In the third and last part of this three-parts article, we identify various benefits and challenges in designing with dialogues in service design. We conclude that with dialogues as a separate abstraction layer, service ecosystems with multiple touch points can provide a much more coherent citizen experience for public services.
Benefits and challenges
In our design projects with government agencies, we increasingly find that working with dialogues is relevant, valuable and useful. People react to them well, and engage with them easily.
Dialogues are beneficial because they are channel- and touchpoint-independent and agnostic. They can be discussed without having to refer to specific characteristics of a touchpoint.
Secondly, the re-usability of dialogues is high. For example, dialogues such as ‘Identify citizen’, ‘Pay bill’ or ‘Find answer’ can be implemented in touchpoints across multiple channels.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, using dialogues requires all involved parties to be citizen-centred. It forces many to change their perspective.
While most service designers might be unfamiliar with dialogues, they simply require a subtly different mindset. It is quite common to think about services in terms of the physical and digital touchpoints involved. Unfortunately, thinking only in terms of the features, functions and capabilities of those touchpoints has several disadvantages: the commonalities of services and touchpoints are identified very late, too late or just not at all. The touchpoints become the focal points, instead of the citizens, their needs and drivers. Furthermore, emerging technologies create the necessity to rethink existing touchpoint concepts completely, whereas the underlying dialogues manifest themselves just as a new kind of touchpoint. And besides this changed mindset, a specific design skill is developed when working with dialogues: designers become proficient at working at differing levels of abstraction or granularity. Identifying and describing the commonalities and differences of services and dialogues is like identifying the universals and particulars in philosophy. Identifying common characteristics, behaviours or facets as distinctive is a major design challenge. Designers learn abstraction not only through practice, but also through applying heuristic principles. Principles based upon understanding citizen needs and drivers, the domain, the differences between mental models of citizens and system models, and all technical constraints.
Designers experienced in writing use cases already have a good foundation for working with dialogues. However, we do see challenges for technology and government organizations. People responsible for systems and infrastructure as well as legislation need a deep understanding of the dialogues they are supporting, and they must be introduced to this technique. This remains as a big hurdle in our projects. But we are convinced that using dialogues provides an adequate response to all of them.
Download reprint:
Touchpoint 5.2, sep. 2013 
PART 1: Introduction – PART 2: Using dialogues – PART 3: Benefits & challenges
About the authors
Mark Fonds (a.k.a. @markafonds), a previous contributor to Touchpoint, has a background in design and psychology. Mark works as a service designer at Informaat where he is applying service design to help government agencies with their transition to a ‘digital by default’ government, improving service to its citizens.
Peter Bogaards (a.k.a. @BogieZero) has been an online content curator avant-la-lettre in various UX-related fields for almost two decades, choosing what he thinks is interesting, relevant or remarkable to share. Peter works as a curator, editor and coach at Informaat.
