliant (brilliant!) bit of work, but it creates constraints and possibly contributes to prevalence of linear transactions. How can design system teams be funded to be more speculative and active in the creation of new patterns?
- The overall approach today is conservative. It’s optimised for the assumption that legacy and incremental improvements are the norm. Things like GOVUK/Notify/Pay challenge that. Can we create a space for the greenfield and the speculative without inviting in charlatan utopians?
- There are so many teams still solving the same problems. Platforms are great, but not everything can/should be a platform. How can other shared open source tooling be funded and supported?
- Simple end to end services rarely exist. Rather that aiming to design a single end to end journey, how might we optimised to enable ‘composite services’ and interoperability?
- Not having to understand the structure of government too often means obfuscating the structure of government and accountability. Every time it happens it’s a tiny democratic paper cut. How can the design of services help people understand how their government(s) work?
I tend to listen to In Our Time when I’m having trouble sleeping. Or, at least, I listen to it to the end when I can’t sleep. There is this bit at the end of the podcast version where the producer pops in to offer the guests a drink. I think mostly because the academics would happily go on all day if not. Anyway, at some point insomnia drove me to start noting down the drinks they chose. Then it became a thing and I felt obliged to continue, not really knowing why I had started. Lockdown has freed me and the producer from that obligation, and I am in possession of probably the world’s most useless dataset:
- Papal infallibility - coffee, tea
- Pheromones - Tea, coffee, black tea (weak)
- Irish Famine- tea, coffee, tea, tea
- Frankenstein - tea, tea, tea, tea
- Bergson and Time - tea, none
- Inca - tea, tea, tea, tea, coffee
- Sir Thomas Browne - inaudible
- The Mytilenaean Debate - none
- Doggerland - coffee, tea, tea
- Venus - coffee, coffee (black), tea
- Augustine’s Confessions - not recorded
- Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow - coffee, tea, coffee
- Dorothy Hodgkin - inaudible
- Coffee - coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee
- Catullus- tea, tea, tea, coffee, tea
- Siege of Paris - tea, tea
- Alcuin - tea, tea, tea, tea
- Battle of T forest - Tea, coffee, water
- Treaty of Limerick- Tea, tea, tea
- The Valladolid Debates - tea, tea, tea, tea
- The evolution of horses - none, none, none, none
- The Covenanters - tea, coffee, water, none
(Pleasing that coffee got a full sweep for Coffee though).
How many project management paradigms do you have in your organisation?
If you are trying to do upfront design upfront and iteration, you probably 1 have a problem.
If you have fixed deadlines and fixed scope, you probably have a problem.
If you are trying to centrally control of design and technology, and delegate decision making to teams, then you probably have a problem.
If you are trying to work in an agile way and using waterfall governance processes (or vice versa), you probably have a problem.
‘probably’, because, as Simon Wardley regularly points out, different paradigms make sense in different contexts. However, it should be a choice, not an accident.↩︎