Essential service design secrets - 10 lessons learned
Ten years ago, I was eager, green, and about to enter the service design world.
Some might say that I was foolish to jump from a secure job in another industry and start a new career at the age of 40 - and looking back, it was a risk (and sometimes felt that way too!). But it’s brought incredible rewards.
Along the way, I've gathered a treasure trove of insights – some learned the hard way, and others kindly passed on to me by seasoned veterans.
Now, I'm eager to share these ten nuggets of wisdom with you, the kind I wish someone had whispered in my ear as I set off on day one.
Ready for a bit of hindsight shared upfront?
Introduction to Service Design Workshop at Waltham Forest Council
1: Be clear on the intent
Without exception, the projects I’ve worked on that had a very clear intent were the ones that provided the most value to the organisation.
Projects with ill-defined intended outcomes have a tendency to meander around, not really sure where they’re going. The results from poorly defined projects are often vague, too general and unactionable. I’ve also seen projects where team members have conflicting ideas on what the intent is from the work they’re doing.
These are useful questions I like to ask at the start of a project, which I’ve honed over the last 10 years:
Why are we doing this work? (what outcome are we looking to achieve/what’s the problem we’re solving?)
What assumptions are we making? (what we ‘think’ we know about the challenge)
Who uses this service? (and what do they need to help them reach their goal?)
How will we measure if we’ve been successful? (based on the intended outcomes)
I wish I’d had these on day one!
2: Service design is as much, if not more, about influencing stakeholders as it is about designing services.
Learning Service design tools and methods is one thing. Still, if we want to influence change in our organisations, we can’t just go around hitting everyone in the organisation over the head with a “service design hammer”.
We ignore important, influential stakeholders at our peril!
We need to bring people along with us and effectively engage people to join us rather than work against us. Not only is this more effective - it’s also much more enjoyable!
For service design projects to have an impact, it’s vital to find a senior stakeholder who can act as a project sponsor and advocate for our work. They can also act as a buffer between the team and demands from the rest of the organisation. I visualise this stakeholder as if holding a massive umbrella above the team, protecting them from all the stuff that would otherwise fall on their shoulders!
That said, there are few training courses that teach these so-called softer skills alongside service design tools and methods.
Books that have helped me navigate this area include:
The Coaching Habit - Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever
Teaming - How Organisations Learn, Innovate and Compete in the Knowledge Economy
What books would you recommend others to read in this space?
3: Humans are emotional
No surprise there, you might say. So why is it that when we get to work, we often forget that we’re dealing with emotional beings and craft a perfectly logical argument to influence others, teach others something or get our message across? This is often supported by a stack of slides with statistics and data that logically share our point of view.
Prof. Baba Shiv of Stanford University did some research on this and estimated that humans make decisions based on 90-95% emotion and 5-10% rationality.
Things probably aren’t so clear-cut as that in reality. However, when we’re engaging those stakeholders mentioned above, we need to engage them on multiple levels.
One of the most helpful tools I’ve come across in the last 10 years is Head Heart Hands, which guides us to consider the emotional, rational and practical elements when working with others. See more.
Customers/citizens are also emotional. Their emotional response dramatically impacts how they remember their experience of our services.
There is something called the “peak-end rule”, which means people will remember the peak emotional experience (be that positive or negative) and the way they were left feeling at the end of their service journey. This is why service designers are interested in learning how the people who use their services feel as they progress towards their goals.
If you think about your own experience of using a service recently - it’s the feeling of frustration or (if you’re lucky) delight that sticks with you long after the event happens.
And it’s this feeling that you’re likely to share with others.
I wish I’d understood this better on day one!
4: Design for the edge cases from the start
As I developed as a service designer, this was the thing that surprised me the most. I had assumed that we should be designing for the “average Joe”, whoever they are!
I often say, “Design for extremes, validate with mainstreams”.
Designing for edge cases often makes the service better for everyone. We often find that the best inspiration comes from these extreme users.
Extremes can fall on either end of a spectrum (for example, very low digital skills vs early adopters), and you'll want a variety of each. Usually, each will offer a viewpoint on your project that can generate new thinking.
For example:
Designing a planning application service for the most anxious and least expert users will make it better for everyone.
Designing accessible buses makes it better for people with a pram or pushchair.
Accessible legislation and government policy written in language suitable for a 12-year-old in Spain has significantly more downloads than the original legal documentation.
In Wales, designing bilingual services from the start creates a better experience for Welsh language users, whether fluent or learners. See How to do Trio Writing from CDPS for practical support on this.
5: Service design is a team sport
Service design is about taking multiple perspectives:
that of the people using the service,
the staff delivering the service,
aligning it with business objectives, feasibility and viability.
We cannot sit in a darkened room and conjure up a new service design. We must collaborate with others who can provide these various viewpoints.
Including the staff working directly on the service from the start is essential to include their valuable insights into any redesign and to get their buy-in on proposed changes. Omitting them can result in a nice report, which does nothing more than prop up the bookshelf.
