Live phase

Continuous improvement is one of the core principles of service design and that's what the live phase is all about.

Live begins when the service has reached a point of maturity and the team has built all of the main features in the backlog.

The goal is to continuously monitor, research, test and iterate for as long as the service is active.

In 'live' you will:

• improve and iterate the service
• monitor and track how the service is performing

Ongoing user research, testing and improvement are essential parts of live and will require a dedicated team. A product manager must continue to be accountable for the service as long as it is live.

Keep a sustainable and multidisciplinary team that can conduct ongoing user research and testing to update and improve the service.

Iterate and improve

User's needs and behaviours change over time, so services must adapt to keep pace.

In many ways, live involves repeating discovery, alpha and beta in smaller iterations:

1. use analytics and testing to continuously find and address users' problems
2. research the cause of the identified issues
3. build prototypes to test new features that will help improve the service

Monitor performance

Monitoring a service's performance prevents and uncovers potential problems. The key performance indicators for a service measure its overall health and identify priority areas to focus on.

Good performance monitoring should extend beyond Google Analytics, which reports statistics but doesn't uncover the user behaviour behind them. It's important to understand the limits of analytics and put processes in place to track all aspects of the service's performance.

Have a plan in place to monitor performance, usage and to stay across any changes that may trigger the need to retire a service.

This content is based on Ontario.ca's Service design playbook (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence).