Ben Holliday

About

Everything service patterns

I recently wrote about the Service Patterns event TPXimpact co-hosted with MoJ as part of Services Week. This included thoughts about opportunities and how organisations are using more strategic, pattern-based approaches in 2025. As I talked about in that previous post, there are now lots of blog posts and examples of where organisations are using service patterns.

This post is an attempt to document everything I know and have bookmarked about patterns work. It won’t be definitive, but points to what I’ve written and read, and the teams I’ve worked with directly.

I’ll keep this up-to-date, so if I’ve missed anything, or if your organisation is working with service patterns in a way that could benefit others, please get in touch.

The Government Digital Service (GDS)

In 2016, former Director of Design for UK government Lou Downe wrote this GDS blog: Let’s talk about service patterns – explaining what service patterns do and how important they are.

“Service patterns are sets of practical guidelines for building services (or bits of services) that are repeated across government – something like getting a licence or exchanging the ownership of something.”

This early post uses the example of discovery work with DEFRA, where the GDS team found lots of services which fell under the category of licenses. A later 2016 GDS blog by Harry Trimble then introduced another example: Check before you start – an alpha for service patterns.

This work was originally positioned as an extension of the GOV.UK design system, which is built around common styles, components, and interaction design patterns. In the current version of the design system you can find a check a service is suitable pattern. The documentation of patterns here is based on what I would describe as digital user flows.

In 2018, GDS shared a further post that expanded and built on this work: 10 principles for service patterns.

FutureGov and Essex County Council

In 2017, I wrote for FutureGov about how we had been giving some thought to the idea of service patterns in local public services: What do we think about service patterns for local government?

“We think that for a service pattern to be useful it has to be a way of documenting or sharing a common user experience or user journey, and, as importantly, a supporting business process […] We think that a pattern at a service level such as ‘applying for a license’, or ‘paying a parking fine’, must also help shape the design of the organisation operating the service.”

The design team at FutureGov started to apply elements of this approach to local government and third sector work over the following 2 years. This culminated in Essex County Council setting up work with our help to map common service patterns for Essex.gov.uk. This is still the project that many people ask about and point to as an example of implementing a more transactional service patterns approach.

This original work on the Essex project was developed and led by Nic Ward, with a FutureGov team including Alessandra Canella and Jenny Thai. The Essex Digital Service shared this work and talked about the approach being developed on their own team blog:

At the same time we expanded on this work on the FutureGov blog.

Understanding your services (2019) explained how understanding your services is the first step towards improving or transforming them. This post included the taxonomy we designed to map all the transactional services at Essex, as well as the workshop prompts we used for collaborative mapping work.

Designing services with life events (2019) explored the bigger opportunities for transformation through joining up different user journeys and interactions in new ways by focusing on life events.

“…once we start to identify patterns, we can also challenge them. For instance, should services be organised in a way that begins with a life event, such as ‘having a baby’, ‘getting a job’, ‘getting married’ or ‘retiring’? Mapping and exploring patterns can also give us the opportunity to rethink services for more ambitious, system-wide conversations.”

All of this work was wrapped into a project to publish a public library of LocalGov Patterns… This has been maintained/archived as a useful resource based on the data captured in the original 2019 work.

The Essex team continued to develop this work, with Nic Ward also sharing a post about the work for the Service Gazette later in 2019: Using service patterns – Changing the conversation in local government. This article was also part of the Service Gazette print publication that year, distributed at conferences.

My blog and TPXimpact book

My most detailed post on this topic was shared on this blog at the end of 2019: How to use service patterns in your organisation. In this post I focused more on using service patterns as a strategic design approach – for delivering consistency at scale and for optimising for the design of services. I also focussed more on using patterns to design whole services – including both online and offline elements.

“Moving beyond digital delivery, teams can start to work with patterns across whole services, thinking more broadly about the design of different types of user journeys and future scenarios […] Working with service patterns should be about shaping and informing the start of a design process where you have to work with an understanding of the people and situations that you’re designing for.”

The following year I followed this up with a more practical post that included working with service patterns: An introduction to service modelling. This set out the idea of service models being a way for organisations to create, test, and scale the design of whole services. As well as patterns, this focused on working with hypotheses, design principles, measures for impact, and the need for prototyping approaches. Again, the emphasis here was on shaping more strategic service design approaches that scale.

Finally, in 2020, I spoke about service patterns as part of Services Week – this post includes notes from that talk and a useful reference to the patterns work of the artist Bridget Riley.

In Multiplied (2022), the book I wrote for TPXimpact (which FutureGov had become part of by this point), I shared similar points around service patterns as a way of supporting modular design and delivery, including the Essex case study and the LocalGov Patterns project.

TPXimpact and DWP

Building on earlier FutureGov examples, Megha Wadhawan led work with Helen Spires at DWP in 2023: Service patterns as a strategic approach for digital transformation. This project explored how service patterns could be applied to non-transactional services and used for wider digital transformation in government. It included work with both digital and policy teams.

BT/EE

At the start of 2019, Jeanette Clement shared early pattern-based work from her team at the Parliamentary Digital Service: Understanding services through user needs. Jeanette has since gone on to lead service design at BT/EE, where they’ve championed these approaches, with the most recent update on service patterns work shared in March 2025:

Barnardo’s

In the third sector, Barnardo’s has openly shared work on patterns and how they use this to deliver their strategy, including this latest post by Amy Ricketts, Head of Service Design: Service modelling at Barnardo’s (2025).

MoJ and Reuse by Design

Nikola Goger, Head of Design at MoJ, and others from her team, have published posts on Medium in the past year – under the header ‘Reuse by Design’ – linking together a number of chapters and latest thinking on service patterns. This includes work to establish a new cross-government working group. Posts include:

In March 2025, work from the cross-government group was shared more widely on the GOV.UK Services in government blog: Developing service patterns – reusable designs for building government services. This post links to a prototype to help teams design an ‘apply’ journey in a service. Launched as part of Services Week, it has been created from multiple ‘apply’ journey examples in DWP, MoJ, DfE, DEFRA and HMRC. 

Other pattern-based work

In 2024, the Service Gazette published a new post by Laurence Berry, Betty Mwema, and Stefan Draskic: The evolving concept of service patterns. This describes work by another group to explore and document a global pattern library that works across governments. This is being built on GovStack’s open-source community. This references back to the early GDS, FutureGov and Essex work described earlier.

There are other useful libraries related to service patterns, and with a specific focus. A good example is the Projects by If design patterns catalogue which helps teams design trustworthy services. It documents a number of detailed examples, such as patterns for designing how users ‘sign in to a service’. There is also a library of Service and Design Patterns for Social Housing, and a Mental Health Patterns Library, which is a dedicated resource for those involved in developing and delivering digital mental health support.

Broader influences on pattern-based approaches shared here can also be found in Kate Tarling’s writing and book about Service Organisations, and in Sarah Drummond’s Full Stack Service Design approach.

March 28th, 2025. Posted in - Service Design, Service Patterns

This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.