In the last 9 years I have been working in the field of service and strategic design. It’s an upcoming field of design that more companies are applying to design new business propositions.

During this time, I had the pleasure to work in different setups as a service designer:
1. In house service designer in a corporate
2. Service designer in a design agency
3. Service design professor in a university
4. Service design manager in a consultancy
5. Service designer in my two startups

It is important to mention that service designer is just a tag, and tags might become confusing. We do not need frontiers in design. Your skills define your scope and the impact that you can deliver from pixel to business strategy.

In this adventure I have grown personally and professionally:
I have experienced the greatest professional moments, (awards, implementation of amazing projects…) and the worst client rejections, need of firing people, acknowledge my responsibility on stupid decisions and an endless list of learnings and scars.

In 2023, I can say loudly that I am a different professional. More mature with a wider view of the challenges and capable to analyze the micro and macro contexts to figure out how to connect the inputs in new to the world value propositions.

In every stage of my service design career I have learnt so much. However, in my current phase, as a cofounder of two tech startups, my evolution reached a new level. Why did it happen? After looking back, I found five reasons:

Become a builder, not a consultant.
You need to have the passion to bring the product to life, it is not just another project to be paid for. It’s a matter of mindset and commitment.
It is the thin line between advice and execution. Consultants advice, builders execute. And the value is in the execution side because you are validating impact on live.

A new service is a start up.
It is valuable to analyze with visual tools like customer journeys, blueprints and personas, but if you do not connect it with the reality of the business with an actionable plan in a minimum scale, it will be useless. We are fortunate because we are well programmed to start understanding the users and this represents a great starting point. The goal of a new service is to find Product Market Fit. And this process is very hard. The objective is to find a concrete problem for a specific user. You need to know if this problem is a real pain.

Example:
Problem: I cannot open a bank account in dollars in Colombia
User: Companies, SME, startups.
Solution: Bank account in dollars for SMEs in Colombia

It is not that easy, sorry. You found the problem and the interested user, but the initial value proposition most of the times is wrong. Your hypothesis are flawed. There are so many nuances that affect the user adoption of your service, and you need to validate them asap.
Example of nuances: I am scared to have my company’s money in the bank , or I do not use my phone to manage my finances.

UX research and no code prototypes are probably the best tools to find Product Market Fit understanding the whole range of nuances to define your service value proposition. Service details are extremely important because they might become barriers for your users’ adoption. Several small barriers create a friction that block your service to be used and therefore acquire users willing to pay.

Implementation is what makes the difference.
Conceptualization is easy. You could be more or less creative and you will figure out an interesting solution. The hard part is execution, that’s why 93% of startups fail, and I assume that new services might have similar performance. Questions like: How do I run the value proposition of my digital service with 50 USD for a month? Limitations could be a boost for creativity, take it from the positive side and challenge yourself.
There is a huge difference between having a blueprint in your hands or receiving 4 user rejections of your shitty service. The first one is static, the latter is action.

Measuring = Improvement and growth
Measuring a service is not trivial, but it is so insightful. There are different touchpoints involved in an average service and a long sequence of user actions from the onboarding to the recommendation or return. A mature service designer must establish and manage meaningful metrics for the service. Establishing the right metrics is a strategic endeavor done together with the team (business, marketing and product) A good understanding of acquisition funnels, churn rate, retention, user cohorts… are essential to set a solid basis to improve your service.

You role will be fluent, hybrid and adaptable.
Don’t try to fit into a certain role, focus on the impact that you can bring to your team, to the service and eventually to the user. Service designers are connectors and orchestrators of stakeholder value. We provide different types of value along the user experience in several touchpoints to form gradually the whole value proposition of the service. Service designers need to own responsibility like product owners, need to manage and prioritize like product managers, need to guide the service vision like founders and need to understand the user like UX researchers. You will flow within teams and organizations, with a builder mindset, an implementation driven approach, a measurement obsession and a deep passion to understand users behavioral nuances.

I hope these words trigger new thoughts and we can discuss these ideas in more depth. I am always happy to share confronting visions of what the field of strategic and service design is and how we can make it even better.
You can find my reflections here, in Linkedin or Twitter.

Service designers need to think like founders was originally published in Strategic Design Lab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In these days, all newspapers and digital blogs are covering the launch of Libra the new cryptocurrency built by Facebook. It was necessary for me to read several articles about it to understand the project and to form an initial opinion.

*Sorry whether I might sound skeptical and slightly critical. These are my first thoughts on the project.

Firstly, Facebook cryptocurrency is all over the place in the press. Maybe it is a marketing strategy since they have 2.38 billion monthly active users, their plans to penetrate the market through their platform (especially in the marketplace) does not sound too futuristic. However, there are many other partners who support the Libra project: Mastercard, Uber, Paypal, Coinbase, eBay, Spotify… It is true that Facebook is leading the process in this phase but they are not building their own cryptocurrency. They emphasize the diversity of the partners: companies, nonprofit, academia…tending to position this project as the opportunity to save humanity.

There is a repetitive message in Libra’s discourse: Improve the lives of people through a new simple and global digital currency. It seems they highlight the social value of the project, but again we are talking about a consortium of the most powerful For-Profit companies in the world. Do you think a farmer in the middle of Colombia’s coffee area would use Libra to pay a Uber ride? I believe they live in a different scenario where priorities are also different.

As WeChat already did in China, financial services are the best monitoring tool of our daily lives and every new transaction says something else about our lifestyle, routine, behavior… so it is the perfect channel to profile the world population. How many of these companies have already asked for a “bank” license?

I live in Colombia where 50% of the economy is informal if we can help these people to build formal businesses would be incredible, nevertheless, the solutions must be truly beneficial for them avoiding business-driven decisions. If Libra helps street sellers to manage their finances in a better way, with simpler logistics, not intermediary fees and saving strategies, it could be a relevant project for low-income communities. Libra should contribute to broadening access to certain basic services within the formal economy. To do so, we cannot bring standard crypto projects by capitalist companies, but we need to understand the behavior of this population and leverage the power of decentralization in these small communities. Start small with real and measurable impact.

Libra is a stable coin supported by a reserve of real assets. This characteristic makes it more credible if users have access to view all transactions in a transparent ledger and reduce the volatility associated with cryptocurrencies. Libra will start with a private blockchain, with a vision to open up a public one in the future. There is a clear trade-off between decentralization and functionality. In this case, they use a BFT consensus protocol with validators, they prioritize high transaction throughput, low latency, and a more energy-efficient approach rather than total decentralization. I see that the consortium might want to partially hold the control, so somehow there would be a central authority running the project. Not totally sure about it.

I envision that this is just the beginning of a new trend of global crypto projects brought by unicorns with a huge user base and an eagerness to supplant traditional banks.

I wish I am wrong and Libra will be the most impactful project of the next decade. A worldwide access to basic services is key to build a better society and this project could be a great opportunity.

PD: This small compilation of initial thoughts might vary in the next few months. Thanks for reading!

Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of the Ethereum Foundation.

Libra: The New Crypto “Social” Business was originally published in Ethereum Scholars Program on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The blockchain space has been developing exponentially in the last few years. It is definitely a hype in our current world: everyone has heard about it and tech managers, innovation directors and other trend followers want to use it and apply it to their projects at any cost.

