More than digital
Why the best service design blends human, physical, and digital touchpoints—whether you’re rethinking it all or improving one part.
In the past decade, much of the buzz about service design has focused on digital delivery. We’ve seen case studies and award features spotlighting beautifully built vaccine appointment tools, streamlined benefits portals, and reimagined agency websites.
These wins matter. They improve access, efficiency, and trust. But they represent only part of the story.
Beyond the screen: where service design shows up
Great service design has always extended beyond digital. It lives in the spaces, processes, and human interactions that make or break a public service experience.
Consider:
Hospital and clinic entries that ease anxiety and help patients orient themselves without confusion or delay.
Food kitchens that organize their physical space, volunteer flow, and pickup process to preserve dignity while meeting urgent needs.
Election ballots—both digital and physical—designed for clarity, accessibility, and trust, ensuring every voter can participate without doubt or difficulty.
Vaccination site setups during the pandemic, where parking lot flow, waiting area arrangements, and wayfinding all worked in tandem with online booking systems to make the experience safe, efficient, and reassuring.
The full spectrum of touchpoints
You don’t have to overhaul everything to benefit from whole-service design.
Too often, the “success” of a service is measured by its digital interface alone. True service design looks across every touchpoint:
Public-facing: What people see, hear, touch, and experience directly.
Operational: The behind-the-scenes workflows, staff training, and physical infrastructure that make delivery possible.
Administrative: Policies, data handling, and decision-making processes that shape the service’s consistency, security, and quality.
Even when you’re improving just one area—like a new scheduling system or intake process—it’s worth considering how it will interact with the other touchpoints. Digital tools have the potential to enhance, not replace, these other dimensions. Done well, they amplify the quality of human interactions, reduce bottlenecks, strengthen trust, and protect the integrity of sensitive information.
Case in point: “Killing the clipboard” in healthcare
Service design spans digital and physical touchpoints—improving experiences in healthcare and beyond.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is tackling a long-standing frustration in healthcare: the repetitive, paper-based intake process. Their “kill the clipboard” effort focuses on one key part of the patient experience—intake—but considers how changes ripple across visits, records, and provider workflows.
The goals are straightforward—and far from purely digital:
Improve the patient experience during visits.
Streamline appointment flow so visits take the time they need—no more, no less.
Strengthen record keeping and protect patient privacy.
Increase patient access to, and control over, their own data.
Yes, technology plays a critical role—through digital data entry, digital check-ins, and secure interoperability (ensuring providers can seamlessly and safely exchange patient information across networks). But the ultimate success of this work isn’t measured by whether a new platform was launched.
It’s measured by:
Streamlined, more focused doctor visits.
Better diagnoses, treatment, and connection-making—for example, auto-enrolling patients in critical screenings or triggering just-in-time prompts to doctors so they can make relevant offers.
Improved provider efficiency and use of resources.
Higher patient satisfaction and trust in the system.
The lesson? Even in a deeply digital transformation, the best results come when digital innovations are designed alongside physical, operational, and human elements—so the non-digital parts aren’t just byproducts but essential, planned components of the service.
Designing for the whole experience
When digital and non-digital touchpoints work together, services transform.
Whether you’re redesigning an entire service or just one element of it, the most transformative results come when digital and non-digital touchpoints work in harmony. That means thinking not only about how to improve an interface or automate a process, but how those changes will influence, and be influenced by, the human interactions, spaces, and operational realities surrounding them.
For example:
A redesigned intake form must be paired with an in-person process that makes the most of the information it collects.
A mobile app for food assistance should be supported by accessible, well-run pickup locations.
An online scheduling system only succeeds if physical spaces and staffing are ready for the demand it generates.
When both sides of the equation are factored into the design process, the result is more human-centered, resilient, and impactful.
Service design succeeds when it works for people in every setting they encounter it.
Our approach at Public Servants LLC
At Public Servants, we design for the whole system—even when we’re working on just one part of it. That means:
Looking at digital and physical environments together.
Mapping the human, operational, and administrative dimensions of service delivery.
Co-creating solutions with the people delivering and receiving the service, so changes are grounded in real-world use.
Whether the solution is a redesigned intake process, a new digital tool, a reconfigured public space—or all three—our goal is the same: services that are equitable, efficient, and trustworthy.
Let’s make service design whole again
If you’re leading a public or nonprofit service and want to explore how your digital and nondigital touchpoints can work better together, get in touch.
