I am delighted to have Richard Pope join us for a remote guest talk in about 2.5 weeks.
My colleague Stephanie approached Richard after they both took the stage at the Amsterdam conference back in April.
Now, the talk has been scheduled for the second half of September. For the occasion, I created a small poster for the kitchen space to inform people visiting the office.
In 3 years, this will be the 3rd international guest speaker joining us, following Martha Lane Fox and Marty Cagan.
Collecting service pattern examples to distribute quality at scale
On Thursday, I ran a service pattern collection exercise in the design biweekly session. As a foundation, I used the GovStack material that the UX/UI working group shared in their Amsterdam workshop in April.
To kick us off, I provided a brief 10-year history of service pattern work abroad, drawing on Lou’s 2015 blog post and Ignacia and Kay’s 2018 workshop. I mentioned the ongoing work of Jas at TPXimpact and the global patterns workshop we hosted with the GovStack folks last summer.
Then, we dove into collecting. With a primary focus on page templates at first, we gathered what exists across offerings developed at Digital Service. The contributions from designers included our justice services, parental benefits, the Service Standard page, and other initiatives, such as recent concept work. We saw commonalities but also divergence. There is alignment work to do.
Why do this? Why now?
As we move the service.justice.de platform towards the KERN Design System, there are several tasks we should complete now. For the justice platform and services we have built in other areas, we have established some patterns. But so far, we have handled them rather loosely; we haven’t governed them tightly or documented them well. We should work on that swiftly.
Service patterns with consistent user flows and page templates help create consistency across services. When done right, well-designed and well-documented patterns ensure distributed quality. Consistency helps build trust.
As of now, the KERN Design System lacks page templates, user flows and service patterns. Today, it primarily covers styles and components. In consequence, serviceportal.gemeinsamonline.de and servicestandard.gov.de don’t look nearly the same – even though they use the same building blocks. That is why I recently sketched improved flows for demonstrating what is possible and should happen – see thoughts in week note #171.
In the context of our justice service platform, the lack of patterns does not hinder our adoption of the KERN Design System; however, these gaps need to be closed quickly. There is an opportunity window we need to use.
We need to refine and package our page templates, user flows and service patterns for the justice service platform. Once done, we need to contribute these to the KERN Design System to fill its gaps.
The KERN Design System is a vital lever for establishing and scaling service quality, just as design systems in other countries and large private sector organisations are. While truly shared platforms across service areas seem far beyond reach in federated Germany, the KERN Design System can be, and should be, the bridge. For that, it must do some heavy lifting.
To be effective, the styles, components, templates and patterns in the KERN Design System need to make their way to existing platform tools. There are form builders and low-code platforms that are already widely used or will get further adoption in the coming months and years. Partially, these are still reluctant, as we learnt, to integrate the cross-government umbrella brand. That needs to change.
Building on criterion 9, ‘Establish security and build trust’, and criterion 10, ‘Use open source and share code’, the Service Standard can help with distribution. By combining the capacity of the Service Standard, umbrella brand, and KERN Design System, we can provide complete building blocks to services across government, creating alignment and order.
As senior officials of the Federal Ministry for Digitalisation and Government Modernisation have stated before, the German government service landscape is a hodgepodge. What users experience is a hit and miss. Now, with these 3 levers, we have the opportunity to bring things together, at least on a visual and experiential level.
While adopting the KERN Design System for our services, we can help fill essential gaps and contribute missing quality-raising building blocks to it.
The relationship between platform tools like GOV.UK Forms and MoJ Forms and the GOV.UK Design System illustrates how to support the smallest transactional services and the underfunded teams behind them. That is the blueprint for us to follow. This needs further conversation across teams and organisations.
What’s next
I will dedicate some attention and focus to the half-year objective I’ve committed to. That’s working on an improved portfolio vision.
Also, Sabrina will run the next iteration of the ‘Introduction to Service Design’ training. I will assist her. It will be the German-language premiere of the training. For this, we have swapped various examples.
Also, it’s the first time we have invited designers from other parts of the public sector to join. That was the default in the UK, but so far, we have wanted to bring our colleagues joining from the private sector to get familiar with a service design approach to government. When there is a chance, we like to broaden it further. So, next week is a test run.