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Day in the life of a Service Designer
Day in the life of a Service Designer
Stephen Collins – 21 October 2020
Tags:
Service design (/taxonomy/term/64) Capability (/taxonomy/term/398)
Career Pathways (/taxonomy/term/431)
As part of our work to define
digital career pathways, (/help-and-advice/digital-career-
pathways)we asked foundation members of the Digital Professional (/help-and-advice/digital-
professional-stream/participation-digital-professional-stream) to provide a short ‘day in the
life’ story about their role. Stephen Collins from the DTA, shares a day in his life as a service
designer.
Hi, I’m Steve. I’m a Service Designer.
Service design has become more recognisable as a part of the ecosystem of specialisations
that exist within human-centred design. Because it’s a newer part of the profession, it’s unclear
to some people what a service designer does and how our work benefits a team building new
or changed products and services.
The UK Design Council has a definition
(https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/resources/guide/design-methods-developing-services) of
service design that’s a good start:
Service design is all about making services usable, easy and desirable. Service
design is the process of creating [service] touchpoints and defining how they
interact with each other and with the user. To design a great service, it's important
to have service users in mind: are they staff, suppliers or customers?
For me, service design is about people
It’s about making sure the services and tools people use are humane, get the job done, and
satisfy needs. And those services and tools do it in a way that benefits both the people
accessing the service, and the organisations full of people delivering the service.
What does all this look like in the doing and how do service designers think?
I start by going as wide as possible, to gather as much context from as many relevant places to
form a robust perspective on the problem. If you’re familiar with the
Double Diamond
(https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/what-framework-innovation-design-councils-
evolved-double-diamond) framework – just one of many tools and techniques a service
designer might use – this is the Discover part of that method.
I read a lot. I talk with many people across an organisation delivering a service, or in the
community of people who might use a service – some formal user research, some more ad hoc
or guerrilla research. I make sketches and use Post-it notes to get down ideas. It’s messy and
iterative.
I work with researchers, other designers, and subject-matter experts. I use techniques such as
user journey mapping and interviews to find out what makes things harder than they need to
be. Improving things for existing service users or delivering what people need from a new or
changed service is a job I can’t do at all, if I can’t collaborate actively with others.
Describing ways it might be made better
Next, I go narrower to form hypotheses about what makes a problem space tick and describe
ways it might be made better. I’ll develop artefacts including personas – if there’s one thing I
can urge you to do as a designer it’s to
make your personas based on valid research
(https://medium.com/inclusive-software/describing-personas-af992e3fc527) and not
speculative, but that’s a whole other conversation – service maps that illustrate a possible
future service, a written explanation accompanying those maps of how a future service might
operate, and rough prototypes of touchpoints such as documents, physical spaces, or
technology-person interactions.
As a team builds a new service and readies it for delivery, I contribute through detailed service
mapping of interactions and touchpoints, prototyping more detailed experiences and
interactions to test them in the real world, and modelling how the service can be delivered.
Service designers tend to have a very wide perspective on both business and human needs. In
my experience, many service designers have previous experience in another human-centred
design specialisation or come from other disciplines after finding their particular perspective
on helping people navigate the world is both useful and personally fulfilling; it’s certainly how I
got here.
Using tools and techniques
A good service designer knows how to use their tools and techniques to bring benefit to their
team. They also know when to break the rules and do something different; following the
defined ways of doing things isn’t always the right choice.
If you’re someone who is a systems thinker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory) –
looking at the world as a set of the ways things work, people and tools in them, and their
interactions – you might be suited to service design. Being a good listener and being
empathetic to the challenges people face in using the services they encounter might make you
a
really good service designer.
There are literally 1000s of books, videos, blog posts, and other media that address issues like
design leadership, strategy, change, and thinking that are useful to help understand service
design. This is the tiniest handful of resources that might help you:
Resources I recommend
Books
Gray, D. (2016). Liminal Thinking (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30197119-liminal-
thinking), Rosenfeld Media.
Iqbal, M. (2018). Thinking in Services (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40979357-
thinking-in-services), BIS Publishers.
K
olko, J. (2012). Wicked problems: Problems worth solving
(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15834964-wicked-problems). ac4d, Austin Center for
Design.
Monteiro, M. (2012). Design is a Job (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13574985-
design-is-a-job), A Book Apart.
Reason, B., Løvlie, L., & Flu, M. B. (2016).
Service Design for Business
(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22775594-service-design-for-business). John Wiley
& Sons, Inc.
Senova, M. (2017). This human (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31944932-this-
human), BIS Publishers.
Stickdorn, M., & Schneider, J. (2011).
This is service design thinking
(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9840969-this-is-service-design-thinking). John Wiley
& Sons, Inc.
S
tickdorn, M., Lawrence, A., Hormess M., Schneider, J. (2018). This is service design doing
(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27015347-this-is-service-design-doing), O'Reilly
Media, Inc.
S
tickdorn, M., Lawrence, A., Hormess M., Schneider, J. (2018). This is service design methods
(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40014290-this-is-service-design-methods), O'Reilly
Media, Inc.
Online
Bodine, K. (2011). Focus on Your Customer’s Customer (https://hbr.org/2011/04/why-you-
should-focus-on-yo). Harvard Business Review.
Chan, S. (2019).
On (digital) leadership (https://medium.com/@sebchan/on-digital-leadership-
71c85a2d73bb). Fresh & New.
DeFrias, K. (2017). Designing the Intersection of Government, Cancer, and the People
(http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/designing-cancer-moonshot/). UXBooth.
DeFrias, K. (2017). The leader’s guide to the care and feeding of humans
(https://medium.com/@karadefrias/the-product-managers-guide-to-the-care-and-feeding-of-
humans-ee2854bc5944).
DeFrias, K. (2018). The Leader’s Guide to the Care and Feeding of Humans: Kara DeFrias
(https://vimeo.com/296825193). Leading Design 2018.
Design Council (2015). Design methods for developing services
(https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/resources/guide/design-methods-developing-services).
Design Council (2019). What is the framework for innovation? Design Council's evolved Double
Diamond (https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/what-framework-innovation-
design-councils-evolved-double-diamond).
Haque, U. (2018). The Work of the 21st Century (https://medium.com/@umairh/the-work-of-
the-21st-century-5c31557f94af). Eudaimonia & Co.
Holliday, B. (2019).
Seniority in design: empathy both ways (https://medium.com/seniority-in-
design/seniority-in-design-empathy-both-ways-70ca1a94e2f9). Seniority in Design.
Service Design Network (2018).
Nordic Service Design (https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=330YCLMDaRg). YouTube.
Young, I. (2016).
Describing Personas (https://medium.com/inclusive-software/describing-
personas-af992e3fc527). Indi Young: Inclusive Software.
© Commonwealth of Australia. With the exception of the Commonwealth Coat of Arms and
where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under the CC BY 4.0 license.
