We’re building a service manual to support our Digital Service Standards for Wales.
Though it seemed like a simple, straightforward project at first, we faced some challenges as we delved deeper into the process.
As we embark on our beta phase, we want to reflect on what we’ve learned over the last few months.
Challenges we faced
Defining the value proposition
One of the main challenges we faced was defining a clear value proposition for the service manual.
There are some brilliant service manuals across the world, and the GOV.UK Service Manual is particularly relevant for a lot of our work in the public sector in Wales.
So how does another service manual add value alongside other well-regarded resources? How do we avoid duplicating existing resources and guidelines?
Understanding users and their needs
Along the way, we realised how important it is to define our target users and their needs clearly. Starting broad meant that the content in our prototype was too general to solve any specific problems.
We could have been more exploratory during discovery and alpha. Our focus in these phases was on how the service manual can help people meet and apply the standard, the relationship between the standard and the manual, and how people might navigate the content.
While we understood the problem area from a website and navigation perspective, perhaps by zooming out and being more exploratory, we could have found the gaps in current guidance and explored the role of a new service manual earlier in the process.
Product manager Phil Baird’s thoughts
Looking back on the challenges, identifying our value proposition was worthwhile, and there are things I’ve taken away and been reminded of as a product manager.
Finding clarity
We could have spent more time in alpha trying to find clarity and developing a shared understanding.
This is important for team members to understand clearly where they add value and feel more at ease with their contribution.
For beta, I decided to focus on ‘setting up beta’ for the first 3 sprints. Though this may seem like a big block of time, it has enabled us to rethink the value proposition and build our understanding together of what we’re trying to achieve and by when.
Creating a good team
There are always challenges in user-centred design projects, and a good team is key to overcoming them.
A ‘good team’ shares a set of values and goals, understands what to expect from each other, and has the conditions it needs to thrive.
Through a Team Canvas workshop, we agreed some things for our team:
- we’ll have fun
- there are no silly questions
- ask for and offer help where needed
- call out dithering
These may be obvious, but the exercise gave us a good grounding, and we’ve built trust and openness as a result, meaning that we face challenges together.
Let’s not ‘boil the ocean’
The team must be bored of me using this phrase, but it’s my way of telling them that we don’t need to do all of the things now.
Settling on our value proposition was already quite challenging as there was so much we could do.
As the product manager, I needed reminding to reassure them that it was ok to not do everything. Or to an extent, even to pick the wrong thing to do: there are lessons to learn there too.
And giving them this reassurance allows the team to focus on moving forward.
Service designer Gwenno Edwards’ thoughts
These are some of the lessons I’ve learned as a service designer.
Don’t underestimate the importance of service design in products
The service manual project has been a great opportunity to apply a service design lens to working on a product.
Read about how products and services work together.
As a service designer, my role is often to try and help the team to think about the context that the product sits within and be the ‘glue’ between different products.
As we are focusing on one product, there were times I could have brought our attention back to the wider journeys that our users will go through when using the service manual, and the other problems that our organisation is trying to solve.
Now that we have more certainty about our product’s value proposition, I’m looking forward to giving more consideration in this beta phase to the experience of using the manual alongside other CDPS support.
Decision-making in a multidisciplinary team can be hard
We are lucky to have lots of user-centred design practitioners on the team, including a user researcher, an interaction designer, a content designer and myself, a service designer.
But most of the team had never worked together before when I joined it at the beginning of alpha.
While the scope and boundaries of user research felt relatively clear, the three designers blended our roles in alpha and collaborated closely on several activities.
Though this is a dream scenario as a designer that allows me to learn from others and be more creative, it was easy to lose track of what design ‘lens’ would be best applied to different decisions, and who could or should be leading at different times.
While we will continue this close collaboration in beta and as we get closer to launch, we also hope to be clearer about which discipline is leading and who makes decisions about what.
Don’t forget about landscape mapping
Service landscape mapping is a great tool to understand all the services, guidance, advice, and support available about a particular topic.
Early on in the alpha phase, I created an inventory of all the existing policies and guidance relevant to the Digital Service Standards for Wales.
This was useful for highlighting what is unique about working in digital public services in Wales. But around this time, our focus was elsewhere as we grappled with lots of questions.
It wasn’t until the beginning of beta that I shared it again. We were having more conversations about the value proposition of the manual, and it was clear that other service manuals did not address many ‘uniquely Welsh’ things.
In future, I need to remember to bring tools and artefacts back at different times, as it may take a few conversations for us to fully understand the insights and the implications.
Hopefully, while we delve into specific topics in beta, service landscape mapping can be a useful tool to understand how sections of the service manual play a role alongside other guidance and resources.
Moving forward
It’s always healthy to look back, reflect and learn, and we’ve got a clearer plan for what the first version of the service manual can do.
The GOV.UK Service Manual is a great place to go for information and guidance on, for example, user research. But what about guidance on research with Welsh-language users? What about testing bilingual content?
Our service manual can fill this gap and help people understand what is unique to designing and delivering digital public services in Wales.
It was a journey to get to this point, but we’ve strengthened as a team and learned a lot, so it was all worth it.
Even when it may feel straightforward at the beginning, solving these problems is hard, and it’s ok to not get it right the first time.
We certainly didn’t and we’ll run into other challenges as we go.
And that’s fine, it means we get to learn and get better.
Get involved
We’ll be talking with users over the coming months to get a better understanding of their needs.
And if you work in the public sector in Wales, that’s you!
Take part in our research to help us by emailing us at standards@digitalpublicservices.gov.wales, and we’ll be in touch soon.
