Service design at dxw

Service designers are often referred to as the glue that helps connect the different human, technical and commercial aspects of the challenges we address.

We’re often helping to identify the right thing to design, so that our teams can design the thing right. So setting strategy, vision and direction are critical to long term-success.

As service designers, we’re not alone in focusing on the value of what we create. But we do bring a balance to how that value supports the organisation as well those who use their services.

We do this by:

• holding a service mindset, this means thinking about the whole end-to-end, by being perpetually curious and open to all possibilities
• joining up the understanding of user needs, and of organisational processes/constraints, across the whole journey
• being flexible in our response to challenges, whether they are strategic, or in delivery
• being adept at divergence and convergence, introducing different and new ways of thinking
• often bringing aspects of systems thinking to help move the project forwards
• helping to build relationships with clients, stakeholders, within and across teams
• facilitating conversations, bringing people together to learn, collaborate, generate buy-in and de-risk the project
• mapping (yes, we said it!) journeys, experiences, interactions, processes, technology, data, pretty much anything in fact
• making some of the invisible (such as support staff and their processes, a user’s ‘offline’ activities, or the service structure), feel tangible, so that teams and stakeholders can act on the insight
• reducing complexity, visualising abstract concepts and processes, to help build a shared understanding
• thinking holistically about the whole service, both the digital and offline, from the point of view of all users, actors and beneficiaries
• thinking about the now, the next and the future states of services. Bringing previous design experiences to the table, but acknowledging when there are experts from other design disciplines in the room.

Why the service design team’s work is important #

Service design helps to bring a holistic and joined-up perspective to the products and services we design and deliver. The team often finds themselves ‘joining the dots’ between the different perspectives of people and disciplines, with aspects of the project and challenge by bringing form and simplicity to the abstract and complex.

We remind ourselves, and the team, that products do not live on their own, but exist in people’s lives as part of a system. And also in close relation to many other products, tools and experiences that we all have as humans.

How we work with the wider team #

When we’re working with the wider team we:

• pride ourselves in delivering clear and visible value whatever the challenge, brief or project. We do not assume we’ll do the same things as last time
• love to work with every single member of the team, although we may have natural affinities, and even some individual experiences, we are truly multidisciplinary (aka ’T-shaped’)
• are always happy to help with planning, to identify approaches, tools and methods or even introduce new ones
• are willing to redefine our own responsibilities, working independently to identify where our skills can deliver most value
• evolve our role in teams as projects progress along the agile delivery phases, from discovery through alpha to beta and live, acknowledging that the part we play changes over time

Finally, we often find ourselves moving between these 3 roles:

• connector: building upon learning about users, technology and systems, identifying opportunities and challenges
• facilitator: instigating discussion, utilising collaboration and co-design to support problem solving and decision making.
• catalyst: identifying recommendations, creating artefacts to support understanding, acting as a catalyst for moving forwards and connecting strategy with outcomes.

Last updated: 20 March 2024 (history)