Full Stack Service Design is a model to help people break services down into the parts that make them and understand how all of these parts impact the user experience.

Services are made up of thousands of tiny, often accidental design decisions.

These design decisions are often unconsciously made, in isolation from one another, and without an understanding of the impact they will have on our services or the experience our users will have of that service. 

From policy development to metrics & measurements, organisational structures to technical architecture, all of these components – and the decisions we make about them on a daily basis – have an impact on the services we deliver and our ability to meet user needs.

Yet the vast majority of the tools we use to design services – from user journey maps to blueprints – focus on just the parts of a service that a person can see and where we believe we can firmly influence the output of how a service should work with a level of certainty.

Service design is rarely greenfield. Most service design is brownfield most of the time.

The activity of service designing, whether that’s adapting existing services or inventing new ones, usually takes place in an environment where many other services are already live, their structure dictated by the organization that delivers them.

By the time we turn our attention to the ‘user experience’ of the service we are designing, we are often limited in scope because of decisions that were made long before we started. This means that more often than not, we are designing on top of less than perfect infrastructures, fluid organisational models and cultures potentially adverse to change. 

The result is that all too often, our good intentions are not implemented because of this imperfect reality that lurks below the surface – the technical, policy or financial constraints, lack of strategic vision, organisational delivery skills or our business model that can scupper even the most well thought through user journey. 

It’s easy to think of these things as ‘constraints’ that get in the way of good service design, but these components are the things that design our services, and – just as we would design a machine that builds a product – they need to be consciously designed and influenced so that they themselves can build better services.

When working in a brownfield environment, we need to design how the constituent components of a system – from its rules, policy, culture, infrastructure or design impacts the user experience and how it helps, or stops meeting user needs and/or desired outcomes. 

Just like a mechanic can navigate, diagnose and fix a car’s engine with the help of part specialists, we need the capabilities to navigate an organisation or system, diagnose the parts that are blocking a service meeting user needs, and collaboratively orchestrate a strategy alongside domain experts on how to improve this. 

Service design isn’t an individual role, it’s a team sport. This is about ensuring the layers of an organisation consciously recognise their role in making the right decisions that will enable an organisation or system to meet common goals, user needs and service outcomes.

Introducing Full-Stack Service Design, a model to help us understand what the components of a service are and how they affect the user experience

This model helps to identify what the components of a service are, and how they impact its design. 

Just as a product designer making a chair will understand the malleability of materials they are working with and the manufacturing processes to go from raw materials into a product someone sits on, this model will help you to navigate the physical and invisible materials that make up services.

The materials that our services are made of form a series of ‘layers’ – from the veneer like surface layer a user sees – the service itself – to the infrastructure that this service sits on, the organisation running that infrastructure, the intent that drives that organisation, and eventually, the culture that leads to the creation of that initial intent in the first place.

As we tunnel back through these layers, we see how each preceding layer has an effect on the next. Like the layers of the earth’s crust, each reliant on the next layer down for it’s stability until we reach the core, that affects them all.

These layers form a ‘stack’ of things that we need to think about when designing services – the full stack of service design.

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The 5 Layers of Full-Stack Service Design

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A service is something that helps someone do something they need to do – be that to pay tax, book a holiday or buy a house. Services are designed (intentionally or otherwise) to deliver an intended outcome as defined by the organisation providing it.

When someone is using a service, we might refer to them as ‘a user’, and the experience they have as the ‘user experience’. We might replace ‘users’ with other more specific words like ‘patients’ ‘visitors’ or ‘residents’ that reflect the relationship that our user has to our particular service.

When we talk about someone using a service, we can also mean people who are delivering that service, because that person often needs to use parts of your service, even if they are doing so to provide a service to someone else

Services are made of the things that our users see and experience themselves – their user experience and the things they don’t see – the business processes that we use to run those services.

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Business processes are a series of actions we take as an organisation that enable services to take place.

Some processes are explicit in the user experience, involving a combination of interactions between staff and users, for example, checking someone into a hotel. These are commonly known as the ‘front stage’ processes.  

Others are automated or invisible to users, like a background check on your finances if you’re applying for a mortgage or health and safety processes to ensure what is being delivered meets safety standards. These are commonly known as ‘backstage’ processes.  

Other business processes are not directly related to powering the user experience but facilitate the organisation or system to work collectively in order to facilitate all of it’s services, for example – internal payroll, or deliveries of goods.

Business processes usually have artefacts that support staff to understand how to deliver services. These things might take the shape of manuals, online learning resources, process diagrams and in-person training sessions. Some of these even become learned and imbibed by staff over time.

When business processes are not designed well, they can be expensive to provide, stop users from getting the support they need, or force them to become experts in negotiating your complex processes. Many poorly designed business processes end up being hacked by staff to deliver work more efficiently which can end up supporting users better but also potentially putting them, or staff, at risk. 

Processes will usually incorporate elements of compliance, or health and safety to ensure staff and users are kept free from harm, for example, a process might be put in place to  keep users data safe and meet data protection regulations. These are usually reviewed and audited by organisations or sometimes externally accredited by ISO standards. Understanding these standards will help teams know what needs to be designed into the processes that power services. 

How do business processes affect the service? 

Business processes can increase or decrease the time it takes for your user to do the thing they need to do

Business processes can be designed with varying degrees of flexibility, either  enabling or disabling staff from performing certain activities that help your user to achieve their goal

When exposed enough to users, complex business processes can force people to become experts of complicated systems and language.