They are afraid of missing the train.

However, it is not as simple as it sounds. It takes some time to build a train to carry passengers. Firstly, we need to pilot and test if this train works for cargo and then we will be able to transform it to deliver value to passengers.

Even though we all agree upon blockchain has a huge potential to disrupt several industries, are we aware that we cannot apply blockchain for every problem? It is necessary to reflect on the influence of trending topics and buzzwords that lead us to work on a technology that might not be the most appropriate for the project we are trying to develop.

Nowadays, I am exploring the blockchain space from my personal perspective as strategic /service designer and researcher interested in emerging tech, design and behavioral economics aiming to uncover opportunity areas to create transformational value to all stakeholders involved.

For some months I have been evaluating the fit between blockchain and design approaches, tools and skills. I had several talks with designers, designers+developers and developers in the blockchain ecosystem to learn more about their experiences and be able to gain my own conclusions in order to apply my skills in the most fruitful manner in this space.

Moreover, I have read all articles I could find about “Design + Blockchain” that helped me to broaden my scope and frame this space even better. Some of them really inspirational, I must admit!

For me this is just the beginning. I have a long learning journey to go through yet. Anyway, I would like to share my thoughts in case they could be helpful for somebody.

My (In-progress) Conclusions:

Engineering driven ecosystem.

This new world was created from a disruptive vision of a developer to eliminate centralized organizations from the traditional formula of control and intermediation. This vision was brought by the creation of a new technology. The blockchain technology is the origin of this space and as in many other occasions, the potential applications of this tech were not considered initially, the creators recognized a group of technical characteristics that could be interesting to develop aiming to decentralize our current world. If they did not think about applications, neither do so about user needs, behaviors, desires… They probably thought “we do not know how to use it, so first let’s make sense of this and then we can think about the user.

Probably some of them might have wondered: How can we think user centered if we do not know yet the value of the application?

Actually, this was exactly what happened. Blockchain technology matured (even if it is still a toddler trying to walk slowly) due to the involvement of developers in the open community and the development of new protocols, mechanisms and tools that triggered the eruption of small applications with a variety of use cases, from gambling to collectibles.

Then, design as a discipline entered the blockchain space to facilitate the use of these (decentralized) applications. UX, user experience design was/is needed to make use of complex concepts in the digital environment, guiding the user through the experience and eventually increasing the user adoption of blockchain applications.

We are not talking about the past. This is happening right now.

The present status it is not just about individual interventions for specific apps, designers are shaping the future of blockchain apps creating standards. Design systems are being developed to standardize the visual language and interactions within blockchain applications. An example is Web3 Design System, a set of principles and a material library built by designers and developers to create a common language for decentralized apps.

The value of design in the UX dimension is “clearly” understood in the blockchain space, but what about the strategic and systemic dimensions of design?

Designers in blockchain should be capable of thinking about the whole system of the project and apply their specific skills for each component of the system. For example, if I am designing the incentive system, I will need to use “nudges” examples, empathy and journey maps to understand user behaviors and to find the right triggers to invoke action. Otherwise, if I am focusing on monetization of my project, I will need to assemble the value proposition to each stakeholder and the revenue models associated to them.

Consensus mechanisms

A decentralized consensus algorithm is required to achieve an unbiased verification of new transactions. Members of the system give a correct answer to the algorithm and others peers must validate it to let the blockchain to get updated.

“Proof of work” and “proof of stake” are the most famous mechanisms at the moment. Each of them are being used for different use cases. Nevertheless, there is a huge room to imagine new ways to create consensus within blockchain, specially to minimize the power consumption of the current mechanisms. Here, again designers can apply their skills to generate alternatives to the current models depending on the specific application of the technology and connecting it to the incentive system.

Incentives/ penalties.

The exchange of value in blockchain is mediated by tokens. A “physical” representation of digital assets. Tokens are used as traditional currency to transfer value between stakeholders, but also are used as share of a project/ company. When an ICO (Initial Coin Offering) happens, the company sells its tokens to get funding from investors.

In this part of the blockchain there are several questions to consider: Do we need tokens in our blockchain system? Why do we need them? What does it add to our system? among many others.

In most cases, the solutions to these questions are answered by developers who set the basic rules of the system, however, I strongly believe that behavioral science and behavioral economics should be applied in this part of the system. We must understand the dynamics of the users while making decisions and even more important while making irrational decisions to exchange value. Is the reward enough for different stakeholders? Am I giving the right reward/ incentive? How rewards and user adoption are linked? are some general questions to consider while designing an incentive system.

Business model innovation.

In the past decades mainly business administrators were responsible to create business models that answer to What am I offering? Which segment of people will buy my product? How can I earn money? and so on. Nowadays, other professionals with hybrid profiles like strategic designers are using these concepts in practice and are able to define value propositions and revenue models applying their diverging thinking to bring disruptive ideas for the company.

Design tools for blockchain

There are some design tools that can be useful for the blockchain space. These tools are not “the secret formula”, they should be used to reflect on how to tweak or combine them to fit our needs in the decentralized design process:

• Stakeholder map: Understand and visualize the interactions between actors and the exchange of value. Useful to find intermediaries and central players with excessive power.
• Personas: Archetypes of users to humanize specific behaviors, needs and desires while interacting with the application.
• User stories: Analysis and visualization of users’ sequence of actions through the experience considering pain points and key interactions.
• Service blueprint — front & backstage: Analysis of the user experience and the processes and operational protocols that support every touchpoint of this experience.
• Board of innovation business design toolkit: Perfect tool to design business models interactively in co-creation sessions with colleagues, clients and stakeholders.
• Flight Plan design toolkit: The flight plan team created a couple of interested canvases ready to test and play with. It combines mechanism design with UX. Very nice material!
• Design thinking for Blockchain: Toolkit that guides the process of designing for blockchain step by step adding several tools already mentioned here. Worth using it!

Once I discovered the design tools that could generate value in the blockchain space, I was able to distil the skills needed to answer one of the most relevant question I wondered when I started my initial exploration:

How a strategic/service designer can be valuable in the blockchain space?

System thinker & front-back connector: Ability to connect the nodes of the system and visualize the experience from the user and operations perspective.

Analytical & intuitive: Ability to distill business requirements while create new to the world ideas.

User centered & behavior alchemist: Ability to understand user and stakeholders’ needs and behaviors to design delightful value propositions.

Translator of complexity: Ability to minimize friction between user and digital interfaces.

Co-creation evangelist: Ability to open conversations between professionals from different disciplines to all together generate new opportunity areas.

So, to conclude:

If you are a designer, please join this wave, there are many opportunities for us and our contribution will bring a real impact to the blockchain space.

If you are a developer, talk to designers and collaborate with them, I am sure these synergies will bring many interesting ideas and prototypes on the table.

If you are both, lucky you! Your role is to bridge both worlds and educate professionals to combine engineering and design to build a human centered blockchain space.

