On service design

Titta and Maya accompanied the Techlab participants in Phase One – Service Design. This phase lasted two months.

At a basic level, service design is a research-driven discipline which designs solutions for both public and private services. We look at service systems and organisational development, ie the inside of the organisation, and we look at value offerings to your customers, which is to say the experience that the service gives them.

We take a big view of this, including the human needs, asking what customers need for the best experience and what employees need to perform at their best. We can work in a way that is hands-on or in a way that is more strategy-related, depending on the organisation’s requirements.

While there are also in-house service designers, we come from an outside perspective, without a personal attachment to the organisation or its services. We use a certain set of creative analytical tools and methods and follow a process to try to gather the information we need.

What is the first step you take with a new organisation?
This begins with qualitative research (as opposed to quantitative, that is numerical research), in the form of interviews or workshops in which we do different activities and review the results. We find out what research the organisation has done before, where the product is right now, we work out where the information gaps are. We ask where we can find the data that already exists and use that to work out what doesn’t exist. We’re also closely observing interpersonal dynamics to work out the hierarchy. We are aware that we are not an expert in their field, we are more of a facilitator.
Sometimes the expertise that already exists in the organisation isn’t translating as well as it could the experience of the service. We talk to everyone and try to get enough detail to get an overview of in-house practices and then try to get the right people on board. We believe in involving everybody before making a plan for an organisation. After we’ve made that, we guide them on how to implement it.
Generally, service design has four phases:
Discovery: Research, from reading existing data and user research
Definition: Analysis of your research, summarising your results into a design brief
Design: Ideation, creating the concept
Delivery: Narrowing down further on the concept
For the Techlab, we focused on the first two steps, discovery and definition. We wanted the teams to have a reality check on what they were doing, what their product or service is and what kind of knowledge gaps they have.
What were some of the common themes in the knowledge gaps?
Most of the teams already had a project they’d started and we began with conducting interviews and circulating questionnaires. For some teams, the struggle was figuring out who their users were.
An example of a socio-cultural project that struggled with understanding its users was a team working with the intention of supporting some of the most vulnerable populations in the city. For this, they had worked out how a solution but not considered all the stakeholders involved in this. For instance, they hadn’t involved the local government so there was no way of offering this solution to the intended users. They had thought about one product but it wasn’t embedded in a service that would actually make it work.
After the teams were interviewed, we analysed their responses together. There were some striking similarities across the board; several teams had broad ideas and spoke at a high level about the solutions they hoped to provide but they weren’t quite sure how to get there.
For example, if they wanted to create a game for city development, we asked what techniques can you use, what would people experience, what value would you provide to gamers? Some teams were satisfied with their idea but unsure of their target group. Their concepts existed at an idealistic level but not a practical one. In one team they knew who the target audiences were roughly but the data revealed that all of them had some level of assumption about what they expected the users to need from them.
How can you work more commercially without quashing values and vision?
During the process, everyone narrowed their concept down. We think you need to dream first and then put realistic bounds on your ambitions. Start with the bigger picture of what you want to achieve, don’t start with the constraints.
When you are on solid ground with the data, you are able to start exploring other possibilities.
We had conversations involving the fear of compromise and the desire to provide the public with content for the greater good while working side by side with businesses whose goal was simply profit. Participants spoke about how they understood the importance of being sustainable but worried about selling out their socio-cultural values. We could see it between the lines, in the way people hesitated with some decisions.
We spoke about how instead of thinking that they were turning their organisation into a business, it can be thought of as how to make their service carry itself. If you have some level of self-sustainability, this is an enhancement of what you want to deliver rather than a way of selling your soul.
What are your tips on how to apply service design principles to your own work?
You can ask a list of questions:
How are you currently running your organisation and providing your service?
What insights do you need to develop a better picture of your offerings? Create a plan to collect that information.
What do you know about your target group, could there be some information that you don’t have about them?
If you know your users, speak to them, ask them what they think, how they’re using the service/product.
Gather data from all your stakeholders, speak to all potential stakeholders be they city officials, social services, healthcare providers etc.