Notes on Chris Govias’ Service Design for the Public Sector

(from uie.com’s All You Can Learn library, highly-recommended subscription required)

Service Design isn’t about the double diamond we all know and love:

or affinity diagrams or post its or co-creation sessions etc—those are all great tools but not SD

SD is the design of service, the end-to-end experience for a customer,  every single part of the process that we can help design, from call center scripts through kiosk UI and everything in-between

SD is about achieving the best delivery possible

Chris takes us through the example of the British justice system, which is extraordinarily complex:

And the image above is only half the chain!

Huge amounts of software—the vast majority of it is bad with awful user experience— is being used to power incredible important services

In the UK, the Government Digital Service (GDS) has a mission:

• To create digital services so good people prefer to use them — referred to as Digital by Default

They chose 25 services across government to redesign, naming them Exemplars

Example: Prison Visit Booking

Prison visits are important:

• 45% of prisoners lose contact w family while inside
• 39% are more likely to reoffend if they don’t receive visits

To visit someone, folks filled out a paper form:

A prisoner, upon arrival, is experiencing a sudden massive change to their lives:

1. In this flux, they may struggle to remember names and info for three visitors in order to fill out the left-hand side of the form
2. The prison officer then fills out the boxes on the top right then sends it snail mail to the visitors
3. Visitors can then:
   • Call a booking office (occasionally)
     • Users said they called over 50 times but couldn’t get through
     • Narrow hours of operation in the middle of the day only
     • Wait times could be enormous
   • Or write a letter to the prison to set up visitation schedules, involving more forms and follow ups

Service redesign

Doing service research with IT depts, Chris’ team discovered the major issue was legacy software—black boxes of ancient code that they couldn’t readily access. Fixing it would require years and mounds of cash

So the team decided the solution couldn’t be technical

They had to rely on the humans already involved in the service

They created a simple web page

• Visitors could submit three possible dates for a visit
• Then they would get an email confirmation of one date

• Note the 3 bullet points set up what’s needed to successfully complete this task
• Note the gray bar/pullquote reminds users of a backend requirement—helping users succeed by pointing out a common failure point in the service
• A response timeline manages more expectations

How did the team make this work within existing technologies?

Their research found that call center folks could access both the legacy software and email

So the team used the call center as a human API, using call center folks to create a visit date w the legacy tech and then email to visit date a simple new booking service

The takeaway:

The team also:

• Rewrote call center scripts to encourage online booking
• Put up posters about online booking in prisons
• Coordinated w gov.uk to ensure the new service showed up on their site also

Outcomes of the service redesign:

• 1.5m bookings/yr, a large increase
• 52% booked digitally
• 85% user satisfaction rate
• 82% completion rate

Key learnings about transforming govt services

• Rely first on low- or no-tech solutions
• Users don’t need to be instantly satisfied—just make sure your service can fit somewhere in an ordinary person’s day
• Focus on the user; worry about tech later

About Chris (from uie.com): Chris Govias is a Canadian designer who has spent the past decade in London, UK. He’s worked with startups, charities, and Fortune 500 companies including Expedia, where he was a Design Lead. As Head of Design for the Ministry of Justice UK, he was on the forefront of delivering transformative, user-centred government services. He returned to Canada to become the first Chief of Design with the Canadian Digital Service, a new initiative from the Government of Canada to deliver simple, easy to use services for all Canadians.

Chris’s work on Spacelog.org, which converted scans of NASA transcripts from early space missions into a searchable, accessible, linkable website, won praise from the Huffington Post, the Atlantic, Popular Science, BoingBoing and NPR, to name a few. His work has also appeared in Applied Arts, the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Design Magazine, and Communication Arts.