Service Designers, we need to plan ahead
As service designers, it is key to lay out a structure that would help the team to see the whole picture.
If you are new to Service Design and would like to explore the work scope for a Service Designer at a Startup, MNC or a Design Studio in India, check out my book Navigating Service Design.
As a service design team lead, I often find myself asking my team — “ Where is your structure?” or “ Put your structure in place and then we shall discuss”. My team hates the word “structure” today.
In this article, I want to expand on why a structure is important as designers. Maybe this is a letter to my design team or any other design team who does not realize the importance of having a larger road-map laid out.
Firstly what is a structure?
It is nothing but strategic steps which defines why each activity has to be conducted in a particular sequence. For further explaining the concept of a structure, let us take an example. The problem we are trying to address is —
How Might We provide an omni-channel experience to the fashion retail industry?
As a Service designer, the problem has to be broken down into smaller addressable parts. The first step to this is to identify all your stakeholders.
In the above example, the stakeholder could be — The designers, the fashion house with their own brand guidelines and operational staff, then you have the franchisee owners, the store representatives and the main core of the service which is always the Customers.
Each of the stakeholders have their own needs, motivations and goals to address. Hence each organizational structures has to be researched and documented individually.
A Service Structure can have larger “Phases”. A Phase generally refers to group of activities that is conducted for a particular purpose. If it is looking at an already existing service, Phase 1 could be focused on auditing the current service. ( I will write a separate article on how we can audit an existing service, and draw a strategy canvas for the same.)
What encompasses a phase?
A ‘Phase’ would generally set the context of the current study. It will have the city that the study would be conducted at, the intent of doing that particular phase and what would be the final outcome.
Example : Phase 1
The Research is conducted for the city of Bangalore . The objective of the study is to understand the current customer journey of Persona 1: ‘The Fashionista’ when she encounters a dress on Instagram ads and purchases the same in-store. The intent of the study is to understand the different touch points the persona encounters, the questions asked by the persona across each touch point and how it has been addressed by the retailer both offline and online.
The first step to create a structure is to identify that larger phases for individual stakeholders that would be required to re-design the current experience to create an omni-channel experience.
First identify all your Phases for each stakeholder
Once all the phases has been identified, the next stage is to identify the Activities that has to be performed in order to achieve the objective that has been framed for each phase.
Example :
Phase 1
The Research is conducted for the city of Bangalore . The objective of the study is to understand the current customer journey of Persona 1: ‘The Fashionista’ when she encounters a dress on Instagram ads and purchases the same in-store. The intent of the study is to understand the different touch points the persona encounters, the questions asked by the persona across each touch point and how it has been addressed by the retailer both offline and online.
Activity 1 :
As in journey map for persona 1
Activity 2 :
List of current touch-points with break down of all features ( offline/online)
Activity 3 :
Feature list matrix mapping
Activity 4 :
Collating the nice to have features, primary features based on business requirement, technology feasibility and customer needs.
Activity 5 :
Proposals of possible customer journeys.
What is an Activity?
An Activity is nothing but a sub set of steps that has to be done with each phase. An Activity has the following parts -
Objective | Research Methods | Research Output | Participant sample size | Time estimate for the study | Researchers / Designers required
These sub categories would help to clearly define how the study would be conducted and what would be the outcome of the above study.
“By documenting your process, you ensure that the entire team is aligned towards a common goal.”
Example : Phase 1 : Activity 1 — As in Journey map for Persona 1
Objective — Is to map out the current journey of Persona 1 so that we can identify his/her touch-points, actions, pain-points and frustration while interacting with individual touch-points. This will help us understand her entire experience.
Research Methods — Scenario creations, shadowing, interviewing and journey mapping
Research Output — Journey for individual scenarios, transcripts, valuable quotes
Participant sample size — 5 to 8
Time required — 1 month
Researchers required — 2
By doing the above documentation, the product manager or your Service Lead will be able to understand and gauge the scope of the study and how it could be adding value to other parallel activities that are being conducted within the team.
Whole to part
The above documentation technique helps the team to gauge what each member is working on and which areas of the study would the converge and diverge. Remember the double diamond design process ?
While designing a service, there are teams working on parallel streams. Each individual digital touch-point will have their own UX designers, UI designers, Product managers. Along with interfaces interacted by customers, there are interfaces on the back-end that facilitates the customer to have a seamless experience. There are also customer support teams, stock inventory, employee management and other third party that are instrumental in delivering an experience.
Documenting the larger picture would enable each designer to be more confident regarding their process and also gauge if they are working in parallel to other teams and converging at the same point of discussion so that everyone can diverge together and yet be aligned towards a common goal and time line.
Please feel free to write to me (juneza.niyazi@gmail.com) if you have other ideas or methods that you tested and succeeded or failed at!!!
