How did you become a Service Designer?

Now, ten years ago, I wouldn’t have had a clue what you were talking about if you had introduced yourself as a Service Designer. However, I definitely would have been interested.

I met an ex-colleague about three years ago and I was explaining what I was doing at work these days, and she stopped me mid-sentence and said, “what do you do again?”. The truth is that the world of Service Design is still a very new field of work that many people haven’t come across yet. But they will all be able to tell you about a bad user or customer experience.

Service Design, put simply, is all about understanding and meeting the needs of users to unlock value in experiences. We do this through a whole bunch of different tools and methodologies but, if you care about this you can become a service designer. Your path to becoming one may look very different, but in many ways, they all feel the same.

Stay interested

The most common hallmark of any Service Designer that I’ve met is that they are relentlessly interested in the world and how it works. This interest develops into a desire to make experiences better. Sometimes this idea might be big, but often it’s the small changes that make the biggest difference.

At university I studied History of Art (not an obvious leap into Service Design) so I hit the jobs market with an open mind. I turned my hand to running a bar, working in customer service, career coaching and even a stint as a binman. I didn’t understand it at the time, but all these roles helped me to experience first-hand the importance of delivering a good service and identifying how I might make the experience better. These experiences also helped me to become empathetic to the needs of users, which is an important skill for anyone who wants to design services for a living.

Learn some design theory and practice

Once I had heard about Service Design, I started to read a lot around It and the wider subject of behaviour change. I’ve never been the biggest academic but having a good grounding in the basic principles of good design is essential in any design profession.

Through my reading I was able to identify several transferable skills and techniques from my consulting and change world that I could take across too, such as working with others, wider research/investigation skills, developing a solution and iterating around an idea. I was then able to build design methodologies and theory into my practices, which helped to refine and hone my skills.

To support with this, I would recommend reading the following books to give you the basics:

• This Is Service Design Doing by Marc Stickdorn, Adam Lawrence, Marcus Hormess and Jakob Schneider
• Good Services by Lou Downe
• Universal Methods of Design by Bruce Hanington
• Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
• Just Enough Research by Erika Hall

There are many more, but the above are good places to start and are the ones I constantly refer back to. Equally, anyone interested in public sector Service Design work can find valuable resources here: https://www.gov.uk/service-manual and https://service-manual.nhs.uk/

Quality conversations

So this might sound like an no brainer, but the best way to understand and improve a service is to dive right into the detail and ask lots and lots of questions. The more you immerse yourself in understanding the beginning to end, front to back and channels of a service, the easier you will be able to identify the challenges.

You can do this through many ways - creating journey maps, blueprints, personas, etc. The truth is there is no one output that you must create. The above are all tools that help you to visualise and articulate the challenges faced. Service Design is less about the artifacts you produce and more about the quality of the conversations you have. I often find myself helping to convince others to take a step back and look at the wider perspective or challenging someone to make a bolder choice to solve the real problem instead of tackling the easy stuff.

The crucial thing here is make sure that you are really solving the right problem.