Poor business processes can lead staff to ‘hack’ or creating workarounds that make the service easier to deliver for staff, but that could potentially put users at risk

Back to other layers

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Services are built on infrastructure that enables them to run. Sometimes this infrastructure is visible to users, but most of the time it’s behind the scenes powering the service to help users, both staff and members of the public, do what they need to do.

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Most services, whether they’re experienced online or offline by our users, are powered by some kind of system or set of technologies. 

Users tangibly interact with technology all the time. We log into digital services, we buy tickets in train stations from machines, we pay for groceries using a debit card. These technologies have a direct impact on our experience of a service, however just because users don’t interface directly with a piece of technology, it doesn’t mean that this technology doesn’t have a huge influence on the service. 

Emergency call handlers use interfaces to deploy ambulances, clinicians document patient notes in systems, banks call up your financial data to check for fraud. From documentation to decision making, we interact on a daily basis with the technology that powers services, whether we know about it or not. 

Your choice of technologies, how they work together to produce a system that supports your service can dictate the edges of what is possible, and what is not in the services we deliver. 

Your decision on what technology to choose and how it is managed is an important one, and how much control you have over it directly impacts your service. Systems and physical hardware can be managed and developed in-house by a skilled team, out-house through a contractual arrangement with a supplier or in a blended model where some of it is managed in-house with more complex components of it out-sourced.

Understanding what technology powers what parts of your service, what those technologies  are capable of and how easy they are to change is key to recognising the constraints and possibilities of future service design.

How do our systems and technology affect the service? 

If staff can’t easily use the devices and systems provided to them to do their jobs, it negatively affects the time they can spend on delivering the service

If staff have to use multiple systems to deliver a service, it can impact the time taken to deliver it and result in less users being supported directly

Our ability to change technology systems quickly impacts our ability to be responsive to user needs

Contractual agreements on the technology estate affect our ability to update products and make changes to the user experience

What and who we choose to run and design our services on or with, technologically speaking, can both enable or restrict the freedom we have to integrate with other systems

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In most services, ‘data’ is information in a form suitable for storing and processing by a computer, sometimes open for anyone to view, but mostly closed because it is sensitive, personal or owned by an organisation. 

Data can be qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative data is non-statistical and descriptive, typically unstructured or semi-structured in nature. Text documents, audio and video recordings and images are all examples of qualitative data. 

Quantitative data on the other hand can contain all sorts of information about us like our names and addresses, and when this data is combined, can be used to identify a bigger picture. 

Data can be produced by our users, for example, by inputting information into a form, or tracking our daily exercise. It can also be produced about us, for example, by a social worker registering a concern in a system about a child.

Qualitative data isn’t typically easy for statistical analysis but instead can be categorised manually or by labels or common attributes. Quantitative data on the other hand can be counted, measured, and expressed using numbers. We might not be aware that we are producing this data- like browsing history, or the tracking of where we’ve visited with our phone in the background. What is important about quantitative data is it is typically structured to be easy to analyse and called upon through various mechanisms. 

When it comes to using data to design services, there are four things we need to think about 

1. How we document and standardise our data 
2. How we use and exchange data 
3. How we use performance data to inform our decision making
4. Safety and privacy 

Documentation & standards

Data standards are the rules by which data is described and recorded. In order to share, exchange, and understand data, we must standardize the format as well as the meaning.

Services can talk to each other through data exchange, but only if we standardise how we record that data and make it available.

Standards are important because they enable different sets of data to be used together, for example, a user’s name and age that might be recorded in one part of your service is then able to be used alongside that same user’s location that might be recorded elsewhere in the service 

Standardised data also relies on guidance and documentation for how we record and share better quality data. 

Transactions and exchange 

Data is only valuable if we use it to do something. Data powers services and enables multiple types of user interactions to take place. These exchanges utilise data that is available to call upon and can work from multiple sources once data is standardised. 

In order for data to be used within our services, and exchanged between all of the different parts that need to use it, we need to establish rules on what to share and how to share it. 

One of the ways we enable our systems to talk to one another across organisational, geographic or sectoral boundaries is to use APIs. This stands for Application Programme Interface. 

Think about when you book a holiday online. Many sites will aggregate thousands of flights and destinations which you can filter based on price, or location, or available hot tub! Many services use third-party APIs to collect flight and hotel availability from providers and to confirm the trip with the provider they sourced it from. 

Performance

To understand if we are meeting service outcomes we need data. Performance data captures insight about how our services are performing. This is captured in a variety of ways from manual questionnaires performed at stages of the user experience, for example a charity assessing how well people are when they enter and leave a recovery service to automated data like a municipality collecting how many cars are on a road through sensors. 

Access to this data is vital and our ability to analyse it against our performance indicators for a service is important. Often this data is part of a reporting mechanism so being able to extract it in a meaningful way for internal or external reporting can matter, and in the most efficient way possible. 

Safety and privacy 

Almost every aspect of our service will require some collection, storage or use of data. At each of these points it’s important to consider how safe and ethical the use of that data is.

Data is a material and how we store it, name it, use it, all needs designed to ensure when we design a service that enables a user to do something, it enables them to do so with ease and does not conflict with existing regulations that protect users like GDPR and the Data Protection Act. Baking in privacy by design features and considering data as a material that powers services, we should always actively interrogate the consequences of the services we design and if there any unintended consequences that would be considered a breach of someone’s rights.

