July 9, 2025

When to start small and do it for real

There are some types of service design problem which are first and foremost about user experience. The assumption that must be tested is: can we design a form that someone can complete, or a website that someone can navigate.

This is the type of problem that the classic discovery->alpha->beta-live evolved to address. It prioritises user research based on mockups and delays use by real users until there is enough certainty about the design of the user experience.

There are other types of service design problems where the (often quite risky) assumptions that need to be tested are not about the design of a user experience. These include:

understanding complex user behaviors enough to be able to know what to design (e.g. complex combinations of health conditions or businesses exporting to multiple products to multiple markets)
if user behavior can be influenced (e.g. switching career, getting healthier)
what parts of a service can be automated and which should not (either because they demand a human interaction, or the scale does not warrant automation)
that a particular bit of technology can do what people hope it can in real use, not just a technical proof of concept (putting data land ownership in a blockchain, or creating a chatbot from a corpus or text doesn’t really prove anything)
that the organisation developing the service willing to really commit to changing what it does

These were the types of problem that Universal Credit had to try and solve in 2013. The team used the language of alpha and beta, but those were just labels attached at convenient points of what was, and still is, continuous delivery of a real service.

Starting with a very small number of real users from a postcode area in South London, a minimal (but real) user interface and a lot of manual processes, the approach was to build something that was just real enough to get real users flowing through the system.

Sometimes starting small and doing it for real is the only thing that works.

May 13, 2025

The idea of social objects in the design of digital services was proposed in 2005 by Jyri Engeström the co-founder of the microblogging platform Jaiku. In a blog post titled ‘Why some social network services work and others don’t’, he rejected the idea that successful digital social networks are formed between people, instead arguing that they are based on ‘object-centred sociality’.

Examples of social objects include photos on Facebook or a document in Google Docs. They represent shared points of reference in social context - a placeholder for activity and enable a conversation or interaction.

Social objects exist in real-world services to. A letter sent by a hospital specialist to a patient and their GP after a scan is not just conveying information, it forms a mini social network where each can understand their next steps and raise any issues. A prescription facilitates an interaction between a patient a pharmacist and the prescribing clinician. A passport at an airport enables an interaction between a traveler and a border official or an automated gate.

When we are thinking about the design of new services, we are in part thinking about what new social objects might exist in the future. Take preventative healthcare for example. The UK government currently has a bold mission for the National Health Service in England that aims to shift from:

hospital to community
analogue to digital
sickness to prevention

The prevention one is interesting from a design point of view because most of the social objects that exist in healthcare today are the response to events that have just happened. Test results, medical records, clinic letters, prescriptions - they are a response to sickness in the moment. Where as to design for prevention is to help users to understand the future, and to reflect on the longer-term past. And it is to design for the proactive rather than the reactive. As such we should ask: what might the new social objects in preventative healthcare be?

The following are just guesses, but social objects might include: ‘a preventative care record’, a trend’, ‘a prediction’, ‘a challenge’, ‘a invitation’, or ‘a year in review’. By prototyping new social objects like these, we can start to understand new types of interaction, while also clearly delineating the design of a new services from that which exists today.

healthcare proactiveservices socialobjects design

When to start small and do it for real

Designing new social objects (preventative healthcare as an example)