From User Research to Service Design
A closer look at what went on behind the scenes
About 10 years ago, I started my career in Marketing Research. I set out as qualitative researcher and for a long time worked on a wide variety of projects delving into user sentiments, consumer psychology, and culture.
About 6 years ago, I transitioned into UX Research specifically. Despite my comfort and knowledge with applying research methodologies in a wide variety of scenarios, I witnessed a change in my delivery of work as a researcher. It was rapid, repetitive, and to the point.
About 3 years ago, I got an opportunity to explore Service Design and once again it required me to reimagine myself as a researcher, expanding into new and refreshing ways of doing and delivering research. It was digging deeper, breaking the silos, and forward-looking.
Even though research always remained at the core of my journey, when I look back into my journey, I see that it wasn’t always the research as a skill that got me to where I wanted to be. It wasn’t only research that I was doing. But in fact, I had to constantly groom myself with certain skills to grow, evolve, and eventually find my place in the projects I wanted to work on. It wasn’t a straight road to define for myself what these skills exactly were. It took some exploration, self-reflection, and experimentation to build on these skills in order to keep moving forward. They are not tangible that could be learnt simply by picking a book. I think of them as behind the scene skills; they come from practice, failure and persistence until you get it right for yourself.
Here are my reflections on what helped me navigate my journey into Service Design for the initial few years:
Be a good listener
One of the most challenging skills to develop but also THE most important one for a Service Designer. A lot of our time is spent in the discovery, we are expected to build an understanding of the service or program area and bring it to the table, before we can suggest any course of action on it.
Listen to your stakeholders.
Listen to your SMEs.
Listen to your users.
Listen, gather, and absorb the information to fit in the pieces of the puzzle as it really is.
Advance your note taking skills
What can you do to listen better? You can rely on your note-taking skills. I remember during my school years; I was an avid note-taker. If I write what I am hearing, here are two benefits to it — one, I don’t have to keep everything in my brain, I won’t lose little nuggets of information here and there. And two, I can reiterate it and confirm if I have understood everything as intended.
Service Designers are often dealing with complex information with multiple layers of inter-relationships. Laying it down on sticky notes and finding the relevant interdependencies and connections require us to develop a non-linear mental model and unlocking new levels of notetaking.
Ask the right questions
Once you have gathered the information, and spent some time understanding your service, you will be eager to ask questions. The questions you ask will be based on your critical thinking ability and your ability to join the dots. Service Designers should focus on how best they can ask questions to be one step closer to the answer. Some questions may be straightforward and gets you straight to the point but there will be enough questions that will pass through the fuzzy zone and won’t give you the clarity at once. Some other important reasons to build your question-asking technique as a Service Designer:
You want to know the context — why it is done the way it is done?
You want to work towards the expected outcome — am I getting any closer to identify and close the gap?
You want to orchestrate by breaking the silos — am I making it easier for all of my stakeholders?
Be comfortable with the unknown
To develop your question-asking skill is like scratching the surface. Once you know what question to ask it will bring you into an uncomfortable fuzzy messy zone where you would be directed towards the answer but not be given the straight answer. As a Service Designer, you will have to support the team in getting those answers taking into account a lot many factors such as-
the technical feasibility,
the business requirements,
the stakeholder constraints,
the legacy of work,
the impact on users,
and perhaps more. This is where it gets complex, but it is also where the scope of change becomes visible. Orchestrating the service experience will only come by being comfortable with the unknown and eventually connecting the dots.
Have Patience, a whole lot of it
While there are many factors that a Service Designer would like to get control of, in real life, that will not be the case. Change will likely be small but incremental. To know when to create a buy-in for your approach, when to take a stand for your team’s decisions, when to let go of things which are beyond your control will test your patience and might even drain your energy.
For one of my projects, I had to patiently wait for the launch of the MVP for more than a year because there were reasons that were completely beyond my team’s control. What was supposed to go live in 6–9 months took 18 months!
Make sure to take a deep breath, have a community or a safe space to discuss your thoughts and have sufficient breaks to refresh and rewire your brain. It might just get too overwhelming with time.
If you too are a Service Designer or working in a similar role, I would love to learn more about your journey into service design.
