What is Service Design and what can it teach us about building empathy for team mates?

What is service design and do I need an advanced degree to practice it?

If you are a designer of any kind – and I mean this in the broadest sense possible - then you have, most likely, at some point at least considered the much larger world that your design fits into. From the immediate environment to the community to the region to the world – an all of the actors and channels that this may entail – is truly the essence of engaging in service design. It is re-framing your mindset to consider the ecosystem that your singular feature, product, or discreet service fits into. This discipline and practice seems to have become quite high-brow and confusing to many. However, from talking with and listening to experts in service design it becomes clear that with the right mindset and training, any intelligent person with a high enough level of emotional intelligence can be taught how to do this. Mainly, though, it takes time, patience, empathy, and active listening.

Deliverables are a major focus of any business – “show me the value in this project which I’m funding,” says the execs. Deliverables are the very tip of the iceberg of what your team or enterprise can gain from such an endeavor. Despite this, there is no getting around showing progress updates, and they will benefit you and your team in the end anyway. The big deliverable that everyone wants out of a service design engagement is an experience map or journey map, but this doesn’t need to be a five foot long, four-color poster, nor is it the end-all be-all in service design deliverables. In fact, the processes used to create service design deliverables is much more valuable to a product team or enterprise than that gorgeous, expensive, over-sized color Experience Map hanging in the product manager’s office. Smaller sets of deliverables along the way, such as updated personas and service blueprints will greatly aide your cause. When it comes time, after three, six, nine months or more, to deliver the five year roadmap, your logic is transparent and your suggestions are more easily accepted as the best solutions.

Sometimes, in order to deliver the best, most accurate suggestions possible, it is necessary to take somewhat extreme measures in researching your users — you may just need to become one. This is what I call undercover service design — you literally become (or as close as possible, using prosthetics and intentional barriers or aides as needed) one of your own users. This can be the most successful way to deliver the richest set of suggestions back to a client or product team for their product or service. This does mean, in most cases, taking on a new job for several weeks if not months to immerse yourself in the experience you are designing for. This sort of long-term ethnographic research will vary greatly depending on whether your user base is primarily business or consumer – business users may allow you to work alongside them in their offices, while consumer-based studies will need to employ more of a literal “become the customer” experience. Imagine you are designing a service for Alzheimer’s unit nurses; chances are you have little to no experience with that user group, and the best way to understand anything or anyone that is different from your own heretofore experiences is to as much as is reasonably possible become that person and/or live that experience. Working, even a couple of hours a day, on an Alzheimer’s hospital unit is the absolute best way to walk in those shoes and experience those pains.

It’s not always feasible to engage in a complete service design overhaul of an existing product or service, or maybe the task is to build an entirely new Thing. In cases like these, the outcome-driven design strategy and maps are a great example of another powerful design thinking set of mindsets, methods, and deliverables that won’t require undercover service design.

However, the real point here is that by the very nature of designing or redesigning a service, you will delve deep into the team members – the behind the stage actors – that are affected by that service. But by applying many of the same techniques used to interview and observe the behaviors of those behind the stage actors, on your own team mates – the people with whom you are engaged in working on this service design – you can gain the insights needed to motivate your team to continue performing at it’s best. Taking the time to turn this empathetic and very psychologic lens on your own team at the beginning of a project, is well worth the time, effort, and expense. Going out into the field, even when that field is merely a corporate maze of cubicles, requires that you can trust your team – to be doing their best work, but also to be there if you need them to assist or save – an interview, a design workshop, or what-have-you.

Another important point to note – another good reason to get to know your team very well, up front, is that we are all human, and no human is perfect. The reason I remind you of this fact is that the reality of this means that each and every one for us, for our own unique reasons, has a unique set of innate biases that cannot be completely overcome, but can at least be known.