Service Design from the inside out: changing business strategy

This article summarizes a talk that I had the pleasure of giving at ISA 2017, the biggest Interaction Design event in South America.

How could Service Design become a key service in the development of a new business strategy?

To better understand this, I’d like to go back to Flux IT’s beginning, about ten years ago. We — known as the usability team at that time — joined the company when it had only been in the market a short while in order to inject some added quality into the general development process.

It wasn’t easy. We started with two people who were considered the terrors of the organization. The developers went from having complete control over their projects to having to wait for our input. It was hard for them to see the value that could be added to decision-making about design by a couple of crazies speaking up on behalf of the users.

So the starting point for our job was to evangelize over the developers, helping them see that the people who’d be using the product were part of the process. And of course, we didn’t just have to evangelize over those within the organization, since we also had to defend the value of our work with the clients.

The discipline was in its infancy. I remember that in 2010 we were encouraged (pretty unknowingly) to plan a La Plata Usability Day, wondering if there were even going to be 10 people in the audience. Luckily for everyone, a serious interest started brewing among designers and the event was a success.

The community was growing

The discipline was growing and becoming ever more relevant. As a team, we kept on getting more involved with this active community, participating in different activities and events that were being created, even sharing our experiences as speakers in various settings.

For me personally, ISA 2014 (the first of its kind in Argentina), “turned my head around”. That’s where I gave my first talk and I felt like I was going to be part of something huge!

Just when we feel like we’re all settled down, with our processes and experience design methods starting to work like well-oiled machines, the dangling carrot gets pushed out just a little bit farther and we’re yanked out of our comfort zone. We’re forced to stay up-to-date and get moving, experimenting and taking new steps.

More challenging projects

It wasn’t just the community that grew. Gradually, the projects we were taking on got more challenging. We went from improving screen interfaces to being able to participate in more exhausting things like research, ideation and even definition of solutions.

Slowly, we started taking on more space and prominence in the projects.

Naturally, we began to observe and become involved with things that went beyond the digital solutions that we’d been working towards, and we started trying to make sure we provided our clients with a holistic experience for their problems.

It’s difficult to redesign the experience of a benefits program if the benefits being offered aren’t that valuable to people, right?

Transitions are always difficult and the problem we were facing was that even if our service was progressing in this regard, we often felt limited by the fact that the only need being identified was improving screen usability.

I remember one afternoon when we started doing what we called “speedometer”, a template in which we captured the degrees of UX intervention in our tasks and the features they had. The best part about this was that we kept on having more and more projects with a high degree of UX intervention. The speedometer helped us understand and demonstrate that not all services were equal and how, little by little, we could offer better experiences for the users.

This framework was the start of having a clearer idea of the differences in intervention; and things have changed quite a bit:

• We weren’t in the “after” stage so much anymore — making screens prettier and more usable — but rather in an earlier stage of involvement, going from establishing “how” to make the designs to being part of the idea at the point of conception: what solution is more in line with the problems that have been identified?
• The focus stopped being specific and centered on a specific product and became more globalized, more concerned with the general user experience. This change came about because we left work on limited-scope solutions behind (a company’s internal application, for example) so we could start creating broad-scope solutions (like home banking, a virtual wallet, or a health portal, to give a few examples).

This development in the services we offer came along with a change that started brewing in the whole company — the change of interlocutors.

It wasn’t enough anymore to just talk with the technology area; we had to start aiming at the business, which would change the moment of intervention. In this way, we started working with our clients at a newer and earlier stage, identifying problems that need solving and detecting opportunities that could be taken advantage of through different solutions.

Our proposal and paradigm changed: “Don’t tell us what to build; let’s look for problems together and then design the best solution.”

In this way, what initially started as a usability service evolved into experience design; and while the user is still at the center of our processes, now we’re immersed in our clients’ business as well.

This natural evolution of the discipline reached the highest echelons of the company and started marking out a new path where we began offering Service Design to help clients understand their needs and find comprehensive solutions of real value for their consumers.

Applying a new service strategy

We began implementing the methodology on ourselves, aiming at resolving internal needs and redefining Flux IT processes. The results were clear and encouraging.

After these internal tests, we were able to spread our enthusiasm and new way of thinking and designing solutions to a few other companies. We did this with workshops in which our clients would apply the methodology to specific solutions as they became more familiar and comfortable and connected with it.

Finally, the service became consolidated as it is. Now businesses call us up to help them understand their own problem and, in the process of discovering and understanding them, we draw up a roadmap to help them improve the experience of their services.

What role does the designer play today?

From all this experience, I’d like to highlight how as an Experience Design (XD) team we don’t just offer new services, but instead we can enhance a company’s general strategy as it evolves with the new needs of the market.

Rome wasn’t built in a day; it took hard work every day, wondering if it was even right for us as an IT company to propose working on the promotion of business strategies focused on people.

Most services are digital nowadays, and being “ahead of the curve” enables us to help businesses with high-quality technical solutions and value for people.

A developer colleague told me once that we, the experience designers, are the “guiding light for projects.” The discipline, fortunately, has positioned itself differently now, and we, as designers, have an opportunity to modify the conception of solutions. We hold a huge opportunity in our hands.

With entrepreneurial vision, human sensibility and a strategic eye, we have a truly decisive opportunity to change the world.