Digital

Creating the service patterns cards

December 22, 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 post three of three. Read the previous blogs in the series.

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.

This post is about the tools and methods we created to collaborate on service design and development work, using service patterns. We knew we wanted to design an activity to facilitate teams across the public sector to assemble their future service journeys from the patterns.

At first, our scoping sessions with teams were either online or hybrid, and so we quickly mocked up a way to pick and choose patterns from our list, and move them onto a horizontal service journey line, using online collaboration boards. We called these the ‘drag and drop’ sessions. 

Participants would often not interact, and instead observe the facilitator moving the patterns they’d highlighted in discussion, as well as layering in details and unique service moments for consideration.

As demand for these sessions to be in person grew, we wanted to incorporate these behavioural observations and test the idea of the patterns being a physical card-sort type activity. 

Service patterns postcards in action – plotted along a horizontal line on a brown roll of paper.

Steps we took 

• Asked our brilliant content designer to independently look over the working patterns and suggest duplication, re-write the one-liners and descriptors/examples
• Which brought our list from 45 to 39
• Drew up the little screens indicative of the user experience layer for each pattern (these are done in mural – just boxes and lines) 
• Mocked up a postcard-sized card for each service pattern. Title, 1 liner and image on the front, description and example on the back – colours are from our SG palette
• Included a blank pattern card, so folk could suggest missing patterns to us
• Exported these so that 2 cards fitted on an A4 sheet to print 
• Printed a set (40 patterns = 20 sheets of paper). using used regular printer paper for the first iteration
• Cut, folded and stuck the cards using straight rule/guillotine, craft knife, glue stick 
• Bundled these with some rolls of brown paper, post-its and sharpies – ready for an in-person session

Cutting, folding and sticking the paper cards into their packs.

Card pack ready to be used in our workshops

Instructions we gave to groups, for a lightly facilitated session 

• In your groups, talk about the future version of the service you want to plot out
• Think about when it starts and ends (there will be things either side of these moments!) 
• Discuss what’s working in the service right now, and what you’d like to improve
• Look at your cards, read the front and back together
• Arrange the cards that feel like they have a place in your service on your horizontal journey line
• Shuffle and move them to get a good flow through the service
• Add in any missing patterns
• With post-its, layer in things that need to be specific for your service
• Share with the other teams

In some instances, we gave groups a service scenario to plot out, in others we asked them to pitch their own service ideas. 

What behaviours we noticed
We noticed that most groups took the pile of pattern cards and first divided them into 2 piles; those they’d include, and those they exclude. Then they moved to arrange them in order.
Most groups didn’t really read the descriptions and examples on the back, just worked with the titles. 

Many groups would hold the cards in their hands while talking about that moment in the service journey; gesturing and waving it to make their points. It helped bring that bit to life.  

Groups would also hold a couple of cards up at once, if deciding which one to go with.

Some groups swapped over the meaning of some patterns (e.g. Search/Find)

Suggestions from the tests so far

• Groups told us that ‘Get help’ and ‘Contact’ didn’t necessarily feel like discrete moments, but consistent layers that should be present in journeys
• Additional service patterns to consider; Identify, Select, Get called (e.g. ‘your turn now’) 
• Categorising the list, somehow … We’re going to try by section of the journey usually found in (beginning, middle, end)? 
• Building up data of how patterns tend to link together e.g. ‘Prepare tends to be followed by Check’, to help folk to plot best next steps – this might take a while to get to, but we’re quite excited by the prospect of ‘pattern pairs’, or triggers

What’s next for service pattern cards?

We’re going to continue to test this in-person format in our project work helping to scope public sector digital projects. And iterate on the format, outputs and facilitation of the sessions.
As the list of patterns iterates, we’ll continue to add new ones into the pack.

We are currently exploring the possibility of creating printed versions of these packs. Get in touch with the team at deliver.digital@gov.scot if you would like to find out more about getting a pack. 

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

Comments