How does data affect the service? 

When data is not interoperable because of lack of standards or guides on format, it can result in manual processing leading to mistakes and failures in the user experience

Without considering the consequences of how user’s data is presented, we can create negative impact on the user experience 

Data can define what users see and interact with in the user experience through profiling perceived interests or needs

We can improve the user experience by reviewing what is and isn’t working from data

We can use data to improve realtime user experience

Data storage can define how we build and launch services and at what pace

We can use data to build up a better picture of users and proactively support them

Privacy by design currently causes friction in the user experience, adding more steps to users transacting in services

Aggregated data can help the wider system learn about trends and needs and govern with more user centered policy and outcome frameworks 

Without the right data, we can’t report on and understand our service performance 

Back to other layers

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Services are shaped by the organisations that create them. 

Just like how a product is shaped by the machine that produces it, the way we construct our organisations or collaborative arrangements to design, deliver and maintain services affects the user experience.

Our mental models of how organisations or organising should work often create constructs that our services inherit, making users do the hard work to navigate the bureaucracy of organisational designs.

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Governance drives organisations and brings people together to make decisions. How it is run, what data we use to make decisions and who is involved all impact on our services. 

Importantly, governance outlines not just how decisions are made, but the rules of who might be involved in taking decisions, who has authority for those decisions and who is responsible for these when they happen. 

When governance is done well, it helps us to make sure we’re delivering our mission, monitoring risks and delivering the services we should be. Without governance of some format to monitor and challenge performance and risks, organizations can put their sustainability at risk and the services they deliver. 

Governance takes the form of varying processes, rhythms and rituals that bring together people at varying levels of seniority – from boards to team meetings – to take collective decisions. This usually comprises scheduled meetings that bring together information and data in varying formats and the decisions being taken within these. 

To make informed decisions you need data and knowledge. Good governance considers what type is needed to make informed decisions about the services being delivered and the sustainable operation of these. The most important piece of information to include in any governance is information about the end user and what effect any decision that is being taken will have on that user.

It’s important to recognise that whilst governance is run as a set of formal events and structures, the influence on decision making can often come in between the margins of meetings through conversations. The importance of relationships and power must be recognised amongst the formality of governance. 

Understanding how governance comes to life in your organisation, what relationships drive it, when key moments take place, who is involved and what kind of data is being used to drive decisions within a given governance structure is key when you’re considering the redesign of any service.

How does governance affect the service? 

How much autonomy we have to make decisions on behalf of users can impact our ability to be able to respond quickly and proportionally to the things we find in user-research and improve our services

Not having performance data on services in the right forums can impact the effective design, delivery and maintenance of a service

If services aren’t properly governed, they can quickly become inefficient or unprofitable, leading to the discontinuation of services

The sustainability of a service is based on the strength of an organisation’s governance. At an organizational level, if your governance is not effective in marrying up the supply and demand and the balance of funding of your services, there is potential for services to suffer, leaving users in potential danger if it is a critical service for them 

The user experience can be affected by poor decision making governance when there is a lack of understanding of what it takes to make, build and deliver services. This can lead to setting short time frames to deliver services

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Most services are shaped by what money or resource is available to invest in and run them. This money can be provided by a range of avenues, directly from customers to public finance models where organisations work under contract, commissioners, annual letters or targets.  

Finance is the management of money and includes activities such as investing, borrowing, lending, budgeting, saving, and forecasting. What an organisation invests in, often centres around their forecasted budget. Forecasts and budgets are usually cyclical and in many traditional models run on an annual basis with the backdrop of a forecast painting the best and worst case scenarios. 

Financial budgets and forecasts will usually be aligned with some form of organizational strategy so recognising where and how these decisions are made, and how they are signed off, will help release investment when you’re trying to improve a service. 

Financial budgets and targets are usually provided to departments, teams, services or functions of an organisation that outline what they can spend on delivering their service, commonly with targets on what they should make or save. 

The type of money or funding an organization can also come with constraints. External funding can often come with conditional outcomes attached to it, stating what an organisation should deliver or spend it on. Some funding is to specifically fund service delivery. Some are conditional for an organisation to develop it’s governance to be able to deliver services well. This can often result in organisations building services specific to funding they have received and eroding their original central offer they set up to deliver or investing in short term needs, over longer term infrastructure. 

Funding is rarely stable and can also increase and decrease dramatically in quick cycles depending on external factors. When there is increased need for a service, for example in a pandemic, funders may invest in increasing provision quickly. This will drive new services and increased capacity for meeting needs, however when over, finance can force these to close down as the programme of work finishes. 

The balance sheet is a key touchpoint of an organisation’s decision making. Institutions regularly meet around maintaining a clean balance sheet indicating they have little or no debt, or if there is actual debt, that the risk is managed and will be recovered. A balance sheet is the summary of the financial balances of an individual or organization, no matter what kind of formal structure exists and in short, covers their assets, liabilities, any shareholding equity at a specific point in time. 

A clean balance sheet means ensuring a healthy level of available cash (liquidity) to flexibly fund operations and save up for what the Brits call, ‘a rainy day’, where you have to recover from something unexpected happening. This is about being fiscally responsible and ensuring there is a healthy level or profit to reinvest back into running the organization, or spending to the limit of what has been outlined for an organisation in their financial envelope or ensuring in a charitable context there is a healthy level of reserves maintained. 

