What have we learned from the Service Design Conference (SD in Gov)
Back in March I had the opportunity to attend the fifth Service Design in Government Conference. The event was over three days and was a hands-on practical conference that drew on an international audience of top Service Designers and world leading speaking leaders!
I felt excited about the three days ahead.
The venue was impressive at the John McIntyre Conference Centre in Edinburgh. Having looked at the programme, it was difficult to choose which sessions to attend as they all looked like they had so much to offer.
Working with my colleague, we chose our sessions to ensure as much coverage as possible on areas that interested us most in connection with our development and where we were with our digital programme.
Lou Downe from the Cabinet Office opened the conference and talked about how user centred design is still tiny in government.
It prompted me to wonder why this is? I’ve not heard anyone disagree that this is a good thing. There were many people at the event who were passionate about user centred services and about designing end to end services. Why is user research not given the priority it needs and why do we still continue to pay little attention to it when undertaking transformation activity and service redesign? This is something we really want to drive through our organisation and transformation work in North East Lincolnshire.
Much of the conference I experienced focussed around user centred design, agile project management, designing end-to-end services and thinking about designing services around things that users want to achieve. I was also interested in the digital storytelling session.
My top 3 take aways from the event where:
· A reinforced view of how important it is to design services around the user and assurance that we are doing some good stuff! Let’s not build them based on what we think we know or making tweaks around a design we already have. Let’s understand our users and their journey and design around their needs. It’s important that we differentiate between wants and needs — we should be desiging around needs. We need to be bold and rethink around what our users are wanting to achieve.
· Digital story telling can be really powerful and isn’t resource intensive. It doesn’t have to be hard or complicated. I sat through a 90 minute session and by the end had created a video and uploaded it to Twitter within about 5 minutes! https://twitter.com/i/moments/972104822659874816
· Measuring impact is important but it can take time for this to emerge. From what I heard, this is a challenge for many service design projects because it takes time for the impact to be realised. Being really clear at the outset on what your measures of impact are is key. It’s something that was discussed in other sessions, we need to keep it simple and identify a couple of clear measures which would be indiciators of success.
Overall, I felt part of a big community who wanted to develop and embed service design as an approach in government. Many service designers are working on similar pieces of work such as transport and moving home. There is a lot of love out therefore service design and developing user focussed services and we need to build on that, learn from others and most of all design services around user needs.
