Investigating service design

In my last post I reflected on how the field of digital had changed over the last 9 years, from when it was about websites and emails, through the emergence of ‘digital’ and to today, when there are many discussions about whether ‘digital’ is even what we should be interested in anymore.

If it’s not about digital though, what might be a good starting point when thinking about making a difference in ‘the Internet-era’?

Over recent months, I seem to have been reading more and more about service design.

Most of the stuff I read comes to me via twitter. I scroll in the evening and can often get lost in reading fascinating stuff. My particular twitter bubble started to feel quite different over the summer. Somehow I seemed to be reading more and more from people that called themselves ‘service designers’.

There were some ridiculous debates about the difference between service design and product management (and presumably which was better?) which were laughable to me as 99% of charities will never be able to fund a dedicated user researcher, let alone whole separate teams of researchers, product people and design people.

But there were interesting articles too, lots of which resonated with me. They probably resonated because many of the ideas were the same as in pieces about ‘digital’ being user-centred. I’d also been involved in the development of CAST’s excellent digital design principles, which were a great route into thinking about digital services (as a part of the wider ‘digital’ field). And I had already been inspired by Janet Thorne of Reach Volunteering’s story about their experience of service design.

One day I stumbled across a link for super-early bird tickets to an event about service design called DOTI fest. I thought I should find out more and signed up.

What are services?

Here are some things that I’ve learned. They are probably pretty obvious to anyone that works in or has read about service design, but when they were new to me I found them very helpful. So I’m sharing them here, especially for any other charity people that are starting to explore this stuff.

Right now, the buzz is all about a new book by Lou Downe. She was a keynote speaker at the DOTI fest event, and I enjoyed her talk hugely. Key take-aways for me were:

• A service is something that helps someone to do something.
• You don’t get to decide what a service is. Your users decide what they need to do, you get to help them.
• Good services are verbs, not nouns.

To a user, a service is simple. It’s something that helps them to do something — like learn to drive, buy a house, or become a childminder. It’s an activity that needs to be done. A verb that comes naturally from a given situation that cuts across transactions, call centre menus and around advisors towards its goal.

Lou Downe, Good services are verbs, bad services are nouns

You can see here how it chimes with the idea of being user-centred, and suggests the value of user research, for example.

I also really like Lou’s 15 principles of good service design.

What is service mapping?

Start reading about service design and you’ll come across service mapping. Service mapping is about understanding how services work and how users experience them. If your users are defining services, based on things they are trying to do, then service mapping helps you understand how the things you provide do (or don’t do) a good job of providing this service and meeting their needs. ‘Build digital services, not website’, one of the 10 digital design principles (from CAST) explains it like this:

A website never exists in isolation. A person visiting a site always has a goal, and your website is just part of the journey they are on to achieve that goal. Always think about how the website fits into with the wider journey your user is on. What gets them to the site? How does it link with other parts of yours (or others) physical services? Where will the user go next to achieve their goal? Thinking in services means we are always thinking about where our users are coming from, where they will go next and how we support them throughout that journey.

Dig a little deeper and you come across terms like ‘journey map’ and ‘service blueprint’, at which point I have to admit I stop reading (for now). I’ve been part of a few conversations recently about whether charities should employ service designers. But maybe the question should be whether and how we can develop new practice — after all only a few large charities have the resources to employ all of these specialists.

So how about mapping what services you have?

But while we’re not yet into service mapping at NCVO at the level of journey maps and blueprints, we are interested in mapping (or is it just listing?) the the services we have.

We are currently developing a new strategy, which might look something like a 10-year ambition, a theory of change, and a set of two-three year priorities. I’ve described over here why mapping out our services is an important part of the jigsaw as we develop that strategy.

Thanks again to twitter, I found a few other charities doing a similar thing. Snezh Halacheva from Cancer Research UK blogged about their experience, and Emma Parnell, currently seconded to Addaction from Snook, arranged for a few charities that were also trying to map their services to come together for a show and tell (huge thanks to Emma for organising this!)

Chatting service mapping with colleagues from Addaction, Cancer Research and British Red Cross

Four organisations managed to make it on the day and each of us was mapping out which services our charities provided. There were different drivers for this, we were at different stages, and we were doing it in different ways.

Here are a couple of things I’ve learned so far:

Working out the right level at which to map your services is harder in practice than it is in theory

This piece from Ben Holliday at FutureGov helped me to think this through, but I’m not sure we’ve got it right yet.

Take the time to ask yourself what the goal of your map is. Does your organisation need a high-level overview or your services? Or, do you need a more granular detailed view of service-based components in your organisation? … continually question and adjust the level of focus when working through service mapping exercises.

1. Go higher when you need more perspective, or to understand the context of services/parts of services.

2. Go lower when you need to better understand the detail of services/parts of services.

CRUK in their mapping have the idea of services and sub-services. When we started to think about this we realised that we have products that are sometimes the service that a user is looking for (for example, develop a theory of change) and are sometimes a sub-service in a larger service that a user is looking for (for example, understand our impact, or develop a new strategy, both of which can include developing a theory of change).

Mapping services and thinking about your organisation’s role in an ecosystem should be linked

I started thinking about mapping our services because I wanted to map that against the needs and priorities of our members. But I’ve increasingly been thinking about NCVO’s role, and how what we do complements what other organisations do. Talking to Nick Stanhope of Shift Design (our support partner for our grant from TNCLF’s Digital Fund) is helping me to think about how we can map out our services and how that relates to the wider ecosystem. I started some work with our management team thinking about the different roles NCVO and others play in the ecosystem. I suspect this will be helpful as a lens for the service mapping and will help us to then think about where we are playing similar or complementary roles in relation to others. This is all a work in progress and I plan to write more about it over on our strategy site as the work continues.

So, to conclude…

Investigating service design over recent months has been:

• Interesting. I’ve learned some new things that are genuinely interesting and helpful, and made new connections to people and ideas.
• Confusing. Like with most disciplines, there can be a tendency towards using jargon and making things sound difficult (more difficult than they are?), which can be really off-putting.
• Energising. I’ve learned some new things that I think will help NCVO to develop a better strategy and make a bigger difference.