It’s important to recognise that many decisions on how resources are allocated – whether that is expenditure for service provision, development work, or ongoing maintenance – will all come back to a spreadsheet. In larger organisations making decisions might be taken by a business or finance team who are overseeing a business case for a specific department, and will make a call on expenditure on a case by case basis. In small organisations decisions might come back to a basic live spreadsheet where examination on spend is a literal line by line outline of expenditure. The numbers may be hugely different from £100s to multi-million contracts, but the question is always the same – can we afford to do this, and what is our return? 

Depending on motivation, corporation type and business model, an organisation might emphasise profit, breaking even, or spending funding they receive wisely with conditions, like a grant. 

This might mean that financial decisions take the form of resourcing decisions or decisions about time and focus of a team. It’s not money that’s the asset here, it’s people’s time but it’s still a resource that powers a service.  

Understanding basic economic concepts can go a long way in recognising how services are costed, financed and sustainability can fluctuate based on external factors. Profit and loss, cost of delivery, EBITDA ( Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization), return on investment, scarcity, supply chain are all terms and concepts worth learning so if in the position of making a business case to invest in services, you can talk in the language of the balance sheet. 

All of this is important to recognise who and what is driving decisions in terms of how an organisation invests. How systems and organisations finance services impacts on the ability to sustainably deliver them and improve them overtime. This includes non monetary based investment, for example where to focus internal resources.

An organization’s annual or time based budget typically outlines where resources will be spent and is sometimes signed off by external stakeholders or decision makers, like a board of trustees. Understanding when and how these decisions are made is important if you need to navigate or pitch for funding to develop and deliver services. 

Further to how funding works, it’s important to think about how an organisation invests. An organisation can choose to invest their finances and resources into the technical systems that power a service, the user experience of a service, the staff who deliver it, the security of the service. There are many spinning plates to invest in keeping a service running before considering investment in updating or changing it. 

If an organisation has money in abundance, it may still not choose to invest it into service development.  An entity can choose to manage its finances to focus on varying different outcomes. They might choose profit and deliver a minimum viable service, or a service just good enough for users. It can choose to use profit to invest in research and development, and improve its services overtime. An organisation can choose to focus on increasing turnover by developing more services in the marketplace or choose to retain existing shares of services and continue to deliver their service. Conversely, they can choose to deliver less.

Finance, understanding it and how organisations take decisions around it, is central to service design.

How does finance and resources impact on service outcomes and the user experience? 

If there is no available finance or cash fluidity, an organisation cannot invest in updating or improving its service

The constitution of how an organisation is set up and its goals will affect the decisions made on service expenditure and investment

The timescales for service improvement to meet user needs is reliant on being programmed into a financial decision making cycle and forecast, and ultimately the timing of service improvements may revolve around annual budgetary sign off

Emergency funds at a time of increased need can create a dependency on services which can result in issues when this extra money is taken away

Supply and demand of materials to deliver a service and their costs will impact the bottom line of an organisation and change their capacity to meet the scale of demand, positively and negatively

Funding, if not designed well, can limit cross organisational, departmental or geographic boundary work because it limits where it can be spent

Service decisions can be driven by budgetary cuts that are outside of an organisation’s control

The promise of finance in return of future profitability can drive decisions on how a service might be designed to save money or make profit

The conditions and outcomes attached to financial investment will dictate what kind of resources can be focused on service improvement or purchased

How a service is designed may be dictated by how it is assessed for financial gateways of spend controls

The spend controls set out in an organisation or sector’s legislation can stop a service from progressing into implementation      

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Procurement and supplier management involves buying goods and services that enable an organisation to have the resources, equipment and people to deliver their services. 

Procurement can refer to the final ‘purchase’ but can also refer to the process of defining a need, going to a market, choosing suppliers and signing contracts for delivery. 

The procured services can be both directly and indirectly connected to the service the user interacts with, for example organisations might procure research services that help inform their organizational strategy or they might procure entire end-to-end services for users and the touchpoints they interface with. 

Procurement can form a large or a small part of your organisation’s ability to deliver services, with some organisations being set up to handle the procurement and running of services entirely through external providers, and others delivering their services entirely in-house with minimal help brought in.

Most services run at scale will have some kind of interdependency on an outsourced supplier which is usually technology related, and organisations have to make a decision based on their finances, skills and capabilities whether to deliver services themselves or utilise external suppliers to help them. Whilst there is no right answer that will fit every organisation a balance needs to be struck between the speed of initial delivery (which is often faster with an external supplier), the speed to spin up a service and the long-term sustainability of the service. 

Some organisations allow teams to run their own procurement, meaning the individual who will be responsible for the successful delivery of a supplier’s contract will be at the helm of the procurement and see it through. However, in many instances, a scope of work or outcomes can be translated by procurement and legal departments to ensure it can go out to market. Sometimes the actual needs of a team or department can get lost in translation during procurement because of the need for legal definitions or domain expertise not being readily available in the procurement team. 

This misunderstanding can continue once a supplier has been chosen and a legally binding contract developed at the end of a successful bidding process which can include targets, incentives and service level agreements (SLA’s) that can shape the way that this supplier works and therefore the service itself is delivered.

