Getting the chance to start from scratch designing a new and effective service, together with a team is something I like best in my job as Service Designer at Liip. Immersing myself in customers’ needs, developing great new ideas, making them tangible with prototypes and getting stimulating feedbacks. These parts are definitely the most inspiring and fun of service design projects.

But the delivery can be a really hard landing.

When working on service design projects, we break open existing silos. We align all the different parts involved in the service to create a better and more efficient service experience. For the delivery of the new service, that can also entail a high degree of complexity. In addition to the hard work of developing concrete solutions, we also have to deal with other challenges. For example, changing the habits and behavior of people or clarifying organizational uncertainties. The search for the right decision-makers and sponsors between the different parts of the company and technical restrictions as further examples. After the thrill of the first creative phases, delivery can mean a really hard landing.

Combining service design with agile methods helps facing the challenges of delivering.

Having worked in both Service Designer and Scrum Master roles in recent years, I tried several ways of combining Service Design with Scrum. My goal is to combine the best of the two ways of working to make this hard landing a little softer. Here are 6 learnings that proved to be very helpful:

1. Use epics and user stories to split the service into more “digestible” pieces.

Everyone probably knows the feeling of not seeing the wood for the trees when you’re standing in front of a wall full of sketches and stickies with ideas. Then it’s very helpful to create a list of epics. In the Scrum world, epics are “a large body of work that can be broken down into a number of smaller stories” (see Atlassian). In Service Design, epics can help dividing the entire service into smaller pieces. This reduces complexity, and allows dealing within specific and limited challenges of a single epic, rather than the whole. Also, the ability to clarify one epic gives good clues where to start with this big mountain of work.

2. Use the service blueprint as the master to create the backlog.

In software projects we often use user story maps to create epics and user stories. In service design projects, the service blueprint is a very powerful alternative to do user story mapping. Service blueprints help mapping and defining all aspects of the future service - from the targeted experience to internal processes, systems, people, tools, etc involved. This contains a lot of useful information for user stories e.g.

• The actors involved, eg. the different types of users (as personas), different staff people, systems, tools, etc.
• The required functions, as each step of a service blueprint usually contains a number of functions that will be written in the different user stories.
• The purpose of the function, as you can read from each part of the blueprint what is triggered by this step.

After a first version of the user story backlog is created, you can reassign the user stories to the service blueprint. Mapping all the written stories to the blueprint is also great to determine if some user stories have been forgotten. This helps a lot to have a better overview of what to do and how it affects the service experience in the end.

3. Do technical spikes in an early stage of the project in order to make your service more feasible.

If the service contains digital parts, it’s highly recommended to face the technical crack nuts in the project as soon as possible. Scrum provides us with the so called technical spikes - a great chance to dive deeper into different possibilities of solving technical issues of the new service. Strictly timeboxed, they allow developers to explore different technical solutions and suggest the one that fits best. Furthermore the team can discuss the consequences and adapt the service. In order to still create a great experience but also find a feasible way of delivering it.

4. Estimate the business value of the different aspects of the service.

In Scrum, we use business value poker to prioritize user stories. A business value is a relative comparison of the value of different user stories. It helps to prioritize the delivery and to show where the most time and money needs to be invested. This process is also very healthy (and tough!) for service ideas. Knowing how much value each part of the service brings to the whole service vision is very valuable and allows the team focus on what really matters.

You can also do business value poker in combination with an adaption of the six thinking hats method, e.g. one of the team estimates the business value in the hat of the user, one in the hat of the top manager interested in return on investment, and one in the hat of the staff member interested in delivering a service experience that doesn’t mean additional work.

5. Deliver a “Minimum Viable Service” (MVS) before taking care of the rest.

Once we have the user story backlog rooted in the service blueprint and we know which story brings most value to our service vision, we start step by step to deliver the service. In agile software projects, the team starts by producing the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Which means, delivering the smallest amount of features necessary in order to create a valuable, reduced product to users. For services, we are doing the same - creating a “Minimum Viable Service” (MVS). This allows the team developing a first basic version of the service in a short time to market. Delivering results in a early stage of the project is not only motivating the team but also allows continuous learning, adapting and evolving of the service.

