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.

1/12🧵 #ServiceDesign 10 tips for working with a service designer – read them al
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.

2/12🧵 10 tips for working with a service designer:  1 – Join the
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.

3/12🧵 10 tips for working with a service designer:  2 – Give the
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.

4/12🧵 10 tips for working with a service designer:  3. Expect them
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.

5/12🧵 10 tips for working with a service designer:  4. Accept they
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.

6/12🧵 10 tips for working with a service designer:  5. Know they w
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.

7/12🧵 10 tips for working with a service designer:  6. Help them g
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.

8/12🧵 10 tips for working with a service designer:  7. Pair up wit
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.

9/12🧵 10 tips for working with a service designer:  8. Realise you
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.

10/12🧵 10 tips for working with a service designer:  9. Wait for th
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

11/12🧵 10 tips for working with a service designer:  10. Have them
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.

12/12🧵
PS: You can find Annie here, too: @streats_

13/12🧵

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Martin Jordan (he/him) 🌈✊🏽✊🏾✊🏿🌍⌛️

Martin Jordan (he/him) 🌈✊🏽✊🏾✊🏿🌍⌛️ Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(