How to improve program delivery with service design
I started as a service designer at It Utveckling at SVT in September 2020 and immediately started a work on the program delivery process at SVT.
I will use this blog post to tell you about service design, what it is, why it’s a good method and what we did with the program delivery process.
One could say that service design is like every other defined design process, but — you have to take twenty steps back. Service design is to design for the biggest picture.
Service design is a method used to create solutions both for the end user (independent on channel and situation!) and for every other user involved in the service.
Service design is suitable for complex, joint services where different tools and users are needed to fulfill the process. The program delivery process is a good example of such a service.
The program delivery process at SVT is all about making programs ready to broadcast on TV and published at SVT Play. The process starts when the program-file can be downloaded and ends when the program file is ready in the broadcast system and to be coded for online publishing — and thereby becomes available for the audience. Important steps in the delivery process is quality control of audio and video, and adding accessibility services such as sub-texts and sign interpretation.
Service design is always user-centered and focuses on methods to co-create. The aim of doing service design for the program delivery process was to find out what parts of the process that will be affected by the fact that we are replacing our media archive.
We started with an impact mapping-workshop to find out the goals and visions for the program delivery process. Together with 5 stakeholders did we formulate what we want to achieve. This always helps to know where we want to reach, and also to know if we succeed or not. It is also very helpful to have goals later when you need to prioritize between solution ideas.
The core team in this work was a few experienced people who work daily in all phases of the process. We planned the work in stages as suggested by the double diamond, first Research then Design.
The aim with the research is to learn about how the service works and to find what problems to solve. The aim of the design phase is to create solutions to those problems. During the research phase are insights collected and analyzed. We tried to take our steps back and look at things from a wider perspective. We wanted to understand whats going on before, during and after the program delivery process. To dig into the problems like this is also a good way to avoid old truths.
We used a user journey map to visualize the results of the research. Our user map shows the program delivery process from the start when the program is ordered and created, through all states of technical approves, added subtexts until its finally ready to be broadcasted and published online. The user journey walks through every action, step by step and highlights the positive and negative experiences associated with every step.
We used interviews and a few field studies to get insights to fill the user journey. We visited Go’Kväll in Umeå, the media center, delivery center and the publishing editors. We interviewed 30+ persons working with everything between purchasing programs to project coordination to video doing and program planning.
To end the research and start the design did we go through the user journey and wrote “How might we”-questions for the areas we wanted to improve. Finally did we prioritize the most important “How might we”.
The goal in the second part of the Double diamond is to explore, build and design new ideas on how to overcome the problems. We invited people affected by the program delivery process from all over SVT to use all knowledge and inspiration to a couple of design studio workshops.
The aim of the design studio is to find a lot of ideas.
Afterwards could we easily form 5 core concepts on how to improve program delivery. Together with those was a vision about the process created. The concepts were formulated as hypotheses and the next step is to validate them by small scale tests. One test was developed as a part of the Tekniksprint, a project called “Tullen”.
The next step for the concepts is to be prioritized by the project portfolios.
Service design is a way to approach product development from everyone’s perspective; the TV audience, the internal users and the goals of the organization at the same time. To be successful, solutions for complex services must be useful and attractive in all parts of the process.
Sally Ståhl