Thank you for reading! Let’s chat about the potential of design in the blockchain space :)

The value of design in the blockchain space was originally published in Strategic Design Lab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Design is shaping business as ever before. With the irruption of design thinking as a mainstream methodology in 2000s, companies started to pay attention to design and implement this new perspective to solve old unsolved problems. Design consultancies like IDEO and some others made of this philosophy its identity and helped to make it viral around the world. This was just the first move of this trend, however nowadays design is evolving even quicker, taking a protagonic role in innovation and broadening its influence in the business world.

Differentiation is a synonym of design. Design was applied to make products more beautiful, more functional, more usable… also it was used to communicate better, to visualize complex narratives and to make services easier to understand and navigate. Then, it took a more emotional dimension making the creations more pleasurable, meaningful and personalized. Eventually it is being used as a tool to facilitate connect and leverage value systems within organizations that uncover new business models. In its essence, design must beat the mystery to open unexplored doors that might connect to new dimensions of interesting possibilities.

Design is climbing up the ladder faster than ever (Dansk Design Center, 2016). It was known that design could take a place in the overall business strategy, nevertheless no many companies were either brave enough or able to apply it in a sustainable manner. The application of design as strategy shows a new dimension to create a competitive advantage in the market for companies and it is being seen to become more common in enterprises from different industries in the last years.

Design in its strategy dimension is a fluid discipline, it spreads within the companies to impregnate different departments with design practices. To apply design strategy, people must understand the basic principles of design: user centeredness, empathy, a mental & physical process, future oriented, hands on approach, visual, co-creative, an interconnection for complex systems, continuous testing and iteration…every decision taken within the company should consider a design mindset. Applying these principles should be not exclusive for designers, it must involve as many stakeholders as possible to make a real impact internally and in the market.

In the last decade more startups are being founded by designers. Lately, we have seen several designers founding successful startups such Chad Hurley (Youtube), Brian Chesky (Airbnb), Charles Adler (Kickstarter) or Mike Krieger (Instagram). Since the founders understand the value of applying a design mindset in business, the whole company is ruled by design principles and this philosophy leads to great differentiation in the market. For example, Airbnb has a department called Employee experience, which gives a clue of the company culture considering the front stage of the experience as much as the backstage.

Coinbase, the biggest crypto exchange in the world, is an example of the application of design strategy. Cryptocurrencies is a new and unexplored world for the general audience. Only a few geeks and visionaries were playing around with it since Bitcoin appeared back in 2009. Coinbase set the stage to become the natural entrance to cryptocurrencies for the mainstream audience applying several design principles: user centeredness, making something complex as simple as possible; visual, using a great user experience and interface; and holistic, designing the whole service to be intuitive, accessible and effective.

Design provided a trustful environment to exchange something as ethereal as cryptocurrencies, which are totally volatile and convey a high degree of uncertainty. Coinbase did not even have the biggest offer in cryptocurrencies, they actually started with only three from a catalogue of 1,658 coins, but they were able to conquer the biggest piece of the market due to user experience delivered. They attracted more than 13 million users around the world and help them trade $150 billion worth of cryptocurrency over the past year applying a strategy based in design.

Design as strategy is clearly an essential part of business in these days. Traditionally, using a business perspective meant to analyze the past and make decisions to generate higher revenue in the future. Design strategy envisions the future, crafting ideal solutions to answer What should it be? questions. Designers create things (tangible and intangible) based on societal trends and ethnographic research to understand behaviors and desires while businessmen are trained to make decisions based on data.

Using design as strategy means wearing special lenses that filter desirability, viability and feasibility, combining what is attractive for the user, what can be made technically and what represents a sustainable business (Brown, 2009). Design strategy diverges substantially exploring all kind of ideas and then brings analytical tools to evaluate the potential of the ideas created.

However, design is not a static discipline. It evolves reacting to new business paradigms. In fact, business is changing from a knowledge paradigm (Brand, R., & Rocchi, S. 2011), where companies enable platforms for peers to exchange value, to a transformational paradigm, where companies need to rely on complementary expertise, global know-how and local contextual insights, which require experimentation via new venturing and cooperative approaches with conventional and non-conventional stakeholders.

How will companies survive in the transformational era?

Design strategy is the secret ingredient to ensure a competitive advantage in the future and unpredictable markets. It can be applied in different levels:

• Collaborative fuzzy front end of innovation: What should I do? How could I find new business opportunities? Who should I connect to create value? Defining the direction to go for the company and the stakeholders involved in the co-creation process is vital in a network driven business scenario. Since business will be a collaborative effort, the strategy must be defined by consensus with all relevant stakeholders.
• Product service system strategy: How do I combine products and services in a system that fit our strategy? How the brand new system fits with the company portfolio and with the company goals? Defining a new strategy for the new product service systems could alter the overall company strategy and position the business in a more beneficial area.
• Experience strategy: How can I create an user experience that deliver value in every touchpoint? How do I transmit the brand values during the experience? Which stakeholders are taking part of the experience? Defining intertwined experiences between brands and peers to deliver memorable moments for the end user.
• Market introduction strategy: How and when should I launch my product/service to the market? How should I use the assets and resources in the local and global context to maximize the revenue? Using design principles to maximize market adoption and get a critical mass that permit a leader position in the market.

Design strategy: the secret to survive in the transformational era. was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Driven by my personal experience failing and fairly succeeding starting a couple of companies, I reflected about why we, designers, do not tend to jump into the pool of entrepreneurship, what are the reasons and the differences on mindset between designers and entrepreneurs.

It is a fact that lately we have seen several designers founding successful startups such Chad Hurley (Youtube), Brian Chesky (Airbnb), Evan Sharp (Pinterest), Rob Kalin (Etsy),Charles Adler (Kickstarter), Mike Krieger (Instagram) or David Karp (Tumblr). In spite of these impressive examples, I see a need to leverage the value of design even more and help designers to gain self confidence and believe in their skills and ideas to start up companies.

Nowadays, I am professor at Los Andes university, teaching service and strategic design, so I took this opportunity to use my professional activity to answer my questions. I decided to propose a new course in the design faculty to test the potential of designers, their strengths and weaknesses when starting up a new company. The design department of Los Andes university, always open to experiment and develop a cutting edge discurse, trusted me and gave me the chance to start the course aiming to unlock the potential of 24 young designers to become company owners.

It is been a while since the course started and during these months I have been able to collect several conclusions comparing designers and entrepreneurs conducts that I summarized as follows:

I.

Entrepreneurs start with a personal vision of the business. They have a “clear” idea about the business, however they need to validate if their idea is correct or they need to reformulate it, that it will most likely be the case. They start with hypothesis and assumptions that are coming from previous experiences, preliminary research or even gut instinct.

On the other hand, designers start from the user, exploring the needs and behaviors in a certain context, aiming to discover unmet needs that can be transformed in features of the final product or service. The user research help significantly to define a value proposition that satisfy the customer desires.

II.

Entrepreneurs have a holistic mindset. They think about the different aspects that affect the business from the beginning (value proposition, customer segment, channels, partners, resources, costs…) They connect all these aspects to build a coherent whole that will be validated step by step.

Designers think about an idea that fits the user needs, this idea might be a service or a product. They focus on desirability. In other words they ensure that the user will fall in love with the product when using it. They tend to think about the ideal solution, something original that solves a problem or reduce a pain.

III.

