Digital

Practical application of reusable service patterns on a real service use case 

December 19, 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.

This is blog two of a three blog series. Read blog post one.

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.

In 2024, the design team at the Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate developed the first set of reusable service patterns — shared building blocks aiming to make services more consistent, efficient, and user-centred, regardless of department or topic. 

The next step was to test them in practice. Could they be applied directly to a real project? Would they hold up in complex service environments, and what would we learn from doing so? 

At the start of 2025, the team had an opportunity to find out through a proof of concept for a new food business registering service — a digital solution designed to help food business operators in Scotland register through a single, unified process. The project became an ideal test case for applying and refining the emerging service pattern library. 

Applying patterns to the food business service 

The food business registering project offered a chance to apply our patterns to a complete user journey. We began by mapping this journey from start to finish. This helped us overlay our existing service patterns and assess how well they aligned with the real-world flow. 

• Learn – understanding what the service is and whether it applies to the user
• Check – helping users confirm eligibility or the correct route before starting
• Apply/Register – completing and submitting the necessary forms
• Track – monitoring progress and receiving updates
• Receive – getting confirmation or outcomes

Mapping these stages clarified where the patterns held up and where they needed adjustment. For instance, the Check stage proved more complex than expected due to local authority variations, suggesting the need for a refined sub-pattern for pre-application checks. 

Refining the pattern library through practice

Rather than designing new flows from scratch, we used the existing service patterns as a foundation and worked backwards — applying them to the project, observing what fit and what didn’t, and refining from there. 

This backwards approach allowed us to test the relevance, flexibility and completeness of the pattern set in a real-world context. Some key learnings included: 

• Learn needed to account for how users discover services in decentralised ways — for example, there were multiple entry points to the service than a single recommended one
• Check required clearer guidance for conditional logic — short question flows that route users based on policy rules
• Apply/Register reaffirmed that multi-step form patterns are broadly reusable across government, reinforcing the value of consistent design and data-capture standards
• Track highlighted the need for standard terminology and visual cues for progress updates to ensure users always know where they are in the process
• Receive showed the importance of handling multiple confirmation sources when services involve several local authorities

Capturing these insights allowed us to make the service patterns more adaptable to diverse policy and delivery contexts. 

Service patterns in action 

Testing patterns in a live project also revealed how they connect across systems. The registering service, for example, involved several shared digital components: 

• ScotAccount for login and authentication 
• User dashboard for managing applications 
• Digital mailbox for notifications and correspondence 

Each of these elements fits within and supports a broader service pattern. Seeing them in action helped us confirm that the library supports modular design — assembling services from standardised building blocks rather than designing bespoke flows each time. 

This is where the idea of pattern bundles becomes powerful. A reusable bundle like “Register for a thing” can include several linked patterns — such as “Learn”, “Check”, and “Apply” — along with interface templates, content guidance, and data standards. Future teams can adapt these bundles to their context, reducing effort and improving consistency across similar services. 

Prototyping as a discovery tool 

Low-fidelity prototyping played a supporting role in this work. Rather than focusing on visual design, we used quick, mobile-first sketches and wireframes to test how the patterns played out across the journey. 

This made the abstract tangible — helping stakeholders see the end-to-end flow, understand dependencies between components, and validate whether each stage of the pattern made sense for users. 

We quickly surfaced the points where patterns overlapped or needed refinement, bridging the gap between conceptual design and practical implementation. 

Sharing and iterating together 

Throughout the project, we worked openly — sharing the evolving pattern applications and findings with colleagues across different service areas. This collaborative approach helped: 

• Validate that the refinements were relevant beyond a single project
• Identify common challenges across services, such as eligibility checks or multi-agency workflows
• Build confidence among delivery teams to start applying and contributing to the pattern library

We iterated often and ensured that the learning fed directly back into the shared repository. This continuous feedback loop is essential — the service pattern library isn’t a static set of rules, but a living framework that grows through use. 

Looking ahead 

Applying service patterns to a live project has given us valuable insights into how they function across policy, design, and technology layers. As we continue to use them in new services, our priorities are to: 

• Expand and clarify guidance for when and how to apply each pattern 
• Develop sub-patterns for recurring steps such as ‘Provide evidence’ or ‘Review details’
• Test how patterns scale for complex or multi-agency services
• Strengthen links between service patterns and existing design systems and component libraries

Ultimately, our goal is to make service patterns the foundation for designing consistent, reusable, and user-centred services across government. 

Conclusion 

Service patterns are more than templates — they are a shared way of understanding how public services work. By applying them in real projects, we can validate their effectiveness, refine them based on evidence, and build services that feel familiar, predictable and trustworthy.

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

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