Service Patterns: Good in theory, Hard in practice.

As a Service Designer, user research is core to our practice and time and time again I find myself wondering how to create an insight repo in order to share valuable pieces of information on common behaviours and motivations learned across multiple services so that they can then be shared across industries, domains and other sectors. We often look for analogous examples and metaphors to prompt inspiration and ideation, but at what point can it become more than just inspiration?

In 2018 I attended ‘UX Brighton 2018 — Advancing Research’ which as you can imagine was looking at the place of research within the UX landscape — touching on new tools and methods, and time to extend our research skills to embrace new technologies. I was inspired by Dan Pidcock’s talk on Atomic UX research.

“Knowledge has a half-life. You need to constantly re-evaluate & re-validate what you think you know”

Dan Pidcock

Based on Brad Frost Atomic Design principles: interested in what our interfaces are comprised of and how we can construct design systems in a more methodical way. Much like chemistry, where atomic units bond together to form molecules, which in turn combine into more complex organisms to ultimately create all matter in our universe. Similarly, interfaces are made up of smaller components. This means we can break entire interfaces down into fundamental building blocks and work up from there. That’s the basic gist of atomic design.