A talk I gave at UX People 2013 as an attempt to demystify the term 'Service Design'. I talked about the methodologies and tools that service designers use, as well as the attitudes and skills requires to practice the discipline.
36. Service Design.
A mission, practice, & craft
Daniel Harris
Service Design Director, Fjord London
THANK YOU
Editor's Notes
Good morning!I’m Daniel HarrisFrom FjordSo lets see who we’ve got here. Hands up who’s an interaction designer, user researcher, front end developer, visual designer. Hands up for all four. ExcellentWe have 8 offices around the world200 so-called FjordiansRecently acquired by AccentureWhat Accenture do, is define and integrate half the planet’s technology infrastructure.pretty significant thing because what we practice is Service Design. Which means we can now apply design thinking to this infrastructure at a massive scale. Which is very excitingSo I wanted to talk to you today about Service Design. What it is. How we practice it at Fjord. Demystify it a little.
So to start, a note about the design part of service designDesign is a force for good. Design genuinely improves lives.
As critic Alice Raswthorn points out, ‘design is on the cusp of a massive change’ as people slowly become more attuned to its potential for positive change.
And that is a big responsibilityGetting it right is really hard. Getting it wrong is easy. & Sometimes the consequences of getting it wrong are horrendous.
If Good design promotes and unlocksdignityService Design focuses on how people engage with the world.And brings that dignity to them
Good service design improves how humans engage with the world.And let’s be clear what world we mean
Well for the west at least, we exist in a Society that is already are steeped in Technology. Algorythms run our lives. and they will more and more. Think of all the ways in which you engage with other people, with your council, with parking, with transport, with entertainment, MoneyIt’s all driven through technologyAllowing society dignifyed access to all these things is the job to be done for Service Design. Take for example, the phone bill. For many of you it’ll instantly hit the recycling bin in one swipe.Because it’s not useful to you. It provide no value, and even worse, it give you work to do. The recycling swipe.This is the brief that Three Network in Sweden gave us. So we devised a way of designing a scenario that allowed people to engage with their world – through their phone billWe wanted to unlock the value of all the data that’s present in the billAnd use it to provide people with a perspective on their social worlds
So we took a data viz approachAnd presented that persepctive in a dashboard. You could see analytics for who you call, how often, how long, And because its visual, it’s glancable. It’s perfect for mobile. It’s changed how Three customers engage With their society through technology. With their worlds. And if Humans are main actors, the constructs of their worlds, We must strive to understand their IRRATIONALITIES, COMPLEXITIES, motivations, hopes fears, and most importatnltcares.And how do we do that? How do we get to the truth?
Good. Old fashioned. Research.We do anything and everything to get to the truth.Sometimes we’ll do some shadowing. We’ll discover paths of intent. We’ll stop people at point of service and interview them. We’ll interview people in their homesSo We’ll always get to know the experience that customers have. The product or service in question. Sounds obvious, but it’s very easy to forge ahead with designing without walking for a mile in customer’s shoesIt’s something that we are doing more and more of. Because organisations are recognising that they don’t have a clue about their customers in this massively complex and rapidly changing world.
And we’ll make sure we plot the expeirence using the most estabished tool in Service Design, the Blueprint.It allows us to plot the entire front end OR FRONT STAGE , and back end OR BACK STAGE of the service.The front end is any touchpoint customers have with the service. And to be clear, this can be any digital, or physical touchpoint. It could be the call centre scriptIt could be the storeIt could be a staff memberIt allows us to plot the emotional jounrney that people expeirience with servicesBecause seeing it visually as a map, makes the job of designing ways to address the pain, easier.It’s a way of validating or even driving the traditional BA-driven requirements process
So research in Service Designis about getting to the truth. Moving beyond the software driven process of gathering user needs. Its about scratching beneath that surface to understand the what makes people human.But it’s not just about people, end users. It’s about forging something greater than the sum of two partiesPeople, yes. But also organisations.And at Fjord we run a service innovation process that helps us do this forging.
And it represents the shift in where we’re playing at as designers. And I think it might be familiar to all of us.Often, clients may come to you with these. Reams of functionalites they NEED in a serivce. And they may have gone through a process to get there. But often they haven’t. We use this as a way of planning the design process for our projectsSo lets see what it is. (go backwards through from Functionalities
Once we’ve planned, we work!We use a number of tools – tools that are public, and some tools we’ve made ourselves.We’re fans of the canvas as you can tell. [Business model canvas] – great for getting fairly detailed from a business perspective[
[Lean canvas] – great for seedcamps and hackathons
The recent Trends canvas from trendwatching] – great for understanding the market and it’s evolution
And there’s Our Service Design canvas – great for designing service propositionsThe first part of it helps us remember to be broad in our initial thinking, and consider the wider context. The part on the right allows us to plot the organisational contextAnd in the middle is forged a service proposition
We used this canvas approach working with the new Paypal. We helped them understand that the opportunity for what they could deliver, was ultimately a revolution in how humans transact in an omnichannel contextWe understood the trends, the market, the individual motivations of customers as well as merchants in a shopping context. But the point is that was also understood the aspirations and capabilities of the service provider, of Paypal itself
And by understanding the aspirations of both of these parties, Good service design created shared value for people and organisationsSo what shape do these value propsotions take, in general?Well we’re firmly in the business of re-imagination.