With any outsourced component, we must ensure that suppliers will consider user needs in the way they work and ideally, commit to iterative development and improvement of the service over time. Unless these needs are thought of at the outset of procurement, it’s all too easy for organisations to purchase an external supplier’s systems at a low price and feel like they’re gaining value for money but find themselves later in difficult circumstances when the costs to have simple changes made mounts up.

From setting the anticipated outcomes and needs, to how you engage with suppliers, the criteria you use to assess suitability of a supplier can be tailored to emphasise a focus on user needs and iterative development. This is far from the norm of outsourced contracts but a shift that is being called for. Most procurement exercises list refined details on outputs, lengthy pre-defined features and unshiftable delivery dates because it is easier to manage and review performance, however this is usually inadequate for modern and agile ways of developing and running services to be able to respond quickly to changing needs. 

Getting the contract right, arrangement around collaborative working and expectations, continuous improvement needs, and integration with your existing infrastructure are all important considerations in the procurement of external support to run services and setting the conditions for how you will manage and work together with suppliers. 

On the flip side, if choosing to run services in a more blended or in-house approach you need to be sure you have the right finance available to continuously resource the maintenance, development and running of services through skilled teams and staff.

How does procurement impact service outcomes and the user experience? 

If procurement focuses on outputs, not outcomes it is likely the service will not meet user needs over time

Service level agreements (SLAs), developed during the procurement process will dictate if and how your service can be improved, timescales for requested changes and what happens if something goes wrong which will impact your user experience 

The contractual agreement will outline costs for changes to be implemented to your externally provided service which you may or may not be able to afford 

If your external service providers are not adequately audited, they may pose a risk to service continuity if you externally outsource and they hit hard times 

Procurement must ensure that suppliers will be able to integrate with existing systems that services are run on and meet any integration post system upgrades that are in the pipeline, or costly development may be needed and disrupt service continuity 

Without clear design principles in place that suppliers must meet, suppliers may not consider user experience and user needs as highly as you do resulting in an inaccessible or poor user experience 

A blended mix of service providers that make up a user journey may cause confusion for users if the name of services or brand changes during their experience 

How you score your potential suppliers and the criteria they must meet could alienate certain organisations from bidding for your service 

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How we work as an organising structure, and how we design – whether consciously or unconsciously – our organisations into departments and teams can often dictate the design of our services, structure and processes for users. 

We’re used to hearing about siloed organisations being bad. In truth, most organisations have silos of one kind or another and they can be useful for ordering complex work and systems. 

More often than not though, these useful silos are a double edged sword – helping to deliver complex services, but at the same time preserving that same complexity in hard-coded team structures and job roles. 

These silos can easily also lead to breakdowns in the user experience, and create confusion over who is accountable at each stage of a user’s journey through a service. This can lead to a fragmented or disjointed user experience when these organisational seams become visible to your user, forcing them to learn the organisational structure and its codified language to use the service.

But it’s not just organisational silos that affect the way we design services. We can talk about ‘organisational structures’ in a few ways.

There are official organisations – those registered in a country as a business, a charity, not for profit, or part of the state’s infrastructure. 

In this formalised setting ‘organisational structures’ are the system used to define hierarchy within an organisation and how delivery is monitored. It will outline who does what and who reports to who. 

This kind of structure will affect the organisation’s actions and staff activities, with policies and cultural elements shaped around this and vice versa.The structure also determines how information and decisions are taken across the company. 

Some organisations will be centralised, meaning decisions and information will flow in a top down way, whilst decentralised structures might have distributed decision making powers, sometimes shared across staff.  

Equally, our services are often influenced by more informal organising structures at work within our organisations. There are often organising structures that are unknown to an organisation, undocumented or not officially defined, formed of informal networks or sub-groups set up on their own merit to help achieve the end goal. 

In all cases, there is an element of organising people, assets and resources to work collectively towards a shared outcome and all have an equal impact on the eventual decisions that this organisation (whether formal or informal) makes about its services.

How do organisational structures affect the service?

Org structures can become visible to users, with services designed around siloed teams meaning users have to learn specialist language and mental maps to meet their user needs

When services are run by multiple different departments without clear ownership for service decisions or approval processes are complex, this can affect a services ability to respond quickly to feedback or emergent needs

Decisions around services can be taken by people multiple times removed from the frontline delivery and informed by specialised reporting, meaning the true needs of users might not be communicated to help make well informed decisions on user needs

The organising of people around functions and not services means that decisions made about the full stack of what powers services may be made based on organisational need and not in reference to a wider user journey leading to unmet needs or difficult to use services

Services can often be delivered by a team that then disbands once the service is live’. but without accountability for the continuous improvement of the service, this can lead to services failing over time from system updates to not meeting user needs

Improving the user experience can often fall between the cracks of different teams and their budgets. Even if a specific team wants to proceed in reviewing a service performance or improving it, politics, budget, resources might get in the way of doing so

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In order to deliver a service we need to be clear about who is responsible for what tasks and at what point in a service they are being delivered. The skills we have within our organisations, and the way we define those skills into specific ‘roles’ plays a huge part in our ability to organise ourselves to deliver our services. 

In the context of services, roles can be assumed to look after specific parts of a user experience and carry out the tasks that need to be fulfilled as part of this. The proximity of roles to the service users can differ, with some working closely with users, whilst some roles work behind the scenes to power the service, never directly interacting with them. 

