Service Design

There’s more to design than just making a button obvious to users.

Service design is the broader picture. It’s how end-to-end journeys intersect. How users follow the labyrinth of your system and what they need to know at each juncture. And it’s about making everything seamless and friendly to not only your users, but also the team that will build what you’ve designed.

At Damn Fine Digital we have experience in holistic service design across each and every stage of development, from discovery to post-launch support.

We are also experts at behavioural psychology, so can spot friction and pain points well ahead of user testing sessions, speeding up the entire development process.

Government Design System (GDS) Expertise

Government departments use a unified design system that we at Damn Fine Digital have been employing for over a decade. Whether a page needs a simple radio selection or a complex layered hierarchy of elements, we can ensure that designs are GDS compliant, meet accessibility criteria, and will sail through development.

Once the designs are developed, and the testing is done, it’s time to take the work to the Dragon’s Den of the Government Design System Assessment Panel.

At Damn Fine Digital we are experts at sailing through these assessments, and in telling the team what the focus and priority should be to appease the most recent GDS requirements.

Every project that we’ve worked on has passed its GDS assessments, whether they be Alpha, Beta (both public and private), or Live.

Research and User Testing

Users should be at the heart of every project, which is why testing your service or app with the people who will use it is so important.

At Damn Fine Digital we have run numerous research projects with users, from qualitative interviews with solicitors up and down the country, to remote surveys and analytical deep-dives of form completions and bounce rates.

But what is data without a story? Just a bunch of numbers. And that’s why we take special care in preparing narrative driven playback sessions, where the numbers become stories that aid the team in understanding the problems, pains, and pitfalls that our users encounter.

Accessibility Expertise

One of the most important elements of design is accessibility.

And while it’s important to ensure that all people can use a system from a humanist perspective, it’s also important from a financial one too. Because if the people that need to use a system can’t interact with it, then your support team are going to be very, very busy.

At Damn Fine Digital we have spearheaded accessibility projects for several government departments, putting together reports, recommendations, and even development shortcut sheets that Business Analysts can simply copy and paste into their JIRA stories.

Bespoke App Development

Apps can be a great way to get your project or service into the hands of users.

But they have to be done right, otherwise eyes will roll, and many a huff and tut will be heard from users who think “this could have just been a website”.

At Damn Fine Digital we specialise in creating minimalist, simple apps that fulfill a particular purpose. There’s no feature creep, no bloat, and no black hat UX design with us.

And of course, they are always easy to use and fully WCAG compliant.