Jake Zukowski: “Everyone is a designer. It’s a consequence of striving to serve people well.”

Jake Zukowski is a group design director at Fjord Berlin. During our discussion we talked about the value of solving customers’ needs with deep empathy, the power of sticky notes and co-creation workshops.

Jake, tell me about Fjord and your role at company?

Fjord is the largest service design company on the planet. We are a part of a global management consulting firm Accenture with 469,000 employees around the globe. The company made its name in the area of digital products and services by being one of the first service design agencies. Since then, we’ve grown past just digital into areas like startup venturing and business design. We design physical products, spaces, and environments. We are working on digital and physical solutions across every industry.

Fjord has about 1,200 designers working in 28 studios. I am the group design director, managing creatives for the Berlin studio. I make sure that we are maintaining a good quality level, meeting customers’ and clients’ needs. My responsibility is to push the boundaries of clients’ comfort, make sure that they truly empathize with the customers that they want to serve.

Do you remember how you got into service design?

Yeah, absolutely. In 2001, I graduated from the University of Illinois with a computer science degree. My hope was to not program systems but to build their structure. I liked technology but I didn’t feel very comfortable when I was a programmer. I ended up going to Microsoft as a program manager. While working at Microsoft I learned about digital graphic design and then I learned of an emerging field of interaction design. From there I ended up reading a lot of books about interaction design, listening to smart people and finding opportunities within my work to do interaction and user experience design. Once I moved to Frog Design, I started to work beyond just interactions and micro-interactions, thinking about the entire experience for customers. That’s when I was turned on the service design, which was a new concept back then.

What is service design for you?

Service design is understanding the totality of customers’ needs and how products and services can meet them. Interaction design is more about moments in time when using a product or service and making those moments frictionless. Service design is about the entire breadth of customer’s needs and the ways we can satisfy them with products and services.

Service design, is it an evolution of interaction design or is it just another domain of design?

If you draw a Venn diagram of this, interaction design is fully within a big bubble that’s called service design. I would say that service design actually is generating more work for interaction design than is taking away. In the past designers were asked to create digital experiences, apps, websites. Now we are asked to understand customers better and to help think about business differently. And only then we move towards a solution which could be a web, an app, or a website. I think we are all growing together. Service design is just a superset of interaction design. One is not eating the other, they go hand in hand.

What are the common problems that clients come to your company with?

Usually, companies come to Fjord because they’ve tried a lot of different ways to solve a problem and they’ve been unsuccessful in solving it. We bring methodologies and techniques to let them think differently about their problem and their business. It is very typical for a client to come and say “I need ____”. And that blank would be an app, a website or maybe a video. We talk to customers and figure out their actual pains and needs. And it’s a common thing that customer needs are different to what a client comes for. So there’s always a reframing moment at the end of the research phase. “You think that your customers need an app. What your customers actually need is a consistent way to get in touch with you when they have a problem.” Once we go back from the “what”, where interaction and user experience design lives, to the actual need or “the why”, where service design lives, that’s when we start having interesting conversations with clients about how to satisfy customers, not just shape a product.

How do you explain the value of service design to your clients?

All clients are different. Some people have an understanding of what service design is and some people think it’s more like “design thinking”. Depending on what their expertise is, we can talk to them about our methods and activities. Or we can go all the way back and talk about understanding customers and getting empathy.

Service design is not about the methods, activities, or deliverables. It’s about getting into the head of other people, wearing their shoes for a while before we start making decisions about how we can best help them.

The way that I talk about the value of service design is mostly about how design driven businesses create value for their customers and shareholders. There’s an organization called the Design Management Institute (the DMI), who has done a research that showed that design led companies increase their value faster than the baseline of all other companies, baselined by the S&P 500 index. Companies such as Apple, Whirlpool, Amazon or Uber show more value, get faster growth, and get more customer loyalty than an average company who doesn’t put design and the customer at the center. When you’re solving customers’ needs with deep empathy, they will love you more and want to give you more business.

Which companies need service design?

I’m trying to remember the last time that a company didn’t need it. You would think governments don’t need service design, but that’s not true in our global economy. As a citizen of the Ukraine, you can’t easily say “Well, I don’t want to work with the Ukrainian government anymore”. However, people are so mobile now, you might say, “I don’t want to do business in the Ukraine any more. What other countries are out there? Even governments compete for people’s talent and tax dollars. Service design can help make even governments more attractive.

Even companies that operate in a monopoly benefit from service design. Service design can help companies save money by streamlining operations, shutting down products and services that people don’t think valuable. As designers, we don’t do an adequate job talking about how service design can save companies real money.