Entrepreneurs focus on monetization and benefits. Their main goal is to build a sustainable business which means to make money as soon as possible, find the best revenue streams on the go and study the reactions of the customer to modify iteratively the solution. They aim to find the cheapest version of the product that will bring benefits to the company quickly. Naturally, they execute.

Designers focus on the experience first, taking into account all details, ups and downs, and the value exchange between stakeholders. Then, they think about the potential business model that fit the solution. They build the best experiences possible. Naturally, they delight the user.

IV.

Entrepreneurs are used to be analytical. Data and measurements are familiar to them. They have been playing around with KPI’s for a long time. ROI is key in any plan that they do and the impact of the solutions is measured mainly in financial terms.

Designers are used to prototype. They build artefacts to test their solutions often focusing on usability. They feel comfortable in the qualitative part of the research detecting feelings and emotions. However, numbers are out of the comfort zone.

Fortunately, this is not black or white! Lately new hybrid profiles appear like strategic designers, service designers or business designers who are able to combine qualitative and quantitative research, quick loops and iteration, analytical and intuitive thinking, and prototyping + measuring. With this combination of skills designers will probably do not hesitate to follow their entrepreneurial dreams.

Do you recognize yourself in these profiles?

How would you encourage designers to jump in?

This is just the first episode of my personal learnings working with designers wannabe entrepreneurs. More conclusions coming soon! I hope you enjoyed the reading and we are looking forward to hear your experience.

Why do designers hesitate to become entrepreneurs? was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Introduction

In the last months I have been thinking and reflecting about Facebook, its evolution and how it works for different generations.

*It is important to say that this is a humble and personal exercise. I am totally aware that Facebook gathers much more accurate data that I can find in the internet, and this means that Facebook’s user knowledge can probably weaken all my arguments, conclusions and consequent solutions. I am not either UX or UI designer, I consider myself a fuzzy front end warrior design strategist, simply I am doing this to play and learn, and this is basically my goal. On the other hand, it would be great if it could even serve as spark of inspiration for Julie Zhuo’s team in Facebook Design, and Facebook Research.

Driven by personal curiosity, I decided to explore several dimensions of Facebook social network and to do so, I defined the following research questions:

Which are the differences on understanding and usage of Facebook between Millennials and Baby Boomers?

• Do different levels of digital dexterity require an intervention in strategic, UX and UI design?
• Should different users’ mindset and behaviors affect the final design or should users adapt to a standard design?

To start my exploration, I thought it was interesting to check my Facebook timeline to remember when I used it for the first time: 12th of June 2008. Almost ten years ago. Time flies! and even worse: I am getting old!

Context: How did this all start?

My generation, the omnipresent millennials, started to use the social networks during our teenage. At that moment, social networks went viral, and the daily use of Facebook and Twitter became part of our routine. We used it to connect with others through our pictures and share our experiences. We were amateur, naive and inexperienced, and our aim was just to discover a new world of possibilities to connect with friends.

Today, March 2018, it is not too different. Facebook has become an automatic response to boredom, to check it while commuting, to skip dull conversations, and a perfect excuse to join the antisocial social club… it is basically the place to go when you do not know what to do, it is always present and available for you. This is impressive, and it is not a coincidence, it is a matter of exquisite work. Due to this, Facebook has become an important part of our lives!

After youngsters adopted Facebook as a daily companion to have fun sharing their experiences more than one decade ago, older generations have gradually started to get curious about it and try to discover the value of this new world for them.

But, are both generations looking for the same value?

Today, there are over 2.01 billion monthly active Facebook users worldwide for June 2017, which is a 17 percent increase year over year. Among them, there are 1.15 billion mobile daily active users, also an increase of 23 percent year-over-year.

Although 29.7% of users are age 25 to 34 being the most common age demographic, the usage of social networks by baby boomers (+53 years old) is growing rapidly in the last years.

What is the current situation for Baby Boomers?

In theory, Baby boomers are in their last working years since their ages are between 53 and 71 approximately. This generation was labeled as non conformists: going against social norms, liberal expression of their sexuality, interest in equality, recognition of environmental concerns… Generally, they are defined as committed, motivated, independent, competitive and work centric. Baby boomers have been working really hard during their lives aiming to achieve a comfortable status for the retirement phase.

Today, although retirement age varies depending on the country, this age has increased to be around 65–67 years old due to change in regulations addressing the need of creating a sustainable pension systems to face ageing population and its consequences.

In these days there are 1.1 billion baby boomers alive, this is 15% of the total world population. In 2030 all baby boomers should be retired regarding its age. However, Prof David Blake, director of the Pensions Institute at Cass Business School says:

“The danger now is we will have a generation who really can’t afford to retire.”

Therefore, it seems that Baby boomers will be the last generation to get officially retired.

Retirement as a life event

In 2014 I carried a 6 month research in collaboration with Aegon- Transamerica center for longevity and retirement to understand the implications of the life event of retirement in baby boomers. Since I was targeting the same audience in my Facebook research, I decided to apply my learnings on retirement to this new research.

What do we consider life events?

Life events are defined as major happenings in people’s lives that require a certain level of psychological adaptation (Rahe & Miller, 1997). These happenings create an atmosphere of uncertainty, fear and excitement where people need to adapt themselves to a new reality (Suls & Mulen, 1981).

Retirement is one of the most important life events in people’s life covering a long period of time and experiencing several emotional and contextual changes. Taking into consideration the changes experienced throughout retirement, Atchley (1987) defined six phases in the life event of retirement: Pre-retirement, retirement, disenchantment, reorientation, retirement routine and termination of retirement.

User research. Retirement

To understand the needs, behaviors and experiences of the users around the context of retirement, qualitative user research was carried based on the following research questions:

Research questions

I. How retirement affects people’s lives?

II. Which individual actions are needed to go through retirement?

III.How would it be the ideal retirement experience?

Methods:

4 Co-creation and generative sessions: Timeline, Personas, Diary, Card Sorting.

8 In-depth interviews with Baby boomers

Findings

Availability of time

Time availability is the main difference between the working life and the retirement life. Time is not perceived anymore as a restriction, in fact, time is the key factor that provides relaxation and freedom of choice during retirement.

“I have time to do what I like” , “I do not like to suspend activities for the future”

Discovery

Discovering foreign cultures, finding new interests and meeting new people are some of their desires once they get retired. Pre-retirees perceive retirement as an ideal stage to broaden their knowledge and to live new adventures bringing together the experiences accumulated during their previous life stages. Retirees feel nostalgic about the feeling of freedom from their youth, however their experience is a key aspect that might help them to live a more delightful time in this new stage.

“It is good to plan to go from A to B, but retirement is to go for discovery again”

Understand yourself

The adaptation process to a new life stage requires knowing yourself on depth in terms of interests, desires, goals, etc… Retirement is understood as a phase which offers total freedom to decide what to do. Despite freedom could be seen as the ideal situation, in some cases it could represent a problem due to the countless possibilities to choose from. Therefore, it is essential to know the activities or groups one wants to be part of and the process to achieve this goal.