Mary Meeker is one of the most well-known opinion formers in digital. She’s an analyst and a venture capitalist, and has been dubbed “The Queen of the Web”.She recently explained how all aspects of society, and all types of companies, are being reinvented thanks to New Devices, Connectivity, UI and Beauty.Why are they being re-invented? Technology has driven it. Companies can get value from it. But most of all, there is unprecedented market demand.The app paradigm is a great example of this churned up, acceleration of demand – millions of easy to produce apps, competing, getting better, shifting expectations. Competing is now about disrupting. Re-inventing. So how do we drive this new wave of re-imagination at Fjord?
Well, we use the good old workshop. Its why you’re here today. To work with others, to build, to add value.It’s a key component of our process at Fjord.And we have tools we use – like the service design canvas I described earlier - that documents a service propositionBut also tolls to stimultate thinking and discussion – like these Service design cards we’re developing
They work by simply testing out new lenses on a thought. Sometimes it might be interesting to apply a different business model to a service. It may be way off. But it triggers different synapses in your brain. And you can do the same with trying your thoughts out with different markets. Different Service models…In this way, workshop activity is stimulated into what we need to do as service designers: Be tangential. Go lateral.Embrace diverse perspectivesRe-imagine life in a human wayCollaborate profusely on ideas, ideas, ideas&Get emotional…
Because life itself, and people, irrational, soulful, emotional. The practice of service design has evolved in order to understand this emotional territory, and connect organisations to it. The outcome is deep value for customers, because it affects not just how they function, but how they feel. Organisations that are making this happen are gaining from providing that value.
We talked to Jamie Oliver recently, and told him that the Fundamental Food paradigm needed the same transformation; revolution even. - into a service which exists everywhere - which wraps around where people are, how they behave, & what they need both physically, and also emotionally.So when it comes to food, we wanted to evolve the Jamie proposition into the emotional space - connecting the heart and soul of food to the heart and soul of society - in a real way.
In short, we wanted to move Jamie from Publishing, (Books) to Service (Our tool)And in doing so we knew we could allow people to represent Jamie’s philosophy and mission for creating Healthy societies via food
We devised a service that would take the food paradigm from what is is today: Something that your mum or dad may or may not have taught youA curious amount of celebrityAnd a massive recipe industry / online mess, depending on who you talk to, INTOHelping people engage with the pure joy of creating great food. & The way we would do it was via a back to basics principle of connecting individuals to food through community. Instead of sermons about creating great meals on small budgets, the service would enable this through the ultimate food/life planner, involving meal budgets, recipes, shopping lists and partnerships with local suppliers, partnership with restaurants, partnership with Schools – a service that could eventually cover yours and your familiy’s entire food life. …And start to shift the perception of food from the functional commodity to the emotional, to the soul.
Connecting into the emotional territoryThese good services connect to the emotional. These good services move beyond the functional. These good services operate regardless of channel. These good services become part of how indviduals engage with the worldProactiveNot anywhere that’s a destination. It comes to youAnd in this way, great services become prosthesese
(What does it take to practice service design?)For me, without Curiosity, there is little to drive the passion needed to create new ways of improving how people engage with the worldBecause the design of services goes deep into what the organisation can provide Into what people care about. what their motivations areWhich is why it requires a broadening of skills. Not just HCI, Interaction design, UX, art directionAnd I know Luke Forsythe will be picking up on this laterBut I also wanted to run through these characters that Curious George here is playing with. Because part of the practice is to act like different characters at different times along the service design journey
Sometimes you may need to be a psychologistTo get to people’s core. To understand what makes us tickPsychologists tend to ask why a lot.At Fjord we use a technique called the 5 whysAnd with this afternoon’s workshops there are multiple chances to dig into this with Jane Austin and Nina Belk
Experiment, design your communication. ChallengeCreating something that is not expected. Again, this afternoon, you be able to learn more about how to do this with Mayana and Tim Brooke
To create systems that people conduct their lives withinTo take responsibility for design decisions that are life or deathAnd design services that are omnichannel – and have an impact on how humans engage with the physical worldIt’s a theme Jonathan Rez will pick up on in the next session
Understand how an organisation can possibly deliver what their customers really needAnd to coach them into what it takes to be truly customer-centric
Put yourself on the line. Ask yourself “if this budget was my money, would I follow this route?”Ask youself, what could block this from happeningBe confident in taking the right risksIts something Jack schulze knows a whole lot aboutBut there’s an essence to the kinds of people who practice service design…
And they love the problem.but theres also attitudes applicable to service designIf you’re not curious, forget it. If you’re not energetic, forget it.If you’re not hungry to make things happen, forget itIf you’re not willing to be uncomfortable, forget itIf you’re not happy to get involved with organisations deeply, forget itIf you’re not willing to fail and fail, but learn from it, forget it
Sohere’s where we are.Design is a force for good. Service Design Focuses on how people engage with the worldThink about the future.think of anything thats mundane right now, in the cmonig years, it will be re-invented by clients who see value in re-imagining the mundane, by employing consultancies that can get to the heart of how to connect value to humansIf nothing else, this is the basis of service design
In reality you are likely to be practicing Service Design as part of your UX jobs. But if you believe that Service Design can provide the impact the world will need and is going to need, Flip it round.Try making UX, part of your service design job.And how do you know you’re doing it?You’re…. (every line)