More service designers than ever are employed in the public and private sector, but not everyone knows how to work with them well and let them effectively utilise their skillset.
So we wrote 10 tips for working with a service designer.
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1. Join them on a ride questioning everything
Service designers ask ‘why’ a lot. They need to get to the bottom of a problem, find out why things are the way they are, and zoom out to understand the broader context.
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2. Give them space to map things out and map with them
Creating maps is an essential activity many people expect a service designer to carry out. But it’s not done for the map’s sake. It’s less about the map and more about the process of mapping.
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3. Expect them to question the scope
Typically, product managers are responsible for determining the scope of the work. But when service designers take what they learn in their investigations, they might see new opportunities for effective interventions.
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4. Accept they will zoom far out and zoom close in
When investigating, mapping, and designing, service designers tend to oscillate between artefacts and their higher-level context, bounce between the strategic and the operational level.
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5. Know they will build bridges
As looking sideways and understanding the service at different levels offers novel insights, service designers might find connections to other services & reach out to their teams. They might spot other services users interact with earlier.
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6. Help them go beyond digital and connect all channels
The service you’re building might primarily be an online transaction. Still, the service designer will look into how the service is provided across channels, including paper, phone and in-person.
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7. Pair up with them to spot opportunities for reducing cost and complexity
Service designers regularly find unnecessary process steps, redundancies in the system, unknown waste points. Addressing these can reduce failure demand, cut costs, and increase user satisfaction.
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8. Realise you’re in a marathon, not a sprint
You might have to deliver a transactional service with an unchangeable deadline. While doing that, your team might also learn many other things outside of this work’s scope, which can become highly relevant later.
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9. Wait for them to step on your and everyone’s toes
The work of a service designer tends to overlap with quite a few other disciplines. That makes service designers occasionally run into the space of user researchers, product and delivery managers and business analysts.
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10. Have them take a strategic & holistic approach – but from a user’s point of view
Service designers work most effectively in larger service areas, at a programme or higher organisational level. They connect dots, work on the bigger picture, address the bigger barriers
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You can find the blog post with all 10 tips for working with a service designer on the Services in government blog.
services.blog.gov.uk/2022/04/25/10-…
Annie Streater and I put it together, but dozen of people contributed to it over the years with their questions and struggles.
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PS: You can find Annie here, too: @streats_
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