Will Osborn Service and organisational design

Digital Service Design Standard

Working towards universal, machine-readable data formats for personas, roles, and service journeys.

Status
still going
Since
2025
Topics
Service Design
Live at
github.com/WillOsborn/digital-service-design-standards
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Screenshot of Digital Service Design Standard

Service design produces a lot of artefacts that don’t talk to each other. A persona in one tool, a journey map in another, a blueprint in a third. Every handoff involves manual translation, and most of the research richness gets lost in transit.

This is an attempt to define lightweight, open JSON schemas for the core artefacts, starting with personas, roles, and journeys, so that tools can import and export them without loss and AI-assisted design work has something structured to reason from.

A central design decision is the compositional model: separating who someone is (the persona) from what they’re trying to accomplish (the role), then creating explicit pairings that capture what emerges when a specific person takes on a specific context. The same persona can hold multiple roles; the same role can be filled by different personas. It means research compounds rather than being restarted with each new project.

The repository holds the current draft schemas and a set of Claude skills for building and validating artefacts interactively.

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