6. Work in cross functional, self organised and fully empowered teams.

Scrum teams are self organised and include all skills needed. Without having a hierarchy based system. In a service design setting, many different fields of a company are involved and it’s hard to specify decision makers and people responsible. But that’s the key. Including each and every stakeholder of a whole service in the project is never ending and rarely contributing. Therefore dedicate a small and powerful team of experts involved, give them the full competence to decide and to organise themselves but also the responsibility to deliver value.

Scrum provides great ways to deliver complex service projects.

This blogpost highlights a few aspects of how we manage the challenges of delivering a complex service project. By combining service design with scrum - from the the tools and artifacts to the mindset and the way how teams work together.

Yet, also when following all these aspects, delivering a complex service remains a hard piece of work. But definitely an easier one to handle with the structured and well working delivery methods to bring our ideas to life. Step by step - sprint by sprint.

Talking about improving customer satisfaction, companies often describe the fancy new product they are about to design. The one that is meant to boost customer satisfaction and sales rates like a miracle. But: Is the lack of this new product really the source of unhappy customers?

The biggest obstacles for customer friendliness are (internal) processes.

As a Service Designer at Liip, I do a lot of user research in my projects to find out what makes customers unhappy and how we can solve this. And in most of the cases, I encounter difficult, complicated or nontransparent processes as the biggest pain points. Customers feel, that they have to make too much effort to get the problem solved. Often it doesn’t seem to be clear what to do next. Or they are redirected many times and have to tell the same story over and over again.
These problems typically result from (internal) processes that don’t suit the customers' and employees' needs. And in the meantime they seem to have a big impact on customer satisfaction and the way a customer talks about a company.

Internal processes often seem complex and difficult to change.

In my projects, I experience that many people often don’t dare to touch these processes, although they realise something is not working well. Why? Typically, the problems have many different causes. So a variety of processes and systems are affected and they can’t be assigned to just one department or one person’s responsibility. So who should take care of them? Who feels responsible to change something? This threatens to end up expensive and complicated. Sounds a bit like Pandora’s box, right?

But also the cost of doing nothing is high.

People often forget that doing nothing also is expensive and complicated too. Unhappy customers who spread bad word of mouth or don’t buy again can have a big impact on a company’s revenues. Also, handling customer enquiries costs a lot of money, especially when internal processes to handle them are complicated too. And last but not least - the impact of unhappy employees on a company’s performance is not to be underestimated.

Align the customer experience with what happens behind the scenes.

So in order to improve customer satisfaction, it’s time to pay attention to user friendly and efficient services. It’s about aligning the customer experience with what happens behind the scenes - from internal processes to tools and systems.

But how to get there? And how to not get lost in complexity, especially when the service touches many different processes, systems and departments? Service Design provides us a lot of useful answers to these questions.

How to design user friendly and efficient services - 9 steps

1. Have a clear mission:
   At the beginning of every project, I work on creating a clear mission and a common understanding of where to go together with the team - like a lighthouse that helps to keep orientation on the way.
2. Understand the problem in all its aspects before working on the solution:
   In my opinion, the most important part of creating useful new services is to have a clear and overall understanding of where exactly the issues are - from the user’s needs to the company’s goals and problems. And very important: based on data, not assumptions.
3. Start with the user’s needs, not what tools allow you.
4. Focus in Ideation:
   It requires some discipline to not ideate on whatever seems to be cool. But clearly focusing on solving exactly the problems the team encountered is crucial to not get lost in complexity.
5. Prototype ideas already at early stages:
   The clear common understanding of what the idea consists of is extremely valuable.
6. Test continuously:
   The more feedback we get, the better. It helps to discover if we are on the right or wrong way at an early stage.
7. Implement step by step:
   Implementing one idea after the other helps to get things done and not get lost in too many measures we can’t cope with. Improving services is often about continuously implementing a bunch of measures in order to fulfill one big longterm mission. Agile methods as Scrum perfectly support this way of working during implementation.
8. Think big. But start small:
   Sometimes also small changes are promising.
9. Evolve:
   Projects are never done with the GoLive. They just enter a new phase: the one where our work gets really tested by the mass of users. Every new learning helps us to continuously improve the service.

What are your experiences with designing better services and processes? What was hard, what worked well? Let me know by leaving a comment.