“You search in yourself about what you like to learn, to play, to do…”

Keep responsibilities

After working for many years people get used to dealing with structured schedules, handling responsibilities and taking important decisions within their contexts. When retirement life starts everything changes and those daily responsibilities disappear. At this moment the scenario changes completely and a severe life restructuration is needed. Finding new responsibilities or maintaining some of them from the working life could help to gradually adapting themselves to the new life stage.

“I need to find new responsibilities, I would like to take care of my sisters and grandchildren”

Health

The degree of importance of health in retirement is significantly high. Either mental or physical health has high impact in people’s lives during this period. Both together are the responsible of any human action and if one of them is missing the performance is limited or inexistent. Even though health is usually related exclusively to mental and physical status, a third dimension has been found in this research as a key point in retirement: Social health. It refers to the interaction between individuals within society. It seems unrelated to the traditional concept of health but it has been discovered as a fundamental part of retirees’ health status. Social interaction helps retirees to keep an active lifestyle which stimulates them mentally and physically.

“Health is essential, but I prioritize to be socially active”. “I need intellectual challenges everyday”. “I will play golf with my friends”.

Paradoxes

During the user research I also found several behavioral paradoxes:

• Freedom vs find responsibilities: After a whole working life being productive they need to be satisfied with their daily journey, in other words they need to be useful for someone. Lacking time it is as difficult to manage as having nothing to do.
• Plan vs improvisation: The process of adaptation to the new lifestyle requires thinking about the future in advance in order to define goals and targets. However, retirees see this new stage as an opportunity for discovery where plans are general drafts and improvisation plays the principal role in the journey adding daily excitement to their lives.
• Working vs relax: This circumstance is strictly linked to the attachment to work and the degree of passion on your working activities. People who are passionate about their jobs tend to continue working after retirement age. On the other hand, some people work exclusively to get an income and to ensure their financial stability, therefore the work attachment is lower being understood as a stage where people are free to do all type of joyful activities that they could not enjoy during their working life.

Conclusions

The findings from the user research lead to a reinterpretation and the creation of a new vision for retirement:

Finding a comfortable and rewarding lifestyle while being socially involved, physically and mentally active and financially safe.

Design challenge

From this vision and taking into account that more and more baby boomers are organically joining Facebook, I have brought together both facts to define my Design challenge:

How can I help Baby boomers to find a comfortable and rewarding lifestyle being socially involved, physically and mentally active and financially safe in their upcoming or current retirement phase through Facebook?

Secondary research: Social media & Baby boomers

Once my design challenge was defined, I decided to dive on baby boomers’ behaviour on social networks, to do so, I did a secondary research on internet to spot relevant data and trends. The most relevant findings I was able to discover were the following:

An overwhelming 82.3% of Baby boomers belong to at least once social networking site, being Facebook the prefered site.

A significant group of Baby boomers (15.5%) spends 11+ hours per week on Facebook.

More than half of Leading-Edge Boomers will visit a company website or continue the search on a search engine after seeing something on a social networking site.

Baby boomers use Facebook to stay connected with their friends and family, as well as to reconnect with folks they haven’t seen in some time since members of this age group highly value community involvement.

Among the online adults, 45% of people aged 65+ use Facebook and in age 50–64 demographic 60% use Facebook.

Women are 26 % more likely to share content more than once a day when compared to their male counterparts.

Baby Boomers are 19% more likely to share content compared to any other generation, reinforcing the notion that Facebook’s demographic is trending slightly older.

This data illustrates that this target group might be a promising customer segment to look at and design for. However, there are some aspects to consider before jumping into them because not only baby boomers think in different terms but also their knowledge and education was completely different regarding the digital world, which definitely requires special treatment.

The Barriers of Baby boomers

Even though they are trying to catch up technology wise, their learning process is slower than younger generations’ and to get updated represents a big effort for them. Therefore, it is important to consider what are the barriers of this generation to help them using Facebook at its maximum potential.

• Non digital native

Baby boomers are not always familiar with how to use the settings of different sites, and they can find themselves overwhelmed with notifications, windows, required actions… Common interactions for youngsters can result in bad headaches for baby boomers who are not used to manage swipes, figurative icons and drag & drop actions.

In conclusion, surfing the internet is not easy for them, they can get hooked easily by digital advertising tricks and get lost on their way. They know the basic features but once they need to use more complex ones they have a hard time.

• Visual capacity

Visual problems are very common in 50+ people and this influences the interaction with screens sustancially. Mobile phones have small screens which are not easy to navigate and sometimes this represents a big limitation for this type of users.

• Security & Privacy

Most of them are very concerned about their privacy on social media yet are not fully aware of how to effectively use the privacy settings found on the sites they frequent. They are very cautious to show personal information. A similar situation happens with payment, although they are getting used to pay online, they are not totally confident with the payment process.

• Information management

Some get overwhelmed with the amount of information that flows into their Facebook news feed. They need guidance in how to filter these feeds so that they can only see information from people who they are most closely connected to.

• Sedentary lifestyle

Older generations tend to have a more relaxed routine, spending time at home and going out fewer times than in previous stages of their lives. This lifestyle can generate health issues.

User research: Facebook users

After finding so much interesting information, I wanted to carry my own research to validate the behavioral patterns and data found in the internet. To do so, I build a questionnaire of 60 questions of different types: quantitative (yes/no and scaled) and qualitative (open questions).

The objective of the questionnaire was to validate some hypotheses related to the use of the platform and users’ behaviors, the degree of interaction between users and the connection of digital and physical worlds through Facebook.

I used my personal network to find participants, so I decided to do it in Spanish to increase the participation hoping to have a decent amount of answers. The final sample was 28 people, from Spain and Colombia, men and women, ages from 50 to 72.

I used typeform to make the questionnaire, which helped me to report the quantitative part automatically. I analyzed the open answers manually.

Insights

After analyzing the answers from the interviewees I was able to find the following key insights:

• Facebook is the favourite social network for this audience (50+)
• Mobile phone is the prefered device to visit Facebook (79%)
• Facebook is used while waiting, when having spare time, boredom and moments of relax.
• 50+ people use facebook to be updated about news, keep friendships, stay tuned on specific topics of interest, be updated about relatives living abroad and as a entertainment tool.
• Their usage of Facebook is basic. They perform simple actions: Read, publish, share and play.
• Frequency of use: 79% of interviewees visit Facebook everyday.
• 29% visit Facebook once a day
• 36% visit Facebook between 2–5 times a day
• 21% visit Facebook between 5–8 times a day
• 95% of interviewees think the time invested in Facebook is worthwhile
• If they are not working, the time spent in Facebook rise considerably
• Publishing: Baby boomers like to publish (59% of interviewees do it) about topics that they consider relevant for their friends, or to share their own experiences.
• Privacy: They are aware of the consequences of publishing publicly
• Information management: They think they select the content which they are consuming, they are not aware about Facebook’s filter.
• The social circle of this audience is reduced to family and close friends. They are conscious about the content of their publications but they do not know how to set up a controlled audience for their posts.
• They like pages and check the news feed, but they do not tend to participate either in groups (just 28% are part of a group) nor events. Since they do not know Facebook’s complete offering, their behavior is contemplative. They focus on consuming and sharing content rather than creating it. 92% of interviewees claim they have a medium-low knowledge of Facebook’s features.
• Regarding events, they focus on weekend events with their closest group of friends. Cultural entertainment is the prefered category, followed by exploration of new places. 38% of interviewees attended to events found in Facebook and 62% of them would go to events recommended in Facebook which fit their personal preferences. They trust more on events created by friends than corporate or strangers’ events.

