Money makes the world go round: how service designers can adopt 'zoom level' systems thinking when approaching public sector design challenges

Lia Emanuel, Principal UX Consultant at Gain and Alix Speed, Lead Service Designer at Money and Pensions Service; and are teaming up to deliver a talk at SDinGov 25 – Money makes the world go round: How service designers can adopt ‘zoom level’ thinking when approaching public sector design challenges 

The Money and Pensions Service (MaPS), work to help people – particularly those most in need – to improve their financial wellbeing, delivering free and impartial money guidance to the wider public. 

User needs and challenges in the financial sector are inherently complex 

If we look across the UK: 11.9m people feel overwhelmed or stressed dealing with financial matters (FCA’s Financial Lives 2024 survey),  22m people say they don’t know enough to plan for their retirement, and  9m people often borrow/use credit to buy food or pay bills  (Financial Capability 2018 Survey).  

As part of MaPS Financial wellbeing strategy, they aim to support the nation’s financial wellbeing by increasing the number of citizens who: access quality financial education and debt advice; engage in regular savings behaviour for now and the future; and reducing citizens reliance on credit. 

To achieve these ambitions, we need to move beyond the narrower focus of UX design to create a user-centric product or service. Rather, taking a systems thinking approach to designing services more holistically allows us to tackle these complex problems.  

Systems thinking in Service Design 

Systems thinking enables us to consider the interconnectedness and impact of wider factors like socio-economic situations, financial attitudes, regulations, and wider sector products and services. Fostering financial wellbeing can only be fully effective if we consider how we support individuals across these broader systems.  

How can we, as Service Designers, encourage systems thinking? One approach we discuss is considering ‘zoom level thinking’.  

Where we often start as user-centred design practitioners is the micro level:

• Understand an individual’s experience and interaction with a product or service. 

• Consider their needs, pain points and the usability of the product/service 

We can ‘zoom out’ a bit more and consider the meso level:

• Understand how a service or product operates and interacts with the organisation or community it sits within 

• Consider incoming and onward journeys to other relevant services/products that helps an individual solve their ‘whole’ problem or set of needs 

• Examine how organisational or community teams work together to improve the delivery of services/products 

And by ‘zooming out’ even further, we come to the macro level:

• Understand wider societal, economic and regulatory circumstances that influence the use and/or delivery of services and products 

The more abstract nature of the meso, and especially macro, level 'zoom' lenes can make it difficult to apply in practice, especially in project roadmaps that are often product oriented. 

Applying these zoom lenses in practice 

In our talk, we introduce a Service Thinking toolkit created and developed by Alix Speed at MaPS.  

The goal of this toolkit is to encourage teams to critique products and services across these different systems thinking zoom lenses. Core to this, was creating empathy with users based on a variety of factors – incorporating and moving beyond the often focused on usability and accessibility user needs.  

These factors aim to support service designers and wider teams to consider a person’s wider life situation. Applying this to MaPS as an organisation that provide money guidance, these wider life factors included: Financial Wellbeing segmentations, attitudes and education towards money, and life events which can often trigger the need for financial decision making (e.g. births, divorce, illness, retirement). 

Leveraging this ‘wide-angle’ life view of users as personas to walkthrough products and services offered by MaPS uncovers a wealth of potential:

• Humanises the often-abstract elements of macro levels (e.g. regulatory factors associated with life events like divorce, societal influence on financial attitudes like normalising conversations about planning for bereavement) 

  
  

• Bring together the expertise of multi-disciplinary teams (UCD, technical, Operations, Policy) by making service design thinking more approachable 

  
  

• Show the benefits of systems thinking through identifying avenues of market disruption, generating future feature roadmaps and discover new incoming and onward journey links for a more cohesive MaPS service ecosystem 

  
  

• Socialisation of service thinking at senior level teams, highlighting the benefits of an organisational structure that is more customer and service centric

Since 2022, we have proudly served as the Money and Pensions Service’s (MaPS) experience and accessibility partner. Over the course of our partnership, we have delivered more than 50 projects across the Government Digital Service (GDS) lifecycle and conducted over 200 research sessions. These engagements have deepened our understanding of the UK public’s financial behaviours, anxieties, and aspirations. Our insights now inform MaPS’ strategic direction and service design.