Service Design-in’ at Hackney Council
An asynchronous interview with Rahma Mohamed, Service Designer at Hackney Council in London
Q: Ciao Rahma, please introduce yourself.
A: My name is Rahma Mohamed. I’m a Service Designer working at Hackney Council.
Q: What does your organisation do?
The London Borough of Hackney is a London borough in Inner London. The London boroughs are the 32 local authority districts that make up the county of Greater London; each is governed by a London borough council. Hackney London Borough Council is the local government authority for the London Borough of Hackney. Borough Councils own and maintain nearly half a million homes, run the libraries, deal with planning applications, and are responsible for waste collection and licensing of the capital’s pubs, clubs and restaurants.
Hackney is a district in East London, England, forming around two-thirds of the area of the modern London Borough of Hackney, to which it gives its name.
Q: How do you define Service Design?
A: Defining what a Service Designer does is hard to describe because everyone’s perception and expectation differ. For example, organisations might hire Service Designers to work across UX, IU, Strategy and/or Policy Design. Therefore, I find it more helpful to focus less on Service Design and more on using a design thinking approach to solving problems, with some designers leaning more towards one of the above than the other.
In terms of the framework and mindset, you’d still need to understand needs, navigate and communicate complexity, create a path forward and manage change.
However, the way someone goes about doing that depends on the digital maturity of the organisation. In organisations where design thinking is new, there is a lot of work that has to be done to get buy-in for this way of working. This sometimes means choosing a quick approach or ‘cutting corners’ to get things out the door in order to show value quickly, but investing less time in research and testing can have an effect on the quality of the end-product and long-term trust with people using the service.
I’m not sure there’s one answer for solving this, but I’ve found balancing quick wins with delivering longer-term goals has helped with gaining momentum and trust, while solving the ‘whole problem’. So delivering small, valuable changes that you identify early in the discovery, rather than waiting until the discovery phase is completed to deliver.
Q: What’s the current Service Design setup at your council?
A: Reporting to the Head of Digital and Data, our team consists of one lead and three designers. We’re based within the Information and Communications Technology Department (ICT) and we work alongside and support the rest of the organisation. Our focus is on understanding user needs first, with projects ranging from developing specific tools (e.g customer relationship management tool) to working across end-to-end services (e.g redesigning a service offer, including tools and processes).
Service Design is not a refined discipline yet, because I think there is still some work to be done to demonstrate what Service Design involves and the various ways it can add value. I don’t think that’s specific to our organisation, but a general observation in our industry. For example, comparing it to User Research, which is much more focused on understanding user needs, Service Design and the expectation of the role aren’t always as well defined, which makes the result harder to pinpoint and/or demonstrate. However, I feel that being able to define the type of design you do and telling stories around emotional needs and/or cost-saving, can help people see how your skills might be useful across different projects.
Q: What’s the relationship between Service Design and the other disciplines at Hackney Council?
A: We tend to work quite often with User Researchers, however, we are very flexible when it comes to roles and responsibilities.
There is also a wide range of disciplines across IT, including data analysts and developers, who we work closely with depending on the project. Additionally, we are really lucky to be working closely with subject matter experts across the different Hackney Council services. For example, we might be embedded in a service where we’re working directly with front line staff or we might work in multidisciplinary teams that include colleagues across Customer Services and Social Care.
Q: Your Service design work. What are the typical initiatives you work on? What are the most unsexy bits you ever worked on? What are the bits you are most proud of?
A: The most exciting thing about working in Hackney Council is that you really get to work across a variety of services. For example, I’ve helped design the user experience on a customer relationship management system, worked on a project to understand complex user journeys and the way we might improve customer services in those areas, and now I’m working with two services that are merging and redefining their offer.
I think with digital transformation, there is often the expectation to see a thing/digital product to demonstrate progress. However, I tend to lean more towards work where I’m able to look at a service holistically and make improvements to both front and back-end processes. Thereby providing joined-up, efficient and cost-effective services. As a result, we might deliver a ‘shiny product’, but the value created might also be in the ‘less exciting work’ of reducing the number of handover points in a process that helps improve the overall experience.
This includes work I’ve done alongside HR colleagues to recommend a new way users might make a request to HR (e.g changing someone’s working pattern). It’s a project where we were able to look at the things that a user might touch (a form) and create a prototype that redesigned the existing request form so that it was more user-friendly and accessible. As well as, redesign the underlying processes (e.g duplications and steps involved in the process) that contribute to a poor customer experience so that it might reduce the time, effort and costs it took to process a change.
It was also particularly exciting work that was centred around adopting new ways of working, and we were able to really co-design with people using the service, which led to investment in the work and the outcome. This is important to point out because, in addition to the right skills in a team, we really need the confidence from service users to make change happen.
Q: Service design impact. How do you prove the impact of Service Design?
A: There are a lot of discussions in the design community about having to often defend Service Design. In my early days, when doing research and speaking with Service Designers, I learnt that the work was perceived very differently across organisations/companies. To some, the focus was mainly on marketing and making the service visible to new customers, others focused on transactional services. Even within academia, service design is taught in a variety of ways. For example, the Master’s course I completed had a business and IT lens, where in addition to design methodology and application, we learnt about strategy, coding and change management. In comparison, other universities I looked into had more of an art lens with a focus on theory and communication.
I wonder if it’s the lack of one definition of Service Design that prevents organisations and practitioners from defining the aim and the “expected” value of Service Design. The way this might play out in real life is that there isn’t always clarity on the purpose of a designer with such a title.
For me, I’ve learnt that in order to demonstrate impact effectively, I need to understand the expectation of Service Design in the organisation, with the people I work with. Sometimes this is quite clear, other times you might need to work closely with people to define it. This means scheduling regular chats with the project sponsor and stakeholders to get regular feedback and ensure that we are aligned on the direction and outcomes throughout the project.
Q: How can people follow you?
A: @RahmaJM1
Service Design-in’ is a collection of thoughts and interviews with Service Designers working within organisations. If you want to share your views, please reach out.
