What is (good) service design?
Service Design has come a long way since the Service Design Network was founded back in 2004, the same year that the Design Council also launched the Double Diamond as a clear, comprehensive and visual description of the design process. When I first started considering the work I was doing as service design in 2010, few people in the local authority I worked at had heard of it. Fast forward just over a decade and a LinkedIn search for ‘service design’ returns over 6.25m results.
I’ve spent the majority of my service design career working with the public sector, and whilst it’s clear that more people are talking about it these days, I’m still not convinced that everyone is thinking about it in the same way. Whilst more and more public sector organisations are employing service designers, many of those same organisations are failing to leverage the power of service design. Teams of designers are unwittingly set up to fail, often plugged in at the wrong end of the change process because the organisations which brought them in don’t really understand what ‘design’ actually means.
When I’m talking about what service design is, I find it helpful to start by dropping the word ‘service’ altogether and simply focus on what ‘design’ isn’t. Design isn’t something that happens once you think you know what you need to do. Neither is it simply a garnish or veneer to be applied at the end of a process. Design is the process. Design helps you understand what it is you need to do. At least 50% of design work is about understanding the problem the other half is about solving it. Design is fundamental to how an organisation functions, but for design to be effective, it has to be used correctly. Design has to have a seat at the top table and it has to be part of a project from the very start.
In my experience, organisations that are not design-led start with a solution in mind and favour a clear and detailed plan of action before even thinking about getting started on ‘the work’ itself. Whilst this type of planning and preparation might feel less risky, it often results in missed opportunities, scope creep, and out-of-control budgets. Design-led organisations turn that thinking on its head. They’re comfortable with starting off in the ‘squiggle‘ and using a design approach to explore the unknown and make sense of it; using iterative cycles of learning to understand the problem better and ultimately arrive at the right solution.
Being design-led means being comfortable with not knowing all of the answers at the beginning. It’s OK to start with a hunch or hypothesis and build upon your knowledge through iteration — gaining some understanding, generating ideas, testing those ideas, and continuing the cycle.
The biggest risk to organisations isn’t choosing to take a design approach — it’s choosing not to!
Human-centred or user-centred design puts stakeholders at the heart of the design work. Service design is a form of user-centred design that is focused on making life easier for people by allowing them to achieve an outcome in a way that leaves them feeling satisfied. Over the years, it’s become increasingly aligned to digital services, but it’s important to recognise that service design extends further than simply digitising existing processes. If service design fails to centre on human needs and pain points across a full end-to-end journey, it isn’t good service design, and I’d argue that in fact, it isn’t service design at all.
Good service design, therefore, has several key characteristics:
Organisations that understand design are person-centred; projects are driven by the identified needs and pain points of the people who both deliver the service and receive it. Designers spend time with stakeholders to understand what it’s like to use the service from the perspective of those that do.
It favours problems over solutions
Organisations that understand design know that to get the most value from it, designers must be involved in a project from the very start. Designers work best when they are given problems to solve, rather than solutions to be implemented. Design helps you arrive at the RIGHT solutions.
It focuses on end-to-end experiences
Good service design cuts across organisational silos. Your customers don’t care about your internal teams, departments or processes. The best services are designed around a customer journey, not an organisational structure.
It’s collaborative
Good service design is a team sport. The best services are co-designed with stakeholders. This means moving beyond traditional models of consulting on a defined solution in favour of models which engage stakeholders from the start and continue to involve them throughout the design process.
Goods service design takes a learning-by-doing approach, starting off with a hunch or hypothesis and building up insight until you are able to truly understand the problem you are trying to solve.
It involves prototypes, tests, and pilots
Good service design values prototyping and testing over expensive pilots. Potential solutions start off small and are tested and iterated as you learn more about how the service works.
Good service design involves storytelling, be that communicating real-life stories following the discovery stage or using visual artefacts to represent a customer journey, inspire creative thinking, or generate stakeholder buy-in.
Because good service design is all about starting small and only scaling once you have the evidence required to move forward, it’s less risky to the organisation than going straight to pilot or straight to scale. Service design encourages you to take into account new insights to iterate concepts on the fly and if necessary kill bad ideas before they get to scale.
It automates but not at the expense of relationships
And finally, perhaps most importantly in terms of social services, good service design isn’t just about automation and digitisation. Good service design results in the automation of those things that should be automated, but also ensures that important analogue touchpoints aren’t overlooked or lost.
Originally published at http://simonpenny.wordpress.com on October 11, 2022.
