Good For: Idea generation

The GovLab's Public Problem Solving Canvas is an online interactive canvas based on twenty questions to create and develop your public interest project. These twenty questions are designed to help you refine your understanding of the problem and those whom it affects; express your Big Idea; and turn that idea into an actionable strategy in the real world to the end of improving people's lives.

Features: Interactive diagnostic

[Now defunct. Link goes to internet archive from 2018, when MindLab closed]. One of the pioneers of public sector design, Mindlab, developed a set of tools to find and define problems as well as new approaches to solving them. This toolset contains some of the most commonly used in the design practice (user journey, pattern recognition, etc).

Features: Techniques

This is one of the first collections of user experience methods. It describes and analyses user experience design methods by costs expended, time required, resources required, expertise required, and quality of data.

Features: Guiding framework

This field guide introduces human-centred design as an approach to addressing challenges related to community demand for services (specifically immunization services, but it could be applied to others). This Field Guide exists to help investigate, understand and respond to challenges of demand. It draws on insights from behavioural science and employs human-centred methods to improve immunization outcomes. Includes a 170 page field manual, process map, and workbook with tools. Its process…

Features: Facilitators guide, Guiding framework, Techniques, Tips&Tricks

This resource is a method library containing 54 method descriptions for using the key methods in service design. These methods include instructions, guidelines, and-tips-and tricks for activities within research, ideation, prototyping, and facilitation. This collection only contains building blocks. It doesn’t detail how to assemble them into a cohesive design process or how to plan or manage it. The associated (paid) book and curriculum offers this context.

Features: Facilitators guide, Tips&Tricks

Designed with the assistance of the CNFPT and the DGAFP, this game is inspired by "Chutes & Ladders": a board game where the team must realize the major stages of their project, and sometimes encounters ladders (these "little miracles" that win several boxes at once) and chutes (these pitfalls that push back the project carrier). The resource is in French.

Features: Checklist, Interactive diagnostic

Here you find a selection of the Danish Design Centre’s commonly used tools. It includes information about the methods, instructions for tool use, and printable materials. The tools are divided in three categories that are used at different stages in the design process - and often in this order: Explore, Co-create, and Give the future concrete form. Explore helps the participants to open up and get around all aspects of the issue. Co-create contains tools that help participants get in-depth…

Features: Facilitators guide

Platform Design Toolkit is based on the tradition of service design thinking and the publishers intend it to overcome the limitations in traditional, linear, business modeling approaches. This methodology is based on a multi-sided, ecosystem based, platform model instead of a traditional product or service design. Those interested in building their "government as a platform" strategy or building a suite of digital or non-digital products or services would likely find value in this approach but…

Features: Associated curriculum, Glossary

This toolkit outlines Bridgeable’s approach to harnessing behavioural economics (BE) to design better products and services that nudge user behaviour. It combines a service design approach with a BE approach, with the caveat that BE helps identify and tweak pivotal moments of decision making but not overall user experience or strategies. The toolkit includes an overview of BE as well as an ideation and testing framework incorporating BE principles to move from a current state to an idea future…

Features: Examples or Cases, Glossary, Guiding framework, Tips&Tricks

A collection of tools that describe how 18F digital service teams put human-centered design into practice. These cards are focused on design in the context of digital services, but can be adapted to non-technical design projects as well. The resource is online and also available as printable cards. The card set includes simplified information on various design methods according to an overall methodology: Discover, Decide, Make,Validate. There are also "Fundamentals" cards related to incentives,…

Features: Guiding framework