Behavioral patterns

Digging in the key insights found, I was able to identify several behaviors that Baby boomers have while using Facebook.

• Contemplative attitude rather than active. They consume content, they do not create it.
• They are basic users because they do not have either dexterity or confidence to research all features that Facebook offers.
• They joined Facebook due to social influence from their closest relatives and their interactions happen within this trustful environment.
• They do not see Facebook as a tool to expand their social circles but to maintain and be updated about their current relationships.
• Baby boomers look forward weekend events to enjoy with friends and family. Week events need to be planned in detail to fit their routine.

Essential ingredients for the solution

In order to build a relevant solution for Baby boomers that enhance their lifestyle and create a more gratifying routine, I found the following ingredients:

• Proactive feed of information about entertainment activities. Facebook should become a reference point for baby boomers to find relevant activities. The current system of Facebook events could be the initial step to launch this solution.
• Basic and selected features , choosing only those which add real value to baby boomers in their interactions.
• Regarding digital design, the solution must apply mainstream digital interactions. Moreover, it should minimize the use of icons without text.
• Event recommendation based on user preferences, and linked to friends and relatives activity.
• Creating events must be extremely easy, similar to a whatsapp group. The process must not represent a barrier to launch the activity.
• The solution must take advance of baby boomers’ publishing routine to share information and events in different platforms aiming to reach a broader audience.
• Increase trust in events created by strangers. Recommendations from friends or friends of friends and public opinions help to create trust on the events.
• Friends of friends are key to expand social circles. The platform should facilitate introductions between users to break initial barriers.
• Push notifications: events and promotions in the neighbourhood.
• Tracking of users’ activities and sending recommendations to maintain an ideal lifestyle. The solution should not only focus on entertainment but also in health and mainting an active lifestyle.

Crisp, the place to be.

Crisp is an extension of Facebook’s platform that lets baby boomers build an active lifestyle finding interesting events related to their preferences, opening their social circles making new connections and monetizing their personal knowledge.

Solution characteristics:

Targeted community: Exclusive community for baby boomers. Bringing the concept of social club to the digital world without any social barrier, being accessible to anyone in this age group. In other words, a digital meeting point to make your daily life more gratifying.

Energetic tone. The community must not be perceived as a place for retirees. The community members should not feel they are getting older, this community must represent a place to enjoy a new stage of life trying to push a proactive and healthy lifestyle.

Locally connected to the physical world. Despite being a global network, this Facebook’s solution addresses the local context and the social and business relationships that are developed during the user’s daily activities. Moreover, it connects Facebook’s digital platform with brick and mortar small businesses.

Simplification of features. Facebook has many features but baby boomers focus on the basic ones. there are so many options in the menus that most users do not use them. Same happens with groups and events. The navigation must be straightforward and intuitive, prioritizing the most relevant activities for them.

Events as social activator triggering an active lifestyle. Events for baby boomers organized mainly by baby boomers. The type of events should be curated taking into account the taste of the target audience.

Integration with Facebook. 50+ people who are new users to Facebook should join the community automatically. To those already registered, an invitation process similar to Facebook messenger’s strategy must be planned. It is an extension of the current platform but targeted to this specific audience.

Once the value proposition with its high level characteristics was conceptualized, it was time to start designing the digital solution. I decided to build an app because the mobile phone is the prefered device to visit Facebook for baby boomers.

UX & UI

Before building a prototype, I illustrated a user flow to help me understand the user interactions to perform different tasks within the app.

Based on the key insights found in the research and the essential ingredients defined, preliminary wireframes were sketched to prioritize the content, visualize the screens and start thinking about the user flows and the ideal navigation.

Digital screens and an interactive prototype were developed in Adobe XD following the design guidelines defined in the paper wireframes. Aesthetics were not prioritary in this phase, the objective was to select the most relevant content and define an intuitive navigation.

The last part of the process was to add the visual style to the app. Following are some of my UI design outcomes. However, I am still refining the design iteratively to polish details.

To test the final concept of Crisp, I talked personally with potential users of the app and ask them their willingness to use it, the intuitiveness of the design and the perceived value of the solution. After using the interactive prototype, 82% of the interviewees found value in the app and they considered the design simple and intuitive. On the oher hand, most of them will like to try the final product to assess the accuracy of the event recommendation system.

Business design

One of the main goals of this solution is to help baby boomers to become financially safe. Most of baby boomers are getting allowance from the government but sometimes it is not enough to enjoy a comfortable and gratifying lifestyle.

“By 2020 older adult (60 and up) spending will reach $15 trillion. It is no exageration to say that the world’s most advanced economies will soon revolve around the needs, wants and whims of grandparents.” Joseph Coughlin

Crisp can provide an extra revenue for baby boomers sharing their expertise with other users and getting paid for it (similar model as Airbnb experiences).

On the other hand, this new platform can create new revenue streams for Facebook with sponsored events and strengthing the alliances with local partners. Moreover, using track record of events, Facebook can offer personalized suggestions of new events.

Local businesses need to reach their audience through new channels and Facebook can deliver a segmented advertising platform to maximize their promotion efforts. Activation strategies like free trials for courses like zumba, painting, furniture restoration… or promotional discounts for one time activities such 50% discount in the local golf resort could be interesting options to get new customers.

All these business assumptions must be validated with potential clients. As we are talking about a multi-sided market, it is important to test the different value propositions with local businesses, baby boomers and local population.

Final reflection

This design process was a great exercise that let me applying my skills in user research, synthesis of information and data interpretation, insight definition and business design. At the same time, it helped me to practice my UX/UI skills. I enjoy and learn doing this kind of exercises, and hopefully they will help me keep growing and become a top-class design strategist, UX researcher, service designer or whatever the label is.

It would be great to hear your comments, opinions and ideas. I love to learn from others and chat about design, so do not hesitate to contact me or visit my website for more information.

Thanks for reading!

What if… Facebook focuses on baby boomers? was originally published in Strategic Design Lab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the last few weeks I have been asked several times by students and colleagues about how to build a service / strategic design portfolio. In spite of thinking that there is no absolute answer to this question, I believe there are some basic aspects to consider when presenting our personal work as service/ strategic designers.

But firstly, let’s start from the beginning!

What is a portfolio?

The portfolio is the principal tool that we, designers, use to showcase our work. Our goal should not be showing all the projects that we have worked on, but the skills that make us special to get the desired job. We need to demonstrate what we are capable to do and what kind of value we can add to the potential employer.

What makes a strategic/ service design portfolio different from a traditional portfolio?

Since this article focuses on how to build a strategic and service design portfolio, it is important to mention that the design discipline has evolved considerably in the last decade and this has affected the way we should showcase our work.

Historically, the portfolio was used mainly by graphic designers to show their “art”. Nowadays, we are not only showing beautiful graphic pieces, but also methods, design tools, and the strategic decisions taken during the process that lead to choose and implement the “final” solution.

Wearing my future boss shoes.

