Really good post this from Duncan Brown – Design by cliché:
But what “booking” means can vary wildly from service to service. Two thirds of breast screening appointments are administered via mobile vans. This is a different, and differently-complex, sense of “booking” from clinic-based appointments, and different in turn from “booking” a vaccination in a community pharmacy.
These “bookings” have little more in common than a name. And indeed that is exactly what teams at the Ministry of Justice found when they tried to standardise “bookings” for prisons.
I’ve done some thinking around this stuff and agree that saying things like “case management should be the same whether it’s adult social care or housing” is a bit daft. Likewise – bookings in my experience are often best developed using components at a layer of abstraction down – forms, payment, resource management, notifications, etc.
Words like booking, reporting, applying work well as service patterns, a layer of abstraction up from the technical gubbins. It’s still helpful to use them to help service designers and tech folk to speak a common language, but not so helpful for the techs putting together a platform of components.