Everybody comes to a project with their accumulated professional and personal experience. We all have our own biases and history that cloud our judgement. Working together effectively helps us mitigate our individual biases and ultimately create better ideas and solutions to challenges.
For teams to function at their best, we must focus on creating psychological safety within our teams. This means team members feel it’s safe to speak up without fear of retribution.
See Psychological Safety - What’s it Got to Do with Service Design?. This would have been a helpful read on day one!
6: Use surveys only if you really have to - and proceed with caution if you do
Most surveys are poorly designed and don’t give an underlying understanding of what’s really going on and why.
Even worse, surveys give us a false sense of comfort that we’ve asked loads of people lots of questions, and we do, therefore, understand what’s going on and why.
They don’t help us to understand the things we didn’t have the foresight to ask about. The unknown unknowns. I’m sure most people reading this have been on the receiving end of a survey, only to complete it and submit it without having been given a chance to share that burning thing you really wanted to tell them about.
This happened to me at the end of my cancer treatment.
I was plugged into my last chemo drip and was offered a 5-page questionnaire to share my patient experience. Great - I thought. I can tell them all about the terribly shocking way I was initially told I had cancer and the way I was then immediately ushered out into a busy waiting room to sit on my own for 20 minutes - an emotional wreck. But no - nobody had had the foresight to ask that particular question.
Surveys have their uses, but they are less useful than people think. If you must use surveys, proceed with caution - and test your questions for understanding, flow and bias with people before sending them out.
The most helpful writing I’ve come across on this is from Erica Hall at Mule. I wish someone had pointed me to this on day one!
7: Enough is enough
When we do research to understand the perspective of the people using our services, we can’t possibly speak to everyone and seek everyone’s views. It would be far too expensive and time-consuming.
So, how do we know when to stop seeking more and more input?
When we begin to see and hear things repeated, and a pattern begins to emerge, we can stop seeking additional confirmation of the phenomenon.
The added value of each piece of research usually diminishes as we do more and more research. I therefore ask myself, “How much value will x more research provide?” If the added value is disproportionately less than the cost, it’s time to stop for now.
This is a question I still get asked more than anything. I wish I’d been able to articulate it this clearly on day one!
8: A prototype is worth 1,000 meetings
We've all been there, I’m sure - sitting in meetings where we're discussing a service experience, feature, or proposed idea with colleagues. Everyone contributes their viewpoints - primarily based on our own biased perspective, often littered with assumptions.
So many meetings!
All this effort could be reduced or eliminated by making something cheap and disposable to test our thinking. Then, proceed based on the evidence.
This is such a phenomenon I’ve turned it into a sticker!
If you’re in the UK, use the contact form below to send me your address if you’d like one for your laptop (until I run out of stickers)!
9: Time to think
I’m sure we’ve all experienced it. You’re in a meeting where only the loud ones get to communicate their point.
What a waste!
Those people who don’t speak up aren’t usually staying quiet because they have no ideas or nothing to say. Maybe it doesn’t feel safe for them to speak up (see previous point on psychological safety), or perhaps they haven’t been given the time to think.
In about 2018, while at a UK GovCamp session run by David Heath, I came across Liberating Structures. They’re a set of guiding principles and facilitation methods used to include and unleash everybody. This session gave me the confidence to use the most basic structure 1-2-4-All - and I’ve never looked back! This simple method gives people a moment to reflect on a prompt before gradually sharing their thoughts more widely. It provides a greater chance for everyone in the room to voice their opinions and ideas, resulting in a greater diversity of thought and, therefore, better quality ideas and solutions.
I wish I’d known about this on day one!
10: Peel Post-It’s from the side
Finally, after years of running workshops and being unable to read the curled-up Post-It’s in the photos when back in the office, I realised there was a knack to removing them from the pad.
Peeling them from the side, or pulling them downwards from the pad prevents curling, so they lie flat on the whiteboard/flipchart etc. Who knew?!
They’re also less likely to fall to the floor partway through our workshops.
Some have said that this was the best thing they learned in one of my workshops! 😀
(Video shows how to peel Post-It’s effectively so they don’t curl up.)
Finally, I’ve realised if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life
I am mission-driven with a passion for making public services great. It’s what drives me, more than anything, to get out of bed in the morning and do what I do.
This inner motivation means that work doesn’t feel like something I have to force myself to do. I want to do it.
After spending 18 years doing a job that didn’t fill me with joy, it’s interesting to look back and notice the difference. Back then, what I did was just a job. Now, what I do is fulfilling and enjoyable. I wish I’d known that when I set off on my career. Then again, Service Design wasn’t really a thing in the mid-90s!
Learn more
If you’d like to learn more about the intricacies of service design in government and not-for-profit organisations, including learning some of the so-called soft skills I mentioned earlier, you can join me and Ffion Jones in one of our training courses.
Jo is an Accredited Master in Service Design and founder of ServiceWorks.
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