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Without understanding what our users are trying to achieve, and reinterpreting our services in language that our users can understand, we often place users in a situation where, to find something, they need to know exactly what they’re looking for. For a user to find a service like RIDDOR or SORN, they first need to know what you call your service, resulting in an additional step being added to your service – that of learning the name that your organisation calls the thing they’re trying to do.

As with the case of the dead badger, the less you know about the situation you’re in, the support available to you or what you should do, the harder you will find this search. Needless to say, even the most patient people wilt at the prospect of this almost impossible task. Instead their confusion drives to them to call centres or, worse, they won’t use your service at all.

Google is the homepage for your service. Whether your service is usable online or not, this is likely to still be the way that it will be found and accessed. When it comes to finding your service, nothing is more important than its name. Beyond making it easier for search engines to index and list your service, the name of your service makes a statement to your user about what that service does for them.

The UK Ministry of Justice found this out when they set about changing its Fee Remissions service in 2017. The Fee Remissions service helps to pay for or subsidise the cost of court fees for people who aren’t able to pay themselves. However, it doesn’t take a genius to realise that the word ‘remission’ is not the most frequently used word, particularly in a financial content. Given that the financial literacy of those applying often wasn’t high, the title of the service was not only hard to understand for most people, but served to weed out precisely the users who were eligible to use it.

The reason this happened is simple, and happens every day in the creation of services. The title of the policy, somewhere long ago, had simply been made into the name of the service, without a thought to what language a user might use.