You can’t service design fishing
Life through a service design lens
Let’s jump back a step…
A year or so ago I was doing relatively well career-wise. I had lead commercial divisions for well known Austalian brands; I had built strong relationships and been promoted. I liked winning and liked the money that went with this environment.
But this wasn’t enough.
I became systemically unhappy and it became to affect my overall happiness and relationships. The things that I thought were important had become less so, and I realised that the work I was doing wasn’t the work I wanted to do and wasn’t aligned to my values.
Sometimes you just have to jump
I’d tried to expand the product management part of roles but for various reasons this didn’t fly. I moved to another company but there wasn’t an alignment between the Value I could add, the value I wanted to add and the value the business wanted me to add.
I’ve always enjoyed managing stakeholders; I can balance affable sensibilities with a commercial mindset and have a knack for building rapport and in particular understanding the dynamics of a room; the relationships between the participants, and how to influence.
I also like to question, to ask ‘why’; something that has been taken the wrong way on occassion and potentially ruffled the feathers of colleagues and seniors but comes from a place of wanting to understand, learn and improve.
I like to make things better, to refine them, to make them the best they can be. To do this you need to be able to ask ‘why’? It turns out that the methodologies, ways of working and techniques that I had tried to deploy in previous roles had a name : Service Design.
I chose to make the leap, quit my job and study full time, immersing myself not only in Service Design and UX but the world of Human Centred Design and Design Thinking.
Many will be familiar with the principles of UX and potentially CX. Service Design builds on this, taking a holistic and zoomed out view of these interactions with the customer, using consulting/consultative frameworks, collaborative research techniques and the viewpoints of multiple users and stakeholders to identify problems and design solutions. As with UX, it looks at services from a customer-centric (last years buzzword, i know…) viewpoint, engaging the customer or user to ensure there is market fit and the design is fit for purpose before the expense of building begins. By considering social factors, context and user emotions & needs, service design helps businesses get to the root cause of problems and not only build the front of house touchpoints (websites, apps, physical interactions) to help engage users, but create a consistent, strategic approach to the entire customer experience. Service designers then dive behind the scenes to understand what kind of systems, processes, people and change management may be needed in the back of house to support the ideal user experience.
Think like a designer
To articulate this, let me walk you through a recent experience.
I recently woke up with a swollen face and realised I needed to go to the doctor urgently, normally I would go to my doctor in the city near where I worked and I hadn’t been to the medical centre near my home. My experience looked like this:
Go online to book. One particular doctor has multiple appointments free while most others are booked up. I don’t trust him.
Call up medical centre to see who else might be free (ok, that’s a lie, my wife called, becoming increasingly worried by my resemblance to the Will Smith character Hitch).
Told to arrive 5 minutes early to complete a new patient form
The entrance to the medical centre isn’t where Google maps says it is. I’m late.
Scan the QR code, fill in the (long) new patient form. Form doesn’t save. Directed to use the self serve kiosk. Kiosk freezes.
Go back to the receptionist who then has to manually input all the information I had already entered on two interfaces. Receptionist doesn’t know where some information goes, asks a colleague. I’m now looking more like Quasimodo than Hitch and a tad self-conscious.
I’m checked in and directed to a wait outside the doctor’s door.
Doctor calls me in. He’s pretty brusk.
“Is it painful?”
“Yes when I move my face or touch it”
“That’s not what painful means. Does it hurt when you don’t touch it?”
“er… i’d say more uncomfortable..” (I thought I had a pretty good grasp of the English language)
[Grabs my face to check I’m not lying.]
Referred for an x-ray to check my sinuses; the x-ray department is just round the corner. I have to complete another registration form. Surely they already have this?
X-rayed and told results would be available the next day. Doctor told me to come back straight after and we would look at results.
Head back to the GP. Much friendlier second time round, takes an interest in me as a person, asks what I do and how I’m coping in COVID and proclaims “We need to take care of each other at this time.” Xray also shows that I broke my nose a while back. Who knew? Seems like a genuinely nice guy. First interaction would have got ⭐, this one would get ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Prescribed meds and I’m on my way. No lollipops.
A basic journey map would like this:
With a Service Design hat on, it’s clear that thought has gone into the individual interactions a user may have but not a holistic and nuanced design of what happens when you move through this service. Some processes are streamlined and automated but there were inherent failures. Potentially there needed to be a more training with the employees so they understand the systems and processes that are in place to mitigate these failures.
While still a medical facility, effort has been made to humanise the experience, the environment isn’t as clinical as others I have been to, paintings on the wall make it feel modern with the air of a hotel, light music in the background is calming. Internal signposting is fairly clear and COVID-19 restrictions and instructions are in place, but departmental systems do not appear to connect well, fragmenting my experience as a user. Commercially, the impact of this fragmentation is limited – it’s a public service. But, in another world, imagine the damaging effect this experience could have on a brand who hangs its hat on customer experience, as most businesses must, now.
The way my mind works and the lens that I choose to view the world through has shifted. I’ve been privileged to have explored HBDI techniques and I know that I have the ability to think big picture and look to the future (yellow), as well as being able to chunk down into the detail and processes needed to enable design and change (green). I now can’t help but analyse environments and services as I move through them and have become much more cognisant of my emotional reaction during this touchpoints.
I was out on an evening coastal walk with my ever-supportive wife recently and noticed someone fishing off the rocks. I’ve never really understood the appeal of fishing; hours spent waiting, trying to attract a fish. How much of it is technique; how much of it is luck? Does a better cast make you a better fisherman? If you choose the right bait is that half the proverbial battle? As my mind began to wander into the first stage of the HCD double diamond and I began to vocalise these thoughts my wife replied:
“Stop it. You can’t Service Design fishing!”
I beg to differ.