Service Design Network

is the leading institution that aims to strength the impact of service design internationally, both in public and private sector. It aggregates an open-minded and knowledge-sharing network of different professionals and believers that get together, discuss and think about new aways to improve the interaction between service providers and customers. Besides all their events, there's a bunch of nice online and print publications, have a look at it on their website.

Service Design

is then about meticulously choreograph a long run, every touchpoint from a service, in detail. Is to build an ecosystem that delivers relevant outcomes by integrating and managing capabilities and services, from people to infrastructures, products and communication, because the design of every component matters to fulfil the needs of the involved participants.

Creating value for Quality of Life

A lead that connects people that, one way or another, have a reason and the will to share their thoughts about what/how can design help achieving a better world – equitable, fair, peaceful, safer, reliant, visionary, kind, healthy, pleasing, comfortable, familiar, etc… However, this meetup was not about glorifying us (designers) and the value of design itself as a problem solver, but about sharing fears, questions, strong ideas and lots of open answers.

We all have our doubts and hesitations, and we all fail, but besides that, we usually can't (alone) have enough capacity to effectively change things as we think they should. A long list of constrains keeps holding off our (designers) goals and targets: financial issues, political principles, business requirements, technical impediments, design restrictions, poor strategies, incomplete visions, strict deadlines, incompetence, misvalue, misunderstanding, etc …

Above all, great concepts aren't always able to initiate and develop the innovative ideas they were meant to, and that's what have been blocking the improvement of many services and experiences. And more than empowering experiences, service design enables saving and generating lives too. It was a great relief to see so many people keen to get their hands dirty and budge those obstacles around!

As on every conference, attendees' background, interests, expertise and expectations are diverse, and that creates already a challenge for the organisation itself: how to engage and raise the right discussions? how to provide what people is looking for? And as a service design conference, somehow everyone presumes to get the best conference experience so far.

From the day I got to know the event, to the day I bought the ticket and booked my flight, to when I arrived to my hostel or reached the location, to the substance of the talks and the breaks, the food and the mates… all that, till the day I'm writing this post, and the ones that will come – affected by what I experienced during all this journey –, all these matter.

The overall experience of the conference was good, but not great. Maybe because I was too obsessed with “service designish” details, or regarding the talks, maybe I expected more concrete deepness about tangible challenges, real practices and failures rather than success theories and unexciting workshops. But again, it's an evidence of how hard is to achieve everyone's ambitions and to overcome their expectations about something. But despite that feeling, interesting speakers and cases came across, from social to business design perspectives, so I would like to remark a few interesting thoughts.

Talks and notes

Mark Levy - Head of Employee Experience at Airbnb

shared some lessons about a world where we belong anywhere, how Airbnb community is changing the world by enabling genuine experiences between people. It all started on improving the employees experience. Their internal engagement enabled great customer experience for both hosts and guests, and that has been leading to a massive community engagement which then reflects again on the employees satisfaction. Happy employees <=> happy customers. A full loop of great experiences that inspire the one after.

Stan Phelps - founder of 9 INCH marketing

mentioned the impact of service design on loyalty and word of mouth. The way you reach the customers' heart creating memorable experiences. Something relevant, unexpected and authentic, as Walt Disney's dream of exceeding people's expectations over and over again. Surprising and entertaining people was his way of bounding without spending money on advertisement.

Kigge May Hvid - a leading global voice in this sector

made her clever point remembering us that we don't need to develop more services and products, but rather, to wisely connect the existing ones in order to reach higher solutions for world wide problems. A design that serves. The right balance between an industrial society and a knowledge society will articulate better systems instead of multiple and duplicated insufficient services.

Low Cheaw Hwei - Global Head of Product and Service Design for global Philips

brought up an interesting topic about the trend of not providing a service (no service = self-service), for example the shift from “being taken care of” to “taking care of” (self). The future of healthcare is (already) beyond the hospitals, clinics and doctors boundaries, and getting closer to a self-help approach. Instead of a full professional service, the examination, diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, recovery and maintenance is being brought home. In one side it can decrease anxiety and increase comfort, but fear and confidence are affected too.

