The way service assessments work is changing. As a service designer, I was initially wary of service assessments. I feared they might be burdensome and bureaucratic when we needed to move fast. In reality, the opposite was true. When we were developing findbusinesssupport.gov.scot, we were the first team in Scottish Enterprise to be subject to an assessment. We treated the guidance as a methodology to apply to our research and development. We recorded everything we found and every decision we took, and published everything we did, as we did it. Designing in the open. It’s all on our Github pages. ## Don’t prepare. Be prepared All our research went on the wall, or a whiteboard. Everything visible to everyone, Now we can point at things, and talk about them. I recalled a conversation with our agile coach, back when we were doing our digital transformation pilot. We were talking about Show and Tells, and he said “You should never have to prepare for a show and tell.” And he was right. In that environment, everything we needed literally surrounded us. All our research, results from experiments testing our hypotheses, analytics and metrics – all of it was on the wall. If anyone had a question, we could say, “Ah, come over here. Let’s look at this.” I replied, “Don’t prepare. Be prepared.” So we took that approach, but extended it. As well as putting stuff on our walls (well, windows by then), we published everything that was publishable. We just made it part of our workflow. Personas, data, and propaganda on our windows at Atlantic Quay When you’re done with a piece of work, publish the results. It’s part of the definition of Done. Have you written up the results? Has that been published? No? Then it’s not done. ## Use the service standard to build quality, inclusive services Anyway, the real value in service assessments is we can engage with the business on our terms. We **have** to consider #a11y, we _must_ think about how we included under-represented groups. You think you need a website? No, you’re designing a service, and these are the things you’ve never thought about that you need to think about. * What about people with a poor (or no) grasp of English? * What about people who don’t have great internet access? * What about people who just want to pick up the phone and talk to someone? * What about people who can’t see your video, can’t hear your podcast? And there is a standard for this, set by people who can kill your project tomorrow. That is the way you should think about the service standard. It’s not a hurdle to overcome. It’s a platform to build on. Use it to build high quality services that work for everyone. Embrace it. #DesignInTheOpen Oh, our assessors absolutely loved our research timeline. (That was down to my user research colleague, not me.) It made their jobs so much easier. And ours. Nobody had to curate or corral anything. We just sent them a couple of links, invited them to the office. Talked them through stuff. And that was that. [Editorial note: this post is based on a Twitter thread I posted back in February. I’ve tried to add a bit more detail and context here.] David O'Brien Website | + postsBio I'm a service designer in Scottish Enterprise's unsurprisingly-named service design team. I've been a content designer, editor, UX designer and giant haystacks developer on the web for (gulp) over 25 years. * David O'Brien https://design.scotentblog.co.uk/author/davidobrien/ __No more cookies for you * David O'Brien https://design.scotentblog.co.uk/author/davidobrien/ __I cycled to work * David O'Brien https://design.scotentblog.co.uk/author/davidobrien/ __The disability myth * David O'Brien https://design.scotentblog.co.uk/author/davidobrien/ __Who are we willing to exclude? ## Possibly related * Accessibility - Sharing knowledge between organisations * How we provided evidence for the Digital First Assessment * "Getting Connected" with our Customers * Good services scale * How many people does it take to design and build a service? * Invisible Disabilities

In week 185, Martin went to the city of Wiesbaden, the state capital of Hesse, to co-run the annual Public Service Lab Day. He gave a talk about the Service Standard to local and state government coll...

Zwischenreport zur Anwendung des Servicestandards durch internes Peer-Panel zum Online-Dienst „Elterngeldrechner“

Zwischenreport zur Anwendung des Servicestandards durch internes Peer-Panel zum Online-Dienst „Elterngeldrechner“

19. Dezember 2024 - BMI und DigitalService entwickeln den Servicestandard weiter. Dabei stehen die Menschen im Fokus, die die Services wirklich anwenden. Wir binden sie direkt in die Entwicklung mit e...

In week #153 at Digital Service, Martin visited the DigitalAgentur Brandenburg, participated in a Service Standard content workshop, and wrapped up the latest Service Gazette.

The Creative Bureaucracy Festival took place again. Martin co-ran an international workshop on ‘design for policy’ and accompanied the launch of the updated Service Standard.

(Bild: VIT) Unser Schwerpunkt ist diesmal der Servicestandard: Martin Jordan (DigitalService) und Ralf Käck (BMI) berichten von der gemeinsamen Arbeit mit über 40 Organisationen. Außerdem sprechen wir über die Forderungen der Kommunen nach Geldern aus dem „Sondervermögen Infrastruktur".

In week 151, Martin met with senior executives of GovTech Singapore. He did some hands-on work related to Service Standard content structure and greeted the new user research operations working studen...

Martin joined his second session as a member of the Digital Council of the Minister for Infrastructure and Digital of the State of Saxony-Anhalt. He learnt more about the state’s challenges and levera...

The week before the general election in Germany, Martin contributed an article to Süddeutsche Zeitung Dossier comparing current developments in the UK and the US, reflecting on what Germany’s new gove...