So you want to be a service designer? Ditch the Haribo and read this…
Has this happened to you? It happened to me.
You enter the world of Service Design keen to do great work. You love the idea of designing things as well as screens. And you’ve got an idea to improve the service you’re working on.
You know, something to surprise and delight users. Maybe it’s putting free Haribo sweets in every delivery. Who wouldn’t love that?
“This is it”, you think, “I’m going to suggest this, my boss will cheer, the company’s sales will skyrocket, and they’ll build a bronze statue in my honor”.
Wrong.
And not for the reason you may think. It not because the company won’t take it seriously. It’s not because it isn’t a good idea — it might be the cherry on the sundae. It’s because you’re about to discover that creating a great service, a great customer experience, a remarkable business is a much bigger challenge that you could’ve ever thought and much harder than you could’ve ever imagined.
Free Haribo is nice. But what’s better is actually designing a service that helps people get something done easily, enjoyably and consistently. Then getting the right people to know about it.
So in this article I’m going to share seven practical lessons to help you on your journey to Service Design immortality. But, first, let’s talk about something important…
What’s the difference between good and great Service Design?
You’ve likely heard Marc Fonteijn’s definition of Service Design:
“When you have 2 coffee shops right next to each other, that each sell the exact same coffee at the exact same price; Service Design is what make you walk into the one and not the other, come back often and tell your friends about it.”
What really makes that difference? And is it really that hard?
I was struggling to find a way to really get this across, so I went for a walk around London in search of inspiration.
I walked into several stores and watched and observed to see what I could uncover.
(Of course, the store is just one element of the overall service — we’re not even starting to look at the online experience — but it’s the tangible things that makes Service Design so wonderfully complex and fun.)
I looked at the store layouts. What was the entrance like? How was everything laid out? Where were the changing rooms and the tills?
I watched the customers walk around. Where were they walking? What were they doing? Were there any bottlenecks?
And I observed the employees. Where were they standing? What were they doing? How were they interacting with customers?
You’ll know this as the front-stage of any service. The stuff that we see when we’re trying to get something done.
After going into a dozen or so stores, I came to the conclusion that most had pretty good, and similar, front stages. You’d expect this — after all, they’re obviously quite successfully companies to afford retail locations in London.
But one store stood out entirely. Everything. Was. Great.
You could feel the painful attention that had gone into designing the perfect shopping experience. The friendly welcome, the layout, the merchandising design etc. They were in perfect sync with every need and pain-point you could imagine. In fact, they even offered to deliver anything I bought to my house at a time that suited that day so I wouldn’t have to carry anything home with me.
I’ll tell you who this company was in a minute. But how did they manage to make it great?
The front-stage design is important — it’s vital in fact. But once you’ve been around the block you’ll learn that it’s only possible if you design the other part right. The part that your UX friends never really explore. The part that you, a future master Service Designer, will need to wrestle with: the backstage. The processes, the technology, even the culture of the team running the service (how else is it going to improve?).
Luckily, I know someone who works for the company. So I called her to do a bit more digging into the backstage. She told me about how they test new ideas, build processes, test technology, and their culture of continuous improvement. Basically, all the ‘best practice’ that so few actually do. When I got off the call, it was obvious why they were succeeding.
So, who was this company?
Matches, a London-based luxury retail business, started by a husband and wife, who recently sold their share in the company for £400M ($520M).
That’s a lot of post-it notes…
Ignore the fact it’s a luxury company. That in itself is a clever piece of Service Design. My point here is to think bigger. To truly appreciate the value of the skills you have, and will develop, and make the most of them.
Good is having a portfolio of interesting projects and some strong references. Great is designing the next Matches, Airbnb, Netflix, healthcare service, education system — or whatever your personal passion is. It really can happen — it’s happening faster than ever before today — and, to get to great, you’ll need to become a master at two opposing skills:
a) Being technically great
Designing the end-to-end, surface-to-core of the service. The customer journey. The touch-points. The technology. The processes. The people and skills to deliver the service. How to research it. How to design it. How to market it (often overlooked). All of this is your Service Design swiss-army knife.
b) Being persuasively great
Communicating the value of Service Design to the people paying for the project. Winning over skeptical stakeholders who deliver the ‘as is’ service. Creating project plans, roadmaps, business cases, procurement documents, partner agreements and all those dull but, unfortunately, necessary things — whilst also making it possible to test and improve new ideas.
How can you develop these two skills in record time?
I can’t claim to be perfect. I’ve made loads of mistakes. But I’ve been fortunate enough to work with great people in Fortune 500 brands, start-ups and even governments. In that time, I’ve seen dozens of services go from an idea on a whiteboard to a live service used by people globally. So here are some seven hard lessons learned to help you on your way.
1. Start with why
There is no perfect project. This is a fact of life. Fortunately, this means you’re doing something novel and interesting. Unfortunately (or fortunately), you’ll have endless moments of doubt, fear, embarrassment to learn and improve from. It’s best to just accept it and move on.
