What do Service Designers do?
One of the challenges people face when trying to understand what Service Designers do, is that the life of a Service Designer can vary significantly day-to-day.
The activities they undertake can be affected by a number of factors, including: whether a service is new or existing; what stage of the delivery lifecycle a team is in; and where in the organisation a Service Designer is sitting. Nonetheless, whilst there can be large variation, we can broadly split the ‘role’ of a Service Designer into two broad camps: Strategic Level Service Design and Service Level Service Design.
Strategic level Service Design
When we talk about ‘Strategic-level Service Designers’, we are typically referring to Service Designers that sit outside of a single Service. The responsibility of this type of Service Designer is to look across a whole organisation, its entire user base, and all of its services, to understand how these all fit together at the highest level of abstraction.
Defining the list of services that an organisation provides
Strategic-led Service Designers will work to understand all of the different user needs and journeys that exist across an organisation’s user base. They will then map these from the user’s point of view into a logical group of services. This work provides the foundation for how organisations think about how their users interact with them. At DWP, we are currently undertaking an activity to do just that.
Assessing an organisation’s structure
Based on the findings of service mapping activities, Strategic-led Service Designers will look to identify areas where the experience of end-users could be improved, and then collaborate with teams to understand how to re-shape the organisation to deliver those improvements. These activities also drive organisational efficiency by reducing failure and duplication of activities.
Identifying common user journeys
Strategic-led Service Designers will also look across different services to identify where there are common stages of a users journey that are repeated across multiple services. For example, all services may have an ‘apply’ stage or an ‘input information’ stage. Here, Service Designers will work with teams across the organisation to try and standardise these common stages to create consistent user experience and streamline the organisation.
Coordinating between teams and business areas
More generally, Strategic-led Service Designers will also work to connect people, teams and business areas to make sure they are communicating and aligned. By acting as a conduit between multiple areas, Service Designers are able to bring teams together to co-create on new ideas, highlight any areas of misalignment, and avoid any duplication of effort. Within DWP, these types of Service Designers will typically work most closely with teams such as:
- Business Strategy
- Customer Experience
- Service Transformation
Service-level Service Design
When we talk about ‘Service-level Service Designers’, we are typically referring to Service Designers that are aligned to a single service. This does not mean that this type of Service Designers is not thinking strategically, nor that they will only look within that service. However, this will be predominantly within the context of their Service. Here, a Service Designer will be working on activities such as:
Working to understand how a given service works for customers, colleagues and the organisation
One of the main responsibilities of a Service-led Service Designer is to develop a deep understanding of the ‘as-is’ state of a service. This means understanding:
- the end-to-end: from when the user starts trying to achieve a goal to when they finish
- The front to back: connecting the citizen-facing service; internal services, systems and processes; supporting policy or legislation; and organisational, financial and governance structures
- Every channel: including online, phone, paper and face-to-face
To do this, they will undertake activities such as:
- running workshops with different teams within the service to understand their stage of the journey
- commissioning user research to understand the citizen’s experience and pain points
- producing a service blueprint to visually articulate how a citizen’s journey is provisioned by the organisation
Envisioning a future state of the service
Once a Service-led Service Designer has developed a deep understanding of the ‘as-is’ state of a service, their their next responsibility is to work across teams to envision a better ‘to-be’ state. This means defining how the service will work in the future; end-to-end, front-to-back and across every channel (not just digital).
To do this, Service-led Service Designers will undertake activities such as:
- facilitating multi-disciplinary teams to work through pain points and opportunity areas of the as-is blueprint
- working across teams to understand constraints that may affect the ability to implement certain improvements
- creating a ‘to-be’ service blueprint to visually articulate how the future state of a service may work
- socialising the future state vision with key stakeholders
Coordinating and collaborating between teams and business areas
Like Strategic-level Service Designers, Service-level Service Designers will also work to connect people, teams and business areas to make sure they are communicating and aligned. They will do this both at the individual service level (to ensure that teams working on the same service are talking), as well as across multiple services. Within DWP, these types of Service Designers will typically work within multi-disciplinary teams across Digital, whilst also collaborating with colleagues across Service Transformation.