Switching from Service Design to User Experience Design
I recently switched from a service design role to a user experience design one. Before working Sainsbury’s I felt frustrated with the lack of implementation in Service Design. When I started job hunting I was looking for a role where I could work on live, user-facing services. I saw lots of jobs at organisations that delivered user-facing services being advertised, but they seemed to be looking for user experience designers rather than service designers. Sainsbury’s were hiring, the role appealed to me because Sainsbury’s is a huge digital-first business, providing food for 70% of the UK population. The idea of working on a service as essential as food was very exciting.
How I switched
While I was in my last service design role I was doing a bit of interaction design. I developed a prototype for PHE’s evaluating digital health services guide using the GOV.UK prototyping kit. I then tested this with various users for usability as well as the value proposition.
When it came to applying for roles, I showed this prototype as a case study in my portfolio. I also showed a few interaction design projects I’d done over the years including Ray, an energy saving chatbot.
Bulb was a company I had my eye on, I love the design of their products and their green energy mission. I was lucky enough to get an interview, and showed them my portfolio. They rejected me for the role, and gave me useful feedback. I had more service design than interaction design in my folio, and my passion for interaction design came from a need to make things real for users, rather than a genuine passion for the craft.
Iterating my applications
After that feedback I changed up my portfolio, focusing more on the detail of my interaction design work and less on the process of my service design work. I enrolled in the awesome front end coding course at Superhi, and spent weeks learning HTML, CSS and some Javascript. Getting better at coding helped my process as a designer. I now had a better vocabulary for speaking to developers, and an understanding how easy / hard my designs were to build. I also built some cute websites in the process.
Learning
Armed with my new coding skills and refined portfolio I started work at Sainsbury’s. Sainsbury’s owns Argos and Habitat, so I started working across the discovery of Argos and Sainsbury’s sites, helping customers find items. I then moved over to in-store experiences SmartShop and Pay@Browse, both apps that customers use in-store. My colleagues at Sainsbury’s have been super welcoming. The team is huge and there’s lots of more experienced designers to learn from. One of the things I’ve enjoyed is putting 30 mins in the calendar with a designer and just showing them designs, getting really detailed feedback before testing with users.
Over the time I’ve spent as a user experience designer I’ve learned a few key lessons:
- Try to keep your design files as neat as possible so that other designers can pick them up — I helped our team move to Figma to make this process easier.
- Ensure your designs are consistent with the rest of the brand. Following design guidelines can feel even harder than creating them!
- Remember people have fat fingers, no small buttons on mobile and tablet.
- There’s always a Medium post, or something in the Google material design to draw inspiration from (no need to create a new product card from scratch)
I had a good handle on the user experience side of the job, carrying out research and creating digital journey’s for people. The user interface side of things was new, so I did a Udemy course in Figma and UI design which I’d recommend.
Designing and delivering user facing services
The amazing thing about working closely with product teams within Sainsbury’s is the scale at which we’re designing. Making a tiny change to a digital product means millions of users will use it, so we did a lot of usability testing before things went out, and carefully monitored the analytics.
No Search Results Page
The Argos no search results page had a big bounce rate. Users would search for things, and if they spelt it really badly they would end up on this page. I redesigned the page so that users could click on categories or go into the search bar to continue their experience.
Argos Mobile Menu
The old mobile menu on Argos was too narrow. It was difficult from an accessibility point of view, because someone with low vision or low mobility in their hands would have trouble navigating it. I simply moved the menu over my an inch, allowing people to easily navigate.
SmartShop Shopping Lists
SmartShop is a Sainsbury’s app that allows you to scan things and put them straight in your bag. There’s a simple shopping list feature. I developed the functionality so that list items could be moved around, people could paste in multiple items. I also introduced ‘Suggested items’ so that people could shop from their previously bought items. I carried out a lot of research into how people create shopping lists and learned almost 50% of people categorise their list to make it easier to when shopping in store.
Pay@browse audit
The classic Argos catalogue is being replaced by Pay@Browse, the ipad within the shop that allows you to browse Argos and pay. This is going to save the business a lot of money, but also be better for the environment. Sainsbury’s will become carbon-neutral by 2040. I improved the search experience to make it more in-keeping with the rest of Argos. I wanted to modernise it and make it more consistent.
Key lessons learned
Making the switch from service design to interaction design is great because you already have the understanding of the user journey, how to carry out research and understand what people want. The main difference is in the detail. I found myself going deep into how a user would behave when a button was in the bottom left, verses the bottom right. This involved lots of testing and iterating.
I miss the strategic side of service design, really zooming out and thinking about a user’s experience from that perspective. At Sainsbury’s we have a dedicated service design team, and they take care of that. I enjoy the blurred lines between user research, content design, interaction design and service design. A good service designer has an understanding of multiple disciplines, and knows when to bring in a more specialised colleague. In the future I hope my more detailed understanding of building digital products supports my service design work.