An interesting exercise before starting the portfolio is to think if you were your future lead, director… What would she/he like to see about myself to hire me? It should not be difficult for us since empathy is one of our core capabilities as designers ;)

Most likely she would like to evaluate your…

1. Skills. You need to be able to show what you are capable to do: which skills you master, which ones you have applied often and which ones you are developing. Are you T-shaped or π shaped? Generalist or specialist?

2. Attitude. Your portfolio should represent you. It must project your personality. Proactive, adaptable, ready to face new challenges, curious and eager to learn… How can I do this? For instance adding a Lessons learnt section in your projects: next time I would do it differently because… This shows your critical thinking and your willingness to improve continuously.

3. Experience. Working for different industries, international clients, use of variety of design tools, project and client management skills… They seek for a balanced combination of hard and soft skills.

4. Team fit. What can you add to the team? Example: Expertise in creative facilitation, ethnography or storyboarding/ sketching. Normally service and strategic designers are generalists, so our profiles are hybrid and therefore more adaptable to the needs of the team. If you know the department you might join, you can check their profiles in Linkedin and highlight your strenghts in the specific gaps detected within the team.

—

Once you have imagined what your future boss might expect from your portfolio, it is time to get your hands dirty. We recommend you to follow these principles:

Keep it simple.

No more than 4 projects. Design directors do not have time to read your portfolio more than 10 minutes. It is vital to synthesize and show a selection of your projects that fit with the vacancy you are applying for and the company’s profile.

For instance if you are applying for a Digital design consultancy (e.g Fjord), it is important to show them you are able to extract important insights from qualitative research and applying those to the final digital product in specific features (user flows, app architecture…)

The process is as important as the final result.

Explaining the brief, the design process (research, synthesis, ideation, selection & validation) and the results is the basic structure to present a project. Again, the project is just the context where your skills are applied, make sure you show your superpowers. On the other hand, do not write too much, make room for questions in a later stage of the recruitment process.

Talk the same language.

Customer journey, blueprint, stakeholder mapping, generative sessions, holistic approach, ROI, … are recurrent concepts within the discipline. The usage of these terms in the portfolio let the reader understand that you are familiar with the jargon and you feel comfortable applying it in practice. However, do not fill it with buzzwords, this might penalize you, like Google algorithm does with unnecessary keywords!

Measurable Impact.

The impact of the final solution is key to demonstrate its success in the real world. We need to have measurable results of our solutions that shows that it was not just an idea. For instance, a deliverable such a CX strategy needs to be consolidated with metrics to justify its impact in the business and therefore the value added by the application of strategic/service design. As an example, Bridgeable helped Telus to get 15% improvement in end-to-end cost reduction.

Be visual my friend.

Infographics and pictures can explain complex concepts better than plain text. Pictures of co-creation sessions, usability tests, ideation workshops, prototyping sessions… with users and clients illustrate your capabilities and tell a lot about the variety of methods applied.

Think about your portfolio as a design project

You main goal is to demonstrate your strategic and service design skills, but do not forget that your portfolio will also present your writing skills, information architecture skills, eye for detail… The format is also a decision to be made. Being digital without doubt, it could be a well designed PDF, a personal website, Behance, Dribble… that depends on the designer’s taste.

To wrap up and make these recommendations more tangible, I found some good examples of strategic/ service design portfolios:

Lilith Hasbeck , Petri Pennanen, Maria Hock, Amy Lee , Judit Boros, Erika Lauro and my portfolio (and hopefully you can add more names in the comments ;))

Moreover, if you need personalized help to build your portfolio, I am offering 3 slots monthly for personalized portfolio reviews here.

If you found this article useful, please share it with fellow strategic/service designers who can benefit from it

Cheers!

How to make a winning strategic /service design portfolio. was originally published in Strategic Design Lab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I started writing this article quite a while ago when I heard once again about behavioral economics and its potential within design from my colleague Santiago De Francisco, a really keen professional on this topic. Today, I decided to finish it pushed by the achievement of one of the pioneers of this discipline, Mr Richard Thaler, just awarded with Nobel of Economics 2017.

What’s the connection between strategic design and behavioral economics?

Making a long story short:

Design try to understand people’s needs, desires and motivations to create new solutions that add value to the end user , in other words make it desirable for the customer. Moreover, the solutions need to be feasible technically, and economically viable.

On the other hand, Behavioral economics studies the psychology behind economic decision making of individuals. It explores why people sometimes make irrational decisions, and why and how their behavior does not follow the predictions of economic models.

Hence, if we look at it through economic lenses, (strategic) designers are responsible to find sustainable business models validated by the customers, and to do so, they need to understand in detail the decision making process of these potential customers. Here it is! If we combine both fields we can gain a holistic understanding on how likely a product/service would be bought by the customer.

“If I understand how users are making decisions, I can adapt my offer to increase the likelihood of being accepted”

If you find this combination of disciplines appealing, you may be interested to read Santiago’s and myself selection of behavioral economics books:

Misbehaving. Richard Thaler This book explains why traditional economic is so classically wrong. It provides an evidence-based discussion of the limitations of traditional economic theory in a way that is also accessible to non-economists. It is definitely a good book to start on behavioral economics!

Predictably irrational. Dan Ariely. Highly recommended for people selling products or services, this book gives a complete view of the duality rationality vs emotionality. The author illustrated each experiment with a scenario followed it with hard data, being able to explain complex concepts with understandable terms.

Nudge. Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein. Excellent book if you don’t know a lot about behavioral economics. It talks about the subtle influences that really affect individual and collective choices in our daily lives. Easy to read with compelling and well researched content.

Blink. Malcolm Gladwell. Superb book about the power of intuitive decisions in our current world illustrated by a great compilation of real examples and experiments. Gladwell’s writing style and its sophisticated research makes this book entertaining and surprising at the same time. A perfect holiday book!

Freakonomics. Stephen J. Dubner & Steven Levitt. This book is an opportunity to look at economics from a different point of view. It touches theories about incentives, what motivates people to act, or not to act in certain ways and about the long-term consequences of short-term decisions. Perfect read about economics for non economists!

The power of habit. Charles Duhigg. Easy to read and practical book with interesting examples. It explores the potential of building new habits or changing bad ones to achieve our goals in life. The understanding of “cue-habit-reward” cycle which dictates most of our actions is my favourite take away from this book.

Hooked. Nir Eyal. A well structured guide full of examples to build habit forming products. It presents a simple and practical user engagement model based on four stages (trigger, action, variable reward and investment) which applies consumers’ psychology to design addictive products or services. Nice resource for designers, developers and entrepreneurs!

The Why axis. John A. List & Uri Gneezy. The book is a good combination of behavioral economics and business strategy, that focuses on analyzing how experimental economics can help us figure out what motivates people. Very readable and accessible, their field experiments are innovative and their results can be unexpected.

Happy Money. Elizabeth Dunn & Michael Norton. If you have been struggled by the question “Can money buy happiness?” this book might have the answer. It depicts five principles on how to spend your money to contribute to you subjective well being. The principles are supported with field research and experiments. I must read book if you are interested in behavioral sciences with a twist of economics.

