Quick Take: Thoughts from Academy Xi Future Series — Service Design
“Companies are realising the importance of a well-crafted experience, and the profound effect this has on customers. At the centre of Service Design, is the creation of thoughtful, user-friendly experiences.” — Academy Xi
Yet like most industries, the disruption of technology in the business landscape has raised questions around the direction of the very approach and process originally designed to manage digital transformation.
Academy Xi assembled a panel of speakers to discuss key questions around this topic:
What are key challenges moving forward for clients and designers?
Where can improvements be made?
What will be the required skills and responsibilities of people in the field?
Panelists discussed over a 90 minute session with a quick Q&A at the end. Admission was free and refreshments (beer, cider, water) were provided. Some of the more interesting points raised during the discussion include:
Service Design Is Based on Relationships
The first type of relationship most are familiar with — the Designer + User. A lot of well-trodden ground was covered here. I will call out Ben Pinto-Oliver’s provocative comment that the entire discipline rests upon the ability to talk to people and listen. While this is common knowledge, the challenge will always remain to gain a deeper understanding of user needs.
Room for improvement abounds in this space:
- Better interviewing and deciphering what people are trying to communicate
- More seamless integration of this intelligence into your product
- Followed by rapid testing and iteration
The second relationship is one that gets less of the spotlight, but is equally important when trying to deliver a successful project.
Designer + Client: To drive a service design approach for a project requires really getting to know your clients. Know what makes them tick. Understand their relationships between different departments.
The attitude reminds me of popular quote from To Kill A Mockingbird’s protagonist, Atticus Finch — “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view […] until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Not only must we bring the users perspective into the equation, but we must get equally familiar with clients and truly understand their hopes and fears. Constantly fostering an environment and approach of collaboration through tone and language is critical true partnership and ultimately project success.
Service Design Can Unlock Untapped Markets
Another interesting conversation point from the panel discussed the use of technology and design to create new markets for underserved or unaddressed market.
The example used in conversation revolved around an international bank looking to expand top line growth. The consultancy after an exhaustive exploratory phase felt the best solution was to “bank the unbanked” (traditionally lower income people with savings but who trust their mattresses over banks), which turned out to be a sizeable segment of the population. The immediate response from the bank was to reject the notion, because it would require building new digital products and services that met this segment’s needs (trust, mobile p2p payment systems) and technology (non-smart phones, limited data plans) — a perfect canvas for service design thinking!
It struck that creating these type of business solutions are something that only larger system thinking and a deep understanding of consumer needs can provide for businesses and categories. Recognising these opportunities requires untangling very complicated relationships within industries and companies while redefining connections between organisations, employees and consumers, thereby requiring a particular set of skills, methodologies and patience/luck to be successful.
Overall, it was a worthwhile talk and my thanks goes out to the panelists fro their time. There are several more discussion panels lined up by Academy Xi in the next few months which I’m looking forward to.
