Service patterns

Public services in Wales often feel inconsistent, making them harder to use and increasing the workload for public sector teams by duplicating work. 

Many organisations struggle with limited resources, inconsistent designs, and a lack of bilingual accessibility.

Service patterns are reusable solutions to common design problems: practical templates and guidelines for building services (or part of services) that are repeated.

A service pattern library could support public sector teams in Wales to design digital services faster, cheaper, and more consistently – creating more seamless, accessible, bilingual services.

The challenges we’re addressing include:

• inconsistent design: service users face different processes across the Welsh public sector
• resource constraints: teams often start from scratch without clear guidance
• bilingual accessibility: the quality of services in Welsh is lower
• scope and adaptability: existing solutions don’t always meet user needs

Our goal is to test if a standardised, user-friendly service pattern library could help improve:

• consistency: standardising service design across the public sector
• efficiency: reducing time and effort spent on design, translation and usability testing
• bilingual accessibility: ensuring equal functionality in Welsh and English
• usability: providing clear guidance on implementation and adaptation

During our discovery for a design system for Wales, we explored design challenges across the Welsh public sector. We engaged the design and development community to better understand their needs, challenges, and opportunities for collaboration.

A key finding was the potential for reusable assets and design patterns to improve services across Wales.

After this discovery, we ran a five-day design sprint to explore the potential of a service pattern library. Through a rapid design-thinking approach, we developed a rough prototype to test ideas and deepen our understanding of how a pattern library could support teams in Wales.

We’re testing our service pattern library prototype through hands-on collaboration with public sector teams. 

We’re running service mapping co-design workshops with different public organisations to validate and refine our approach.

Through this workshop, we’re:

• exploring how reusable service patterns can improve efficiency, consistency, and accessibility
• mapping real user journeys for each pattern, identifying pain points and opportunities for improvement
• testing and iterating patterns to ensure they work in practice
• educating partner organisations on the value of patterns, and how to use them to design future services

This work provides will help us: 

• understand if a library is the right thing
• produce reusable patterns for the public sector
• collaborate closer with public organisations
• increase understanding of a user-centred approach to service delivery

Interested in working with us? Email liam.collins@digitalpublicservices.gov.wales and adrian.ortega@digitalpublicservices.gov.wales to have a chat!