A Watershed Moment?
With the biggest, global service design conference just passed, it’s a good time to take a step back and see where we’re at in this important field of design. Having watched for many years the Service Design Network grow from the fringes to international dominance, and in turn, becoming the primary touchpoint into the discipline, I was curious to know about the kind of energy, the sort of ideas, the type of community and the positioning of this SDN signature event: The Service Design Global Conference 2024 in Helsinki.

As the first SDN event I’ve attended, I was not disappointed. Over a couple of days, I got a strong sense of where the discipline is at as well as bucketloads of inspiration and some practical hacks. The conference was a tour de force in creative conference organisation no less, and a timely torchlight on what’s hot and what’s not in everything related to service from as comprehensive a cohort as you’d want. As a snapshot into this vital design profession, the event was everything I needed and gave me so much more in marking a crucial shift in the discipline from what’s been in the thinking and doing so far to the emergence of in-house service design, the crucible of innovation in the field now.

Same Old?
At the same time as being inspired and energised by the event, it was surprising to see endemic challenges enduring and slow progress in tackling some key opportunities and challenges in the service design community. The survey of service design practice, I conducted in 2016 gives us a good benchmark to see what’s been fixed and what’s on the to-do list. Perhaps unfortunately, dear reader, my hyperbolic style of writing hasn’t changed much in the intervening years and freed of academic rigour I continue to push the envelope here :). Some years later, I also survey service design theory and practice in my doctoral dissertation finding these four issues remain topics of current discussions in the field:

1. Delivery — Getting Out of The Abstraction Business
Waterfall working that doesn’t meld well with agile or reuse

2. Operations — Tweaking Ops More Than Utopian Dreaming
Focus on future visioning vs. present-day continuous delivery and service data

3. Innovation — Mind The Service Gap
More focus on leveraging technological innovation in the back end

4. FLOW Methodology — Modality Agnostic Aligned HCD/HCI Methods
Better integration of development and design methods beyond the visual plane

Gladly, most of the issues noted 8 years ago have lessened and many of the positive opportunities clearly progressing including design breaking out of the metropolitan centres and becoming more open, diverse, inclusive and global. As the conference theme was on impact, the success of globalising the practice cannot be understated. Likewise, the important marker of maturity — in-house adoption was strikingly clear.

Helsinki Calling…
I linked into the conference from the Welsh borders, a relatively rural area with more sows than saