Service Designer

As a Service Designer, you’ll have an overview of an entire end-to-end service, back to front. You’ll design journeys across both digital and offline channels. That means you’ll be able to consider how accessibility is impacted across the whole service.

You should ensure your designs meet accessibility standards. You should familiarise yourself with:

Both are published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

You should also have an understanding of the different ways that users access content and be able to explain ways to meet those requirements.

In Government, services we build must be accessible to everyone who needs them. This includes public servants too. As a Service Designer, you will be designing a service that may be used by external people or staff, or both.

Your overview of the end-to-end service may give you an insight into inclusivity for both external and internal users. Others on your team might not have this insight, so you should be an advocate in your team for all your users.

You can read more about the role of Service Designer on the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework.

Things to consider

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) conformance

Meeting some of the success criteria in WCAG will require consideration of how your end-to-end service works. You will also have to consider potential integrations with other services and systems.

Integration with other services

You should consider the accessibility of any other services you want to integrate before deciding to include them in your design. These other services may have an impact on the accessibility of your design. For example, your service may pass the user to an authentication service before returning them to the main journey.

Asking Questions

Many services ask questions for users to answer. You should ensure that you don’t repeatedly ask the user the same question over and over. This can be a more complicated task than it sounds. Repeated questions can be difficult to avoid when designing a complex service with many integrations.

Consistency

The way you navigate the service and ask for help should be consistent across integrations if possible. As well as testing features of the service, you should be testing whole journeys.

Service Designers should pay particular attention to Service features guidance in this manual. These pages provide more detailed information on WCAG success criteria you should consider. Pay particular attention to the Redundant Entry and Accessible Authentication success criteria.

WCAG conformance is just a starting point for your design. Service designers need to consider offline parts of the user journey too.

Non-digital accessibility

Parts of your service, as well as some of your design activities, might occur offline, or non-digitally. You must consider offline accessibility too.

Disability charity Scope has lots of guidance around accessibility in the built environment. Scope provides guidance for users on how to check the accessibility of an event or venue. This can be useful to understand what things people may consider when attending somewhere in person. Scope for Business also have an accessible events toolkit that you may find useful.

Design Communication

You will need to clearly explain design decisions to others using appropriate tools and methods.

This means that you need to ensure any of your communications are accessible.

Some basic steps include:

Using legible fonts and check that your text has enough colour contrast.
Not relying on colour alone to convey meaning.
Checking the accessibility of your slides in PowerPoint.
Using plain language and explain acronyms.
Sending your presentation ahead of the meeting when possible.

Journey maps

Service Designers often develop maps to convey a user journey through a service. These maps should be accessible, so that they can be used by as many people as possible. This will mean you don’t exclude people from engaging with your design or making decisions about it. For example, you could create a text alternative to your maps and other visuals.

The Services in government blog has some practical guidance on creating accessible maps.

Advocating for accessibility

You should advocate for accessible design to avoid excluding people, by:

articulating accessibility requirements and make sure your team and stakeholders understand them.
ensuring accessibility subject matter experts (SMEs) will be available to work with you.
demonstrating the outcome of inaccessible designs.
showing who might be excluded, for example create a lane in your mapping for this.

Designing together

When preparing and facilitating design activities you should ensure as many people as possible can be included. This is true, whether your activity is online or face to face.

You should:

provide enough details about the activity ahead of time to enable people to give you feedback about potential issues they might have. This will help you adapt your activity ahead of time.
plan for extra time if you are involving disabled people.
ask for feedback so you can learn and improve.

This is for anyone involved: your team, third parties, external and internal users.

When you can’t make a part of your service accessible

Sometimes, you won’t be able to make parts of your service accessible. Be clear about who you are excluding through your design choices and alternatives you have in place for them.

Your service might be technically accessible online, but not the best solution for some users. An offline alternative might be better for them.

For example, consider the digital self-check-in at Jobcentres. It might be difficult to change accessibility settings if you need to use a screen reader and cannot hear in the busy environment. Speaking to a person at the Welcome Desk could provide a better experience.

You should be familiar with DWP’s legal requirements under the Equality Act 2010.

This means:

having an understanding of what protected characteristics you must not discriminate against.
understanding what obligations you have to provide reasonable adjustments.

You should consider working with Accessibility Specialists better understand these requirements.