In most organisations roles usually become more tightly defined as they get closer to a user, for example in a call centre. This level of definition can determine the amount of autonomy that staff can have to meet user needs and can sometimes constrict their ability to deliver the service a user needs

Equally, roles are sometimes so closely tied to the operation of systems and infrastructure that change to the role or system become intrinsically linked with one another, making both much harder to iterate and improve.

Overall, services need to be owned. There is a role for making decisions and prioritising needs that a service must meet and ensuring this is regularly reviewed. It is essential, even if the service is delivered by multiple teams and departments that there is a clear empowered role owning the end-to-end service who has the authority to make changes.

How do skills and roles affect the service?

Staff with inadequate skills to deliver an element of a service may delay processes in the user experience

Unskilled or inexperienced staff can put users at risk in a service

A lack of perceived or actual autonomy for staff in their roles can lead to a limit in the ability to meet user needs

The future delivery of a service may be at risk if the skilled workforce is not available

Some systems and infrastructure require such specific skills to operate that over time, both the system and role can become very difficult to change

When services go wrong it can take time to resolve issues if there is not a clear owner for the service to prioritise fixing it

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Measuring performance is a key part of ensuring an organisation is meeting its overall goals. Measuring the outcomes of our services help us understand if we are delivering the impact we set out to deliver, but it also motivates us to do certain things in our organisations too. What we outline as a good outcome for services has an impact on how we design, deliver and monitor our services, and then incentivise this performance. 

Most of the targets that an organisation has to meet are based on what the organisation, or whoever governs and funds it, deems to be important and believes will help them to meet their overall end goal. Our measurement frameworks and outcomes can be set by an organisation, defining what they think good looks like for users. Sometimes, this is set out in their policies or articles of association, or explicit targets related to their business model, profitability or Government priorities. 

These might be a requirement to do something like improve health, reduce crime or social exclusion in return for credibility and funding to deliver their service. Whatever that target is, it will have a huge impact on the incentivisation of an organisation to deliver something. 

Outside of the public sector there are an equal number or standardised ways we can measure performance – from Net Promoter Score (NPS) to Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) in much the same way as many of the public sector targets, these frameworks can help us to set what ‘good’ looks like for our services and measure them across different sectors. 

It’s important to recognise though, that what an organisation thinks as ‘good’ outcomes for them is not always what is right or ‘good’ for users. 

What we choose to measure in service delivery is important because it outlines what we believe good to look like. When done well, our approach to measurement can support an organisation to improve what it does on a daily basis and continue to improve in meeting user needs. When done poorly, it diverts attention from meeting end user needs.

Measurement, outcomes and the incentivisation of them must be treated very carefully. The implementation of any measurement system from targets to service-level agreements, balance sheet reporting to national performance frameworks can sometimes detract focus from whether or not services are actually delivering the things they need to do for our users. Reporting and the governance of performance data can sometimes become such an overwhelming focus of an organisation’s process that they forget to step back and ask – are we collecting the right data for the right thing in the first place. Is this really helping us improve what we do? 

The implementation of performance measurement can operate at a variety of different levels from service level agreements (SLAs) between partners to individual staff targets that might be tied to a bonus scheme. All of these will have an effect on the way the organisation behaves and are vital to align to the organisation’s purpose,and what good looks like for our users.

Overall, the real test of good measurement is if it;

• is designed around solid evidence on what good means for users 
• helps an organisation improve its offer iteratively
• is based on collecting and reviewing the right data
• Incentives in place don’t create divisions in overall delivery

How does measurement and incentives affect the user experience?

How we design and deliver services, and review their performance can be driven by measurements and incentives

Measurement indicators can sometimes be used negatively to show good performance but miss people most in need

What we define as ‘good’ creates a measurement system which in turn, dictates how we design services

Measurement and incentives affect the user experience by driving our attention to who we should and could help, and how

At a delivery level, measurements and incentives drive behaviour of staff who deliver the user experience

Incentivising individuals or teams to focus on performance can sometimes result in attention away from the user experience

Measurement frameworks can focus us on optimising one part of a service without considering the end to end experience

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Who gets to make decisions, and how those decisions are made, shapes our services and the fabric of the organisations that deliver them. It’s therefore hugely important that we know how to influence those decisions as we work to convince people of your vision for what needs to change. 

Authority should be treated as a material when a team starts work together and they should strive to find out how it works in relation to what they might need to change.This will help understand how they might be able to influence decision making at the right moment with the right material. 

We should be questioning when decisions are made, who really makes them, and what influences those to really consider user needs as well as what decisions have been taken to inform where they entered the programme or project. 

Working out who has the ability to make the decisions we need to be made is often not as simple as it seems though. 

The ability to make decisions can be explicit in someone’s role within an organisation; where we can recognise that a person has the authority to make certain types of decisions because of their position in our organisational structure.

However, this official ‘authority’ doesn’t automatically give someone the power to action the decisions they make. While someone might have official ‘authority’ for decision making, they might have no available budget to deliver the decision they’ve made, no direct reports or even a low level credibility among more senior peers that impacts their power to make change happen. Likewise someone might have very little official authority within an organisation but be so highly regarded by peers that in reality they wield much more power in decision making than we might assume just by looking at their official role.

This happens because our organisations are social networks, made of real human beings, not just boxes on an org chart. Just like any other social network, some of the people that contribute to our organisations have more influence than others.

Understanding these two forces of authority (the decisions someone is supposed to be able to make) and power (the decisions a person is actually able to make) within our organisations is an important part of negotiating change to happen within a service.