How to worry less about money? John Armstrong. As part of the Toolkits for life of The School of life, Armstrong bring us different approach related to how we (should) use money. The book is focus on how people perceives money, levels of attachment and meaning. Using daily basis examples, it lets you explore money in a new way, discovering what really matters in the end.

We hope you will enjoy reading these books. Let’s spread the word of the high potential of applying behavioral economics within design.

If you enjoyed our article, Clap, clap, clap to help others discovering about behavioral economics!

Cheeeeeeers :)

10 must read on Behavioral economics was originally published in Strategic Design Lab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In Strategic Design Lab we are constant learners. We love to be updated about new trends in the domain of design (strategic, UX, UI, graphic, products…) Since we are practitioners, we have observed a growing demand in the market of service design, one of the booming fields within design in the last years.

All started with “design thinking”, which is already a buzz word in the corporate environment. Now, service design is taking over as the new “infallible” tool to innovate, improve customer experience and bring business value to companies. Although service design was originated in Europe, nowadays it is a booming field in USA, Asia and Oceania. Basically it is being applied all around the world, and this is already a great achievement.

I would define service design as “a holistic user centered discipline that analyze the context of the user and the provider throughout the service experience in order to minimize pain or add greater value in the combination of touchpoints during the service”. This discipline is able to zoom in and out in the user experience, being capable to understand the big picture but also to change small details in certain touchpoints e.g. “from stakeholder mapping to swipe left feature in an app”

We have learnt for some years about service design and we still are, mainly practising and reading. Moreover, I have the priviledge to be a member of “Service design drinks Madrid”, a growing open community of almost 1000 curious practitioners who share the lastest trends in the industry. There, someone threw this question some time ago: Do you have any recommendation of service design books? So, to answer it, here you have a selection of my favourite service design books:

1.Service design: From insight to implementation. Definitely one of the references in the field. I read it some years ago and it explains the discipline and its tools in an easy and clear way. It helped me to convince a big corporate to apply service design internally, so I guess it is worth reading. Written by Livework’s founders, pioneers in service design.

2. This is service design thinking. One of the best sellers and a well known book in the field. It presents case studies with practical advice on the application of service design. Easy to read with relevant content. “This is service design doing” the new book of these authors was released in August 2017.

3. The Service Start Up. Tenhy Pinheiro is a well known author and an experienced service design practitioner. In this book he brings together the philosophy of Lean Start up and service design creating a fresh and practical tool for service designers willing to add agility to their process.

4. Service design in business. This book touches the basics of service design, the different parts of the process and its practical implementation within corporations. The business context has vital importance in Livework’s approach ans this fact can be seen in the book bridging design and business smoothly and focusing on creating user centered organizations.

5. Convivial Toolbox. Since research is an essential part of service design, I could not skip this book. Design research in the fuzzy front end is a complex field, however this book makes it so easy to understand (kind of “for dummies” style) that represent a workable tool to use in a daily basis. The book provides from general recommendations to small practical tips that help designers a lot through the research process. It is the perfect professional guide for design research.

6. The service innovation handbook. This book provides an useful set of methods and illustrative case studies that explain the connection between design and business. It is a great resource for design professionals who want to expand their personal toolkit.

7. Mapping experiences. This book cannot get more practical. It presents several mapping techniques and how to apply them in the context of customer experience but also taking into account business requirements. Good read to learn concrete techniques and the connection of those to strategic and business decisions.

If you think this article can help other colleagues to learn something new in the field, please share it with them! We are happy to hear new titles from you! :) Cheers!

7 Service Design books worth reading was originally published in Strategic Design Lab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After some years of practical experience as strategic designer /design strategist in different companies around Europe and quite a lot of time spent reading about this discipline, its evolution in these years (very new as a formal profession), its methodologies, its principles… I have decided to make a list with the most interesting books on strategic design I got to read. There are plenty of books addressing strategy from different perspectives: UI, UX, pure business… and different contexts: corporates, consultancies, entrepreneurs…

This brief list focuses on enlightening the strategic value of design and try answer this question: why should companies use design as strategic tool to create desirable, viable and feasible product/services?

Another important objective of this article is to get to know new books worth reading. So, please share your favourites! :)

Design thinking at work. David Dunne. https://amzn.to/2SMWSrV Essential reading to understand the application of design thinking in organizations, the different models applied by world leaders, its pros and cons, and the tensions generated in the implementation of design programs. This book can help managers to introduce design thinking in their companies, but also consultants to reflect on their practices within organizations. Definitely a really valuable reading!

The Design of business. Roger Martin. http://amzn.to/2rMFWDo In my opinion, this book summaries the power of bringing analytical and intuitive thinking together to solve complex problems. It is slightly theoretical with some real examples, but it adds a lot of value to the reader. Together with Tim Brown, Roger Martin is one of the pioneers using design thinking and a strong advocate of the strategic role of design to innovate. This book is a must read in the field.

Strategic design. Giulia Calabretta, Ingo Karpen, Gerda Gemser.http://amzn.to/2ranSaa Personally I think it is the first book that formally gathers the existent knowledge about “strategic design”. It is an excellent compilation of key skills for strategic designers illustrated with clear case studies that explain the potential benefits to have this kind of profile within corporates. It has a good balance between theory and practice.

Design works: How to Tackle Your Toughest Innovation Challenges Through Business Design. Heather Fraser. http://amzn.to/2rMb6v0Hands-on book where Heather Fraser presents a series of tools to implement strategic business design in corporations including analyzing and building capabilities, but also taking into account the strategic implications and the fit of new innovative product/services might have in the organization. One key take away from the book is the importance of thinking holistically, looking at the ecosystem surrounding the product/ service to understand the whole user experience.

Design driven innovation. Roberto Verganti. http://amzn.to/2raCJ4y This book explains how design can help organizations to create disruptive innovation and a competitive advantage in the market through differentiation. Although most of the examples are from Italian companies, and it may seem culturally biased, the book goes through interesting topics such design meaning, design driven labs and cultural transformation.

Value proposition design. Osterwalder, Pigneur, Bernarda and Smith.http://amzn.to/2rMr0W2 After their worldly known “Business model generation”, Osterwalder and co. used a similar format to the highly successful canvas to focus this time in the design of value propositions. The book is a useful tool to iteratively play with throughout the design process. I would say that Value proposition design distils the basics perfectly to create a quick and decent version of a value proposition. In case you would like to read something more advanced in the topic, I really recommend Marc Meyer’s, Venturing: Innovation and business planning for entrepreneurs http://amzn.to/2rbD5YO

The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company. Steve Blank and Bob Dorf. http://amzn.to/2rMc3U7 I am not discovering anything new adding this book to the list, and although it is not a pure strategic design book, it embraces many strategic thinking in the process of building a new company. Media refer to it as the bible for entrepreneurs, and it is totally right, this book brings a lot of value to the audience. One of my key learnings from this book was “state and test business model hypotheses, verify them and pivot or proceed”. It sounds simple,but it is not! :)

As I said previously, this is my personal list, not in any specific order. I am sure you have many books to add, so I am looking forward to hear your favourite strategic design books.

If you are so kind to share this article, we will find more relevant books on the topic and we all will benefit from it.

Thanks for reading, I hope you like it :)

The best strategic design books was originally published in Strategic Design Lab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.