Here’s the truth about every company, every organisation, and every government: they are doing service design, whether they know it or not. Everyone is a designer. It’s a consequence of striving to serve people well. If you’re trying to make people’s lives better, you are a designer, whether you do it with the intention or not.

Service design helps you design with more intention as opposed to letting design just happen and hoping for the best.

I have consulted with companies that didn’t have a lot of time or resources to dedicate to service design. Once you tell them they are actually doing service design but without expertise, they start to understand why many of their products or services fail with their customers. This small shift can help clients think about their business in a more customer-centric manner and leverage their industry expertise and pair it with customer empathy to make things that their customers will love, that will save them money, and increase their profits.

Why service designers need so many post-it notes?

Sticky notes are small pieces of paper and that’s how we inject constraints to think differently. If I ask you to write down your business plan on a piece of A4 paper you will give a different answer than if I give you a sticky note. A little sticky note works a lot better to crystallize the ideas than typing a bunch of words or talking into a microphone or anything like that. Do designers use the notes all the time and is it embarrassing? Yeah, it is. But if you use them right, they introduce constraints and do their job.

Sticky notes also help us work with intangible concepts. Interaction, graphic and industrial design often work with a form or a flow and have something more concrete to anchor on. Service design is more about the understanding of problem spaces. That’s not to say that industrial, graphic or interaction designers don’t have really big problems to solve. Industrial designers are solving problems of form and materials of physical products. Interaction designers are solving problems of customers’ flow. Service designers are helping shape a business. Shaping a business is done through a lot of communication. Stickies are great way to efficiently communicate, visualize, group, and make meaning of large amounts of data. That’s why service designers use stickies way too much.

Service design is often related to workshops. How do you think, why?

I see workshops as a doorway to have a deeper discussion with companies about how design can help change their business. One thing that I like to do before the workshop is to go find target customers even if the client hasn’t asked me. I write people on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter and see if I can find people who I suspect are the target customers. I have a conversation with them for 10 minutes, videotape them with their permission and put a little compilation together, so that client can understand that we can get empathy with customers very quickly and really understand what customers want and bring that into workshops.

Instead of just sitting with the client with post-its and writing down ideas that are uninformed, showing them a little bit of what design research could be and that doesn’t cost any money. Showing them a power of talking to people and really understanding what their problems are, that really changes the conversation about design thinking.

What is the value of bringing the client into the design process?

While working at Frog I had a wonderful design research executive named Jan Chipchase. What Jan taught me was that clients can not only benefit from the insights, but also the process. The more we can bring clients into our methodology, the less you have to explain how you came up with that solution.

There’s a wonderful technique that we have done to bring clients in on the process. In a workshop, we asked the client to do some user needs mapping based on their understanding of the customer and let them write down what they knew about their customers. We used our sticky notes, captured all the insights, and mapped all the user needs. We did a clustering exercise and then had a discussion. This all sounds like a pretty standard workshop. What we didn’t tell the client was that we were bringing in real users. We set these users up as a panel, allowing the clients to ask them questions. It became clear to our clients that what they thought their customers needed was different than what this actual customer panel was saying. After that, we went back to our user need maps and, without saying anything, the clients started tearing things down. They said: “Well, this is a “No”, this is a “No”, this is a “No”. We forgot this and that. Now we know a lot more”. This is not a real design research, this is like a fake focus group. But this technique teaches clients that they might not know everything and asking real people is a good way to learn the true needs. Another approach is to let customers interview the client. Clients are generally shocked at the questions that people come up with. It changes the client’s perception right away.

There’s another thing that we did. We were working for pet food company and instead of just doing design research on our own, we invited the clients to go with us on dog walks. So we were walking with dogs around the city and talking to people about their pets and their needs. We didn’t make it a formal research. We just went on the streets willing to learn something new. That experience was eye-opening to the client as well.

As designers we are often afraid that the clients are going to ruin our design work or design research, but the more we can bring them into our work, the better results we can achieve on our mission to make better products and services.

How do you think, what is the main challenge in service design right now?

People like to think of service design as just a set of methodologies, and if you understand how to use sticky notes and how to run a workshop, that makes you a service designer. My wish is that we could all understand that good service design is less about tools and methods and more about empathy and human connection. It’s about stepping into someone else’s shoes for a bit and really feeling what they are feeling. I think that’s the challenge the service design has to convince people that it is an expertise, not a toolset. It’s a practice, not just recipes or methodology.

Everyone’s a designer, whether they know it or not.

The more we can help people understand we do all this service design stuff to have true empathy for the lives of others, to help design products and services that not only will be successful in the market but will help with a real problem, the better off we all will be.

Images courtesy of Jake Zukowski and Servant Conference