In most typical structures, authority can usually be described as flowing from the top of an organisation to the bottom as part of a hierarchical structure. 

In order to get things delivered, particularly at a complex scale of delivery, authority must be distributed evenly throughout your organisation to enable decisions to be taken at the right level. Giving authority away doesn’t mean resolving leaders of their responsibility but empowering those with the most knowledge to make the decisions they need to . Authority can be given by clearly stating what decisions others can take on an individual’s behalf, granting permission and designing in an accountability loop to check in on progress.  

Importantly, without making authority levels clear within your organisation, unofficial power can easily take over as the primary means of influencing decisions, making decision making undemocratic and often exclusionary to more diverse groups. Power isn’t always fair and can be more centralised through cliques and close relationships or homogenised group think approaches.

Authority, and the dynamics of power is present in all forms of service design from how we approach designing services, to how services are delivered. Levels of authority can affect staff delivering services for an organisation. where staff feel governed by unwritten rules or by power structures that don’t actually exist, leading to a feeling of a lack of autonomy. 

Authority and power also permeate the relationship between service provider and person using a service. For example, there is usually a power dynamic between doctor and a patient. Both have relevant experience and knowledge about an illness in question that can be considered as equal, yet we usually believe there is one set of expertise that is more important than the other. Power structures can easily become unconsciously designed by inherent biases or beliefs, that in turn affect our services. We must always question ourselves and the power dynamics at play when designing services. 

Authority and power are inherent in the services we design and we must consciously talk about and design with it in mind or risk these things having an unconscious effect instead. 

How does authority affect the service?

Authority has the power to stop investment in our services. If the right case isn’t created that ladders up to business and/or user outcomes then work will not start

The best case can be made for investing in a service to improve it but the actual authority is held by a decision maker who doesn’t value what users need. If authority isn’t clear within an organisation or properly distributed then unofficial power can overtake official authority and decision making becomes an activity for a privileged few, meaning ideas for improving services can be instigated without evidence or those with evidence don’t get taken seriously unless the ideas being put forward are by someone with power

Back to other layers

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The intent of an organisation is the thing that it wants to achieve. This could be to ‘reduce road deaths’, ‘be the best beverage company in the South West’ or ‘make it easy for people to get the groceries they need conveniently for less money’. 

Whatever this thing is, it is often more detailed than just simply ‘making money’ (if a commercial service) or ‘looking after or supporting people’ (if a public service). 

An organisation’s intent is the thing that defines what services it provides and why it operates. 

This intent is often documented in a ‘mission’ or ‘purpose’, and, if that intent is fully supported within that organization, will be encoded in every layer that this organisation uses to think – from its policies and business models right down to it’s values and ethics.

When we’re changing a service it’s important that we consider each of these ‘thinking layers’ and the effect they will have on how that organisation behaves and what it does.

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How organisations finance and sustain their services is largely driven by the underlying business model an organisation uses. A business model outlines the value to be delivered to service users and what value the organisation who provides it might gain in return. It covers who the intended users are, where revenue comes from and how this is invested, the products and services it might produce, how it might deliver those and what it needs in place to resource those things. 

There are lots of different ways you can charge for your service, and define who will pay for this. Business to Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C) subscription, rental, freemium and leasing are all examples of business models that are successfully delivered in today’s market. 

A successful business model doesn’t need to consider money alone as the value an organisation will get from providing a service. This can be switched for a non financial resource like volunteering time or swapping something. 

Business models can evolve at any stage of a service’s lifespan. Sometimes they are considered before an organisation is created to drive forward the creation of a new entity, in other cases, they evolve as an organisation is delivering services, adapting as they respond in real time to how people use their service(s) and markets change.   

They can focus on delivering one service, or expand to cover multiple products and services over time, equally, new technology or channels can often be deployed to transform how a service is delivered in line with the model. 

Business models are closely linked to mission and ethics as they determine the value exchange an organisation wishes to have with its users. For example, an organisation might offer a free service but utilise a user’s data for financial gain. 

We should always question and understand the business model powering services as it helps us to understand what our service outcomes are and how we balance user needs with business objectives. Without that knowledge, we can’t competently design services that deliver business objectives or question them where they need challenged.

How do business models affect the user experience?

Business models dictate the parameters of how a service can be designed to ensure it delivers value

Decision making can impact the user experience if profit or financial gain is the key driver

Business models can dictate what parts of the population we focus on based on return on investment

Business models can derive value for the business but in some situations, negatively impact our users

An outdated business model can stop an organisation from radically changing what it delivers to meet user needs 

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Policies are the things that define a course, or set of actions.

Policies set the boundaries and rules of how we deliver our services, and how users can use our services. For example, a holiday policy for teachers might define when children can attend school, or a child protection policy for a charity might ensure an adult is always in the room for safeguarding purposes. These policies affect the way a user experiences a service because they dictate the way that service is implemented, and sometimes what that service is.

For example, a service that helps users to claim government benefits is derived from political intent, which becomes policy, which is then interpreted into a service. The rules and constructs written into policy can either tightly define the design or leave space for interpretation. 

Policies and the design and delivery of services are inextricably linked. Policies help us understand the constraints and boxes within what we must design, and conversely policy can be shaped by the service we design depending on the power balance of who is able to define the policy. For example, as a response to a service going wrong, policies are often updated. 