I can reel off dozens of things that’ve happened that shattered my dreams of an ideal project: clients going on stress leave in week one (wonder why?), clients not allowing my team to speak to customers or even their own staff (then what do you want us to do?), stakeholders refusing to hand over vital documents about projects, stakeholders refusing to be interviewed, stakeholders telling me how pointless this project is, my team refusing to work for a difficult client, people leaving just in time for a big deadline. I could go on, but won’t.
What I’ve found is these problems have eased if we all agree on one thing up-front: Why. Why we’re doing the project. What we’re trying to achieve. And why that matters for the organisation. If you and your client (whether a real client, your boss, your team or whichever people are involved) agree on that, you’ll find they’ll trust what you’re doing.
Which leads me to…
2. Process beats tactics
I used to hate processes. I thought they were tedious and stifled creativity. I was so wrong: amateurs chase tactics, professionals have a process.
That’s not to say that you need to do things ‘by the book’, just that you need to develop a repeatable way to get things done. Ultimately, whether you’re in-house or at an agency, you’re paid to produce a result. If you can’t produce the result over and over again, why would they keep you?
It took me several years to develop but I’ve now got a process that works for me. Sure, it could be improved. But it saves me so much stress because I know how to solve many problems. And means I can sit peer-to-peer with a CEO and have a conversation about their business knowing my team and I can actually make it happen. In fact, just this week I’ve been working on a new employee experience, a new digital service and a new mergers and acquisitions service for clients. All part of the varied life of being a practitioner.
3. You need to speak business
Most Service Design projects never see the light of day. In fact, I know a senior Service Designer who’s still never worked on a project that has has actually gone live. Think about that: all the research, all the hard work, all the energy…and it never sees the light of day. Why is this?
Many reasons, some you can’t control. But one you can is being able to present your work in a way that resonates with the people investing in it. You can’t simply fill a room with post-it notes and expect a CEO or CFO to sign-off a $5M project (or even a $500 project).
It pays to really do your research into why the company should do anything and actually craft a business story. For instance:
“Sales are down 10%. That means we’re losing $500,000 this year and it’s only getting worse. Rather than invest big, there’s a way we can solve this project quickly and effectively. By investing $20,000 to uncover our customer needs I’ll be able to identify specific ways to boost retention and, ultimately, revenue in just two weeks. I’ll then come back to you with the results and specific ways we can improve. Sound reasonable?”
It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty hard to resist because I’m speaking the same language as most decision-makers. The great thing about Service Design is you can get results fast, you can avoid wasting money on bad ideas and you can measure the impact. If you can master how to communicate that then your ideas will make it out of the lab and into the wild.
4. You need to speak quant
Data and Design are often seen as polar opposites. One’s quantitative, one’s qualitative. Can they really be compatible?
Absolutely.
For instance, let’s say you’ve been asked by a company to improve their existing service. Where do you start?
You could speak to some users to gather some insights. Not a bad idea. Or you could actually look at some real data on how the service is being used to guide you. You might find some tactical quick-wins to start prototyping right away. On one project I worked on, we found an idea ultimately worth $2M and a more enjoyable customer experience by digging into the data at every step of the journey.
Things like regression analysis, behavioural data, web analytics, are all extremely valuable if you know how to use them (or if you can charm someone who can explain them to you). Don’t be intimidated, think of each number as a person. What are they saying?
5. You need to speak tech
UX is hard enough. You’ve got to do the research, design the information architecture, the user journey, the wireframes and obsess over every single pixel for months on end.
But, as a Service Designer, you’ve got all that plus a much bigger world to consider. And the potential uses of things like artificial intelligence, robotisation and any number of emerging technologies can help you get that front-stage and back-stage right if it helps solve a user’s problem.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to be the world’s leading expert. And definitely focus on understanding and solving user needs and pain-points before even thinking about choosing any technology. But being able to have an intelligent conversation will mean you’ll able to make an informed decision about how you’re going to deliver your service (again, charm someone to help you).
6. Working out loud is essential
It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole designing something perfectly then forgetting you have to bring people with you. This is true if you’re designing a blueprint, a customer journey or feeding back your findings in show and tells.
You can’t do Service Design to people, you have to do it with them. It’s much better to show drafts, concepts and ideas before you get emotionally invested in them. (Yes, service designers say they do this…but many I’ve worked with many that hate sharing rough work (myself included at times)).
The reason why is basic human nature. When we feel like we’ve been involved in the process of creating something we become emotionally invested — this is known as the Ikea effect.
My favorite nudge in favour of doing this comes from the classic book ‘It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be’ by Paul Arden.
At my company, Rainmaker, we call this ‘working out loud’. We use tools like Slack to share progress and have an open culture to build each other’s ideas together. It helps us get things done faster, better, easier.
7. You already have the most valuable skill…enthusiasm. Use it wisely.
This post was never intended to scare you, just to wake you up to the wonderful world of Service Design. Yes, there’s a lot to learn. Yes, you’ll see other projects and people that intimidate you. But it’s the enthusiasm that can become technically and persuasively great.
After all, people trust people with a vision, who can communicate that vision clearly and who can execute that vision effectively. You have that potential inside you. Now go and unleash it.
If you enjoyed this article, you might enjoy Service Design — a new course for wannabe Service Designers (and pros who want to get even better).
