Defining a service

Defining your service is a difficult but important part of the Digital Scotland Service Standards criteria to help define what success looks like and solve a whole problem for users. Your users and your organisation may have different perceptions about your service. Defining your service means everyone involved understands what it is and what it is trying to achieve. It also makes it more likely that you will deliver a successful service.  

Part of defining the service is working out when it starts and ends. For a user, the service begins before they click the start button on your site. Our perception of the service is different to our users. You need to know when they start and end their journey.  

If services are hard to understand or use, it can confuse users. This leads to more work for organisations delivering a service. It’s dealing with more cases and phone calls, and users spending more time trying to fix their problems. Bad services are expensive and take up more of your users’ time.  

Following the Digital Scotland Service Standards helps to make sure that services in Scotland continue to improve and make users their focus. 

A whole service 

A whole service includes everything a user and an organisation needs to do to reach a goal. This includes things like the user doing research and deciding what action to take. It's also everything that you need to do, like how you deliver the service and give support. It’s important to remember that both parties have goals they need to meet. 

To meet the Digital Scotland Service Standards a service should solve a whole problem for users. Before creating a new service or making an old one better, you need to understand how it all works. This means thinking about the service: 

• from start to finish: think about everything a person needs to do, even things done by people who are not part of the organisation 

• from what users see to what's behind the scenes: this includes both the service people use and the elements like software and the rules that make it work 

• in every way people use it: on the phone, by post, in person, or online 

• from a user’s perspective: the scope of the service should be based on user experience 

The truth of designing services 

There are common elements that occur across service design. Read ‘The truth of designing services’ for more advice whether you’re designing a public service for citizens, developing an internal service or improving an existing service interaction.