Enabling a Career Shift from User Experience to Service Design

Shifting Your Approach to Up-front Research

As you begin to ask these broader questions and gain earlier access to projects, you’ll need to shift your up-front insight gathering techniques to answer them. One of the first adjustments you’ll have to make as you take on more strategic work is to include more diverse stakeholders in your discovery activities.

For example, in the HR portal example, when thinking about the end-to-end service relationship between employees and HR, in addition to speaking to the people responsible for HR services who are accountable for the digital versions of those services, you would need access to the stakeholders who are responsible for the call center, in-person support center, training, change management, and communications. And, as you involve more people across the HR department, touching multiple aspects of HR, you’ll likely need greater visibility to and buy-in from the head of HR, under whom all of these groups reside.

Another adjustment you’ll need to make involves your up-front research with users, customers, and employees. Early insight gathering on a digital UX project would have the following characteristics:

focused—The topics that you cover in any research sessions focus on outcomes that impact user interface design decisions such as navigation and content. While you can certainly ask users about the broader context of the experience, the focus of your discussion is on the user interface.

targeted—When gathering user needs for a UX project, you can strategically identify and recruit the participants with whom you conduct your research, so you can ensure that you include the most relevant participants in the process.

simulative—Research often simulates what someone may do in a user interface. While it’s usually based on realistic scenarios with which you know users are familiar, you’ll typically ask participants to simulate situations that they may have encountered in the past or may likely meet in the future.

planned—You plan your research sessions and, accordingly, prepare a discussion guide to ensure that your conversations are productive and result in actionable outcomes.

In contrast, more service-oriented research has the following characteristics:

natural—Often research captures the actual use of a live service—for example, listening to calls to the HR call center—so you can see how people interact with the service naturally. It’s not planned, and callers may not even know they’re part of a research study.

open—Up-front research tends to be open ended, with the intent of discovering how people experience services today and what they would find valuable in the future. While you can certainly plan general categories for your observations, you’re just noting what people do and how they do it.

complex—Because of how broad a service can be, you likely need a few research approaches so you can triangulate the results and get a full view of the current and ideal service experiences. In the HR example, you may need to conduct more structured and formal interviews with employees, then complement those insights with your observations of HR representatives in the call center and in-person support center.

flexible—Because of how open and broad service-oriented research is, you must go into your research without any real assumptions, be able to start deducing insights in the middle of your research, and be prepared to shift your approach on the fly. For example, you may start out observing people using a service, then decide that you need to ask them a few questions to probe for more information on issues that you noticed during your observations.

Shifting Your Design Deliverables

It’s not surprising that, if your questions and early insight-gathering methods broaden in scope, so do your deliverables. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll focus on three core digital UX deliverables—personas, prototypes, and scenarios—and illustrate how their counterparts in service design are, at their core, the same.

Personas

Personas illustrate who will interact with your designs. Whether for a digital user interface or an end-to-end service, they show the needs, preferences, behaviors, and attitudes of your target audience. Throughout a project, they serve as a consistent beacon against which to validate your thinking and keep you realistic about the value you’re providing. They also help to illustrate opportunities, ideas, and ways of designing that, without going through the exercise of creating the personas, you might not have considered.

The primary difference between digital UX design and service design with regard to personas is simple: the quantity of data and the number of personas. When defining a service, you’ll just naturally have more content to shape your personas. For our example HR service experience, personas would show behaviors relating to all channels, with no single channel—for example, digital—as the assumed focus of a persona.

In addition to your gathering more content for each persona, you’ll create more personas. Remember, you’re not designing this experience just for the employees, you’re equally considering the needs of the HR representatives who are providing the services. Therefore, you may have three to five personas representing employees and another three to five personas representing HR workers.

Prototypes

Not so simply, prototypes visualize the space in which our personas move. In UX design, prototypes could be static wireframes or clickable, high-fidelity user interfaces. Regardless, their intent is to communicate how users or customers can interact with a digital space. In service design, service prototypes are often three-dimensional, physical environments that illustrate the various service channels and types of users who are involved in the service. This means learning to use new tools like Lego Work Play or creating physical paper prototypes.

Scenarios

Scenarios articulate the linear process in which our personas move through space. They show the steps that people take in going through the experience. Similar to personas, the exercise of creating scenarios helps uncover potential problems, as well as opportunities. The primary difference between scenarios for UX design and service design is their scale and scope. UX scenarios focus on illustrating a single persona’s steps through the relevant digital interfaces. Service design scenarios, often referred to as service blueprints, capture the service as a system, noting handoffs and interactions between service recipients and service providers across all channels.

Shifting Your Approach to Validation Research

When getting feedback on your in-progress design concepts, the differences between UX design and service design are similar to the differences characteristic of up-front research. In UX research, you might conduct a usability test whose focus is on getting feedback on the interaction design for a digital user interface from a sample of the target audience. Service design research is more complex and, as I mentioned in my original 2011 article, more theatrical.

First, you need to simulate the interactions between provider and recipient in the new service experience. Therefore, research would include samples of people in both types of roles, and participants need to act out the experience. In UX research, people may already feel awkward because they feel that they’re being tested, and it’s our role to make them feel comfortable. In service design research, the potential for people feeling awkward is even more pronounced. This means you may need to set the expectation that it’s going to be fun and interactive. So, rather than creating a discussion guide for your research, you’ll actually create a script for participants to follow, stopping at appropriate points to allow them to give feedback.

Second, because of the potential breadth of a service—across various channels and touchpoints—it can be very difficult to simulate a future experience realistically. While you may have a digital prototype that you can test, you’ll also need various props and even sets—such as those paper prototypes I mentioned earlier—for the participants to interact with.

Third, services often happen across a longer time period than a user’s interactions with a digital user experience. During a usability test, you can ascertain whether the time it takes to do certain tasks is reasonable for participants. But during service design validation research, it’s difficult to simulate time because it could extend over many hours, days, weeks, or even longer. In the HR example, consider how long it takes to get your insurance ID card after going through your HR’s benefits enrollment. How can you best understand whether that’s a reasonable timeframe? The truth is that, for some discovery objectives, you simply won’t be able to get any observable feedback—and will have to simply rely on asking whether the timeframe for or between interactions is reasonable.

Conclusion

As I mentioned earlier, the design of digital user experiences and service design are not mutually exclusive. As I have hopefully illustrated, significant overlap exists between the two disciplines, with the only difference often being a question of scale or quantity.

UX design and service design are essentially two practices on the spectrum of experience design, not wholly separate practices. What this means is that UX professionals who are no longer feeling challenged by or content with the work that they’re currently doing and who aspire to do more are perfectly suited to designing great service experiences. If you want to move on to service design, all you need to do is expand your existing skillsets that you use in designing digital experiences.