Digital

Reusable service patterns in Scottish public sector services

December 18, 2025 by Stewart Hamilton No Comments | Category Digital Scotland, Service pattern design, User-centred design

Blog post by Kirsty Sinclair, User-Centred Design, Lead Service Designer, and Anusree Raju, Senior Interaction Designer.

Service pattern design work is supporting the adoption of common digital solutions and promoting reuse across services, aligning with the refreshed Digital Strategy for Scotland vision statement: Sustainable Digital Public Services.

Reusable service patterns is a term for design methods that’s having a moment right now.

We’ve been working on them in the Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate for a little over a year now; looking across our services, categorising, naming, plotting them alongside live projects and then iterating.

The work is at a stage to share, and so this post will cover:

• the work so far; what methods we used to get to our working list
• where we are now; what service patterns are currently being developed inside Digital
• the work to go; how we’ll iterate and update them over time

What are service patterns?

Many of our public service journeys have similar moments in them, moments where citizens are doing things like checking their eligibility, renewing, updating, registering, etc.

Alt : Some of the service patterns that teams can arrange their journeys from arranged in a row: ‘Prepare’, ‘Log in’, ‘Upload’, ‘Schedule’, ‘Get decision’ and ‘Renew’.

We recognised that we shouldn’t be starting from scratch when designing each service, rather, we should work with a set of blocks that can be arranged to compose service journeys.

What if these blocks looked, felt and operated similarly – regardless of the service they appeared in? E.g. checking my eligibility for solar panels felt similar to checking my eligibility for child benefits. That experience could save time designing service moments but also helps to save our users time as they move more smoothly through services that operate to their existing expectations.

What if those assembling new/improved services had access to this kit of parts? They could arrange them into their service journeys, tweak as necessary, then move to test those as prototypes.

We think that offering this as a working design method can save time, money and effort for service staff while also building consistency, trust and efficiency with users.

We wanted to plot all the repeatable building blocks of our services, to understand what this kit of parts might need to include. So, we started by looking at all the things that our services are helping folk to do.

Finding our service patterns

We started by looking across all the services that our website, mygov.scot, currently houses and points to. We found more than 400!

Many are arms-length organisations, some are services run by our 32 local authorities, some are the services run by the UK Government.

That leaves many Scottish-run services. We started to categorise them by their main function and generated our first list of 22 working service patterns.

We did the work on a large mural board. Making a card for each service, then moving it to a category, and giving that category a name. We used ‘good services are verbs’ as a mantra here, as our services should exist to help make a change happen.

Slide showing 400+ services categorised into our first 22 pattern groups, by action.

Once we had our first 22 service patterns, we started talking to different teams about them, and about the idea that reusable service patterns could help us to develop quick prototypes with service teams. Each team had edits and additions. We talked a lot about naming conventions.

We also started to bring the service patterns into live projects (detailed blog post coming soon) which helped us to tweak their naming and uses.

We’ve established this working list of 39 service patterns. We fully expect this to change over time as we continue to work with organisations and end-users, collaborating to scope future services – and as the needs, technology and policy within those services changes.

Exploring service patterns and where they fit in a service journey 

Our team has been looking at how these reusable Scottish Government service patterns appear across a service journey. Understanding their placement—whether at the start, middle, or end of a service—helps us design more consistent and user-friendly experiences. 

Reusable service patterns at the start of a service 

• Discovering that a service exists; Learn, Understand 
• Finding the service for you; Find, Search 
• Getting Support; Contact, Get help 
• Get ready to start; Check, Prepare 

Reusable service patterns in the middle of a service 

• Getting Access; Log in 
• Updating a service; Tell, Report, Renew, Contact preferences 
• Applying to a service; Apply, Register, About you, About your business, Offer, Add reference, Upload, Pay (in), Prove, Declare, Confirmation  
• Contact a service; Schedule, Additional Information

Reusable service patterns through the continued use of a service 

• Using the service; Get the thing, Get assessed, Data sharing 
• Challenging decisions; Complain, Challenge, Appeal, Refund 
• Leaving a service when it’s right; Cancel, Log out

This approach helps us design journeys that feel predictable and supportive for users. 

Next steps 

• If you’re working in Scottish public sector services, we’d appreciate feedback on additional service patterns that your service may need. 
• If you’re working on another service, we’d love to hear how these patterns differ from your own – and whether any more cross over could be helpful. Get in touch: deliver.digital@gov.scot  

We’ll continue to share how these service patterns are being used in our design work, and helping to provide consistency across the infrastructure, data and technical components of our services.  

This is work in progress and sharing it helps to make it better. 

Tags: digital, promoting reuse across services, scottish government, Service pattern design, service patterns, User-centred design (UCD)

Comments