It’s important to recognise that there isn’t one person that writes ‘a policy’ or a step by step process. It is the cumulative development of conversations, reviews, consultations and design decisions. These then become the job of a delivery team to translate into working services. Traditionally this is done without direct involvement of users although there are good examples of where policy has been designed and tested with populations in recent years. 

Not all policies become a ‘service’ but every policy will need to land somewhere, and each of these things will need to be designed with users in mind.  In many cases, the service is being designed as the policy is being defined. Finding where policy is malleable is important so it can be moulded and or challenged to help support the intent for a service to be designed that truly meets user needs.

How does policy affect the service?

Policy can shape the service and user experience before it ever meets a design team or is tested. Policies can define the purpose, delivery channels or intended users of a service, even details like paper size of forms 

Innovation at a policy level can drive new propositions in familiar marketplaces and transform people’s expectations of the user experience, equally policy guides what staff can and can’t do for users in different scenarios in both hard and soft rules 

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Our missions define what we’re here to do. It’s what we use as a driving force in aligning groups and delivering on a shared purpose. Sometimes a company will have overarching mission and vision statements and it’s products and services will have objectives aligned to this shaped around what value they are trying to deliver.

What mission we seek to achieve with our services are heavily defined by the values and ethics we hold. These can be individual or shared, explicitly expressed or sometimes unwritten.

Often, we can find ourselves drifting towards groups with similar values and ethics through a feeling of mutual ambition, type of work, how we dress, what we worship, and more. In these kinds of groups there is often a feeling of shared and mutual value sets and the signifiers of these values start to appear in the ‘culture’ we create. Take a profession like social work, despite commonly reported low wages, many in the industry feel a shared sense of purpose in helping people and striving for social justice of the people they support. 

Sometimes, our mission, values and ethics are explicitly expressed and communicated. In an organisational scenario these may be explicit through company values on objects like posters, repeated sayings used by management or teams, company advertisements or written strategies containing mission-led objectives.

Mission, value and ethics drive our decision making and our ways of thinking, seeing, doing and being in the world. 

These shared and individual values and ethics will guide the organisation and individuals in it to make decisions about what they deliver. Products and services will be guided by a consensus or debate of values and ethics.

How do missions, values and ethics affect the service? 

Values can drive how an organisation treats its staff, and in turn how staff treat their customers

Strong held values can be challenged when service transformation is undertaken and can unsettle staff which has an impact on the user experience

Mission driven organisations retain staff who in turn are driven to deliver better experiences for customers

Shared values or codes that staff subscribe to can lead teams into designing services that align to it  

Back to other layers

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Culture envelopes all the components of a service because it shapes how we make decisions and act. From the autonomy staff have to how authority works, our culture shapes how we design.

‘Culture’ encompasses how we think, speak, act, our beliefs, our moral compass, how we talk, what we wear, how we interact, which all affect how we make decisions. The intent we put out into the world is shaped by this and the existing cultural conditions around us. 

Our ‘culture’ as an organisation is expressed through our attitudes and beliefs, how we make decisions, how we express our thoughts, and what we show up to expressly care for. 

The culture of an organisation can be both organic and intentionally fostered. An organic culture is often created by like minded people gravitating towards one another based on perceived shared values and interest. These might be shaped by similar backgrounds, shared experiences and commitment to the shared mission. 

Organisations can make efforts to intentionally design or foster a culture. These efforts include writing down principles, manifestos documents, company merchandise, leadership talks, physical environment design. These are often aspirational values that an organisation undertakes to nurture culture and can be somewhat effective. Culture is very difficult to design, but it can be nurtured.

The language a company uses, leadership’s actions, the training teams receive, the investment into the environment around them and their tools, investing in their rights, the communication style and signals, all these behavioural elements shape the culture and set a precedent for how people can act and deliver in their day to day jobs. 

Therefore, when we are designing we must ask ourselves what cultural conditions are needed to enable people to act in a manner that is supportive of the change we may wish to see. If the right cultural conditions don’t exist, change can be very hard to enable. 

Culture and power are symbiotic. They permeate all layers from how we shape business models to the style of governance we implement. This is based on our experiences and beliefs, and will undoubtedly shape what the organisation can and will deliver. A culture can support people to deliver freely with autonomy, conversely, it can harbour negative feelings amongst people delivering and using a service. This impacts both the collaboration in the backend of a service and the point of delivery through staff. 

Culture is not a homogeneous entity despite often being promoted as one by entities. We are diverse populations and it is shaped by variable cultures of socio economic groups including beliefs, held wisdom, shared history, celebrations and shared trauma. We must respect the cultural conditions that sit more widely outside of the ‘culture’ of an organisation or organising group. This means respecting the wisdom, knowledge and beliefs of a culture we are designing with and for, or entering into. These cultural dynamics external to a dominant logic can change our behaviour and shape our design decisions.

The wider cultural condition of a society may also impact our decision making, thus culture is fluid, not fixed, and we are responsive to the situation of the time. This means emergent needs or scenarios may shape the cultural conditions temporarily and trigger us to take decisions and act differently than our usual dominant cultural logic.

How does culture affect the service? 

Culture can define how we feel about the people we support and how we treat them 

Change can often create negative cultural responses from staff which can have an impact on an organisation’s ability to change their service model or services

A culture can nurture staff to go the extra mile to support users, conversely it can stop them from supporting users

A temporary change in culture can result from events driving a change in how we take design decisions and over time can proliferate until a given culture is eroded