Service design training — a basic starter guide

This post is a guide for me, my team and anyone who has attended the service design essentials course we’re running at work. It’s non bank-specific so posting it here in case it’s useful to anyone else.

Service design is something better done than dissected, so today you’re a service designer for a coffee company, and your brief is to improve the service of buying a coffee. Therefore we’ll work through a logical design process starting with:

What is service design?

There are lots of definitions out there but for me this video does a great job of explaining that service design is a customer centric and holistic way of designing services that people actually want.

Smart video by Fjord — also ties in neatly with the coffee theme of the day

Why bother? Don’t we have enough design disciplines already?

With each group we have a discussion on why service design is particularly relevant in 2017. We focus on three key points:

Customer complexity — service providers in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s only had to think about a smaller number of channels, including in-store, phone, post and maybe fax. In 2017 digital means that this has multiplied and mutated widely, meaning customers can reach us 24/7 and also reach one another.

Customer expectation — another change brought on by digital is the increase in competitors that understand great service. If you can get your own personal driver with a few smartphone jabs, why would you queue in branch or be happy being passed around endless call centres?

Increased competition — in a world of UBER, Amazon Prime and Netflix, large legacy service provider cannot rest of their laurels. These disruptive new companies understand good service and are built to be interoperable in a way that older companies simply weren’t.

Research

A huge topic but one that is essential to any design process. This part of the training is half discussion, half exercise.

Why bother with research? Let’s just start designing stuff!

1. Research is the foundation on which any good design is based, and is important for many reasons, chief being:
2. It challenges our assumptions — it allows us to think outside of the bank and avoids group-think.
3. It means we’ll design something people need — if we’re not designing based on customer insight than who are we designing for?

Methods of research

There have never been a broader set of tools and techniques available to us. It’s less important knowing about 892 different methods, than it is to know you should do at least one whatever your time and budget restrictions.

• Observation — getting out and watching a service in action, noticing the obvious moving parts (people, signage etc) and less-obvious moving parts (systems, training, process etc).
• Interviewing / focus groups — asking people what they think of a service and/or what they need.
• Surveys — polling large numbers of people to get insight at scale.
• Data analysis — reviewing data on any aspect of customer behaviour and/or a service in action to gain insight.
• Desk research — there have never been more resources online to understand how a service is perceived and what customers want. We often use the Apple app store, Google place and Glassdoor company reviews as examples of free insight into digital platform, physical branches and employee attitudes respectively.

Research exercise

To show how effective guerilla research can be, the group is split in two and each given a £10 giftcard to a large coffee chain. This is their budget and they’re given an hour to collect as much insight as possible. They’re encouraged to:

• Notice things they’d not normally — what’s happening that they can’t see.
• Think in logical service steps — think systematically and break the coffee-buying process down.
• Use a variety of collection methods— from note-taking to photography, think how best to bring the research back so it can inform the next bit of training.

Mapping / blueprinting

After lunch we use the research to build a service blueprint. But first we ask…

Why bother making a blueprint? Let’s start designing already?!?!

• Unless you understand the visible, invisible and supporting elements of the service how can you hope to start improving it?
• They’re useful tools to align stakeholders.
• They position the service from a customer perspective and so can be useful to challenge normal ways of thinking.

How to create a blueprint

There are some amazing guides out there so I won’t go into masses of detail here, but some key points I often feel are forgotten:

• Messy and collaborative is better than shiny and finished — if a blueprint ends up printed and forgotten it’s useless. While it’s tempting to ‘design’ them, only do so if they’re getting too complicated and you need to bring them back to something understandable.
• Facilitation is everything — the blueprint is easy, it’s controlling a group of stakeholders that is hard. As the service designer, be conscious that you’ve got the right group of people to help complete the blueprint, and make sure they all have their say.
• Control the level of focus — too high-level and they’re useless, and too detailed and they become horribly complex and again, useless. Practice your ability to pull people out of the detail as well as driving them into it.
• Keep it simple and on mission — it’s tempting to go down rabbit-holes and capture EVERYTHING, but unless the blueprint moves the work on it’s wasted effort.

Prototyping

To turn the understanding we’ve developed thus far into some kind of forward motion, we prototype. As teams we take two or three of the pain points identified on our blueprint and think about innovative methods of solving them. We base this thinking not just on surface level fixes, but think throughout the service and ask where we might innovate in the back-end?

Why bother prototyping? Let’s just spend loads of money on making it real!

Woah there! I know by this point in the day people are excited as it’s almost hometime, but we still need rigour. We discuss why prototyping is important:

• It tests and enriches our ideas — it’s amazing how quickly that one-liner on a post-it falls over when sketched out or made three-dimensional. Prototyping is thinking OUT-LOUD and incredibly useful.
• It puts everyone on the same page — in a cross-functional team it’s easy for everyone to imagine they’re thinking the same thing, but in reality not be. Prototypes make the idea real and flush out differences of opinion.
• It’s fun — describing ideas in powerpoint is not fun. Making them real is.

Methods of prototyping

Paper prototyping a speaker system

• Paper prototyping — great for quickly conveying ideas, stories, screens etc.
• Clickable prototyping — either full realised experiences or quick&hacky versions using apps like Pop, something clickable can bring a digital experience to life.
• Role-play prototyping — one of the most fun and effective, particularly when bringing a full service to life.

Testing

Bringing the day to a close if the bit when the two teams play their prototype back to the other and recieve feedback.

Why bother testing? Let’s just go home!

Testing is important because:

• It closes the loop and allows you to test your thinking with real people.
• It makes your idea better — real people will give real opinions and challenge your thinking.
• It’s fun and rewarding — without testing ideas are just ideas. Testing an idea creates an emotional payback for you as the designer, even if it’s a challenging payback.

So that’s that. The day normally runs from 9am to 4pm and people are pretty wiped by the end. Feedback is positive and people comment on enjoying the hands-on nature of the course. Feel free to take the above and adapt it, or let me know how you’d tweak it.