Services can be hardware based which means they are scripted – limited, linear and predictive, with processes and clear steps towards a specific outcome –, or iterative, fluid, active and responsive, which means they are spontaneous – towards the same outcome, but allowing agility and broader goals, because they are empowered by values (e.g. a call service for health support that turned out to be a “shoulder” for old people that called because they were feeling lonely).

Nathan Shedroff - program chair of the ground-breaking MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts

reflected about the relation between the qualitative and the quantitative sides of “value”, which for different sectors have different meanings. We all create personal and business relationships where value exists, and within that experience we tend to relate it with professional or personal values, either finance values, sales and revenues, or emotional values, affections and other more spiritual ways of quantitive/qualitative sharing. But the opportunity to build the best value requires us to first understand the qualitative issues that drive decisions, meaning, identity, emotion and satisfaction, and leave the quantitative for a second thought. The way for service design strategically drive premium value into businesses has all to do with triggering the sensorial “state of mind” of business people.

Malin Orebäck - director of digital strategy at Veryday

proved us the benefits of a “shared value approach”, which basically means a “win-win” of all the players in the entire value chain. The challenges while trying to solve different social problems (e.g. end the sea pollution with fishing nets) acted as an engine for business innovation projects (created a service which generated job opportunities: pick and clean the nets, produce carpets and sell = clean sea, money to improve life quality).

Tenzin Shenyen - tibetan Buddhist monk

elucidated us about a monk life style to argue that there are things we can't design. Karma and experience “can't even be correlated for predictable effect, much less be designed”. Contemporary life runs in a chaotic speed and stress which leads designers to the hard task of rushing with deadlines to simplify and ease what surround us, so Shenyen enquired us about why not to adopt the silence and slow methods of a buddhist monk, and learning to say “no” more often?

Alisan Atvur & Byron Wilson - consultant and idea manager

are often confronted with the others' discomfort of changing things, even towards a better reality. As creatives, designers, or consultants, it's sometimes hard to encourage people to overcome the fear of risking, of failing or lose. Healthcare sector cares about results, not about design, unless that magic does bring actual results, so for that, your deliverables have to clearly impact their decisions and present the profits. Answer their “why”s with research, and their “how”s with strategic visions, designing a change that makes them comfortable to accept and act upon.

Marion Fröhlich & Mauro Rego - Strategic Design Consultant and Designer at SAP

highlighted the impact of enterprise IT on quality of life with the humanised softwares they structure and design. As we know, the primary purpose of a business software is generally a functional objective: “to track, store or manage data or to support related processes using that data”. So it's impact is limited to what it can accomplish in that specific context, but when its concept pursuits real value for all the roles involved, then enterprise software can affect people's lives differently, from business-centred, to user-centred.

Denis Weil - recently Corporate Vice President, Concept/Design at McDonald's Corporation, now “Innovator at scale”

shared learnings from his current personal transition into social innovation and made a case for social design as a new and better model for design, particularly service design. In a place with low levels and notions of hygiene it's hard to suddenly change their cultural behaviors. Lots of efforts and understanding are needed to find the better paths to achieve that goal, because there is no system at all, and funcional toilets aren't enough to build a new habit.

Long time of thoughts and experiments, the team managed to implement sanitarium facilities, organize waste removal, transport, treatment and reuse as compost because they added value in participation return. Each toilet owner earned for each time it was used, but also had the take care of it, getting the revenue from the waste he returned. Soon, people realized they shouldn't pay for a toilet, but instead make the same profit a have their own to gain from their waste too.

My take away

Working as an Interaction Designer / User Experience / Service Designer is to be aware of all that and to learn to move from design as a skill set to design as a mindset. To take an active part designing the best experience through engaging and delightful interactions for the users, but more than that, to make them meaningful, to empathize, listen and witness the users' journeys, feelings, actions and reactions. Grasping the information we wouldn't get while embodying them. Re-researching, digging, analyzing and evaluating our findings. Design-think, try, test, fail, retry and rescale to (hopefully) solve all those puzzles and embrace the passion of helping others to improve their quality of life.

You will get proud of yourself, at least I do. What's more fascinating, motivating and rewarding than being able to share and apply your knowledge and experience, dedicating your work to benefiting human kind and the world around you?

Now, at Liip, we mostly do it through web, but in the near future, we will more and more enhance all different kinds of services, focusing on developing even better customer experiences than the approaches we have done so far.