Embedding the service standard at Christmas

I work in a digital team that’s growing fast. We have designers, researchers, and product managers joining regularly — many from agency or commercial backgrounds, where the Government Service Standard isn’t part of daily vocabulary.

Rather than run another slide-deck session on the standard, I wanted to give people something they could actually do.

The North Pole Service Regulator

I designed a fictional service: “Find out if you’re naughty or nice” — a self-assessment tool for the North Pole Service Regulator, where children, parents, and carers self-assess to determine which side of the official list they’re on.

The framing was deliberately absurd. That’s the point — when the subject matter carries no real-world stakes, people engage with the process rather than the outcome.

What I built

The session was structured as an Alpha service assessment, with the mock service as the thing being assessed:

• An examination of the problem space (who are the users? what are their needs?)
• A working Figma prototype using boolean variables to route users through the assessment based on their answers
• Discussion of the relevant standards and service design principles
• A Q&A structured to reach consensus on readiness to progress

What happened

The session generated some of the best discussions I’ve seen about accessibility, user needs, and what it really means to meet a standard. When the stakes are fictional, people argue on principle rather than defensiveness.

Several people said it was the first time the service standard had felt concrete to them.

The prototype and presentation are available on Figma if you’d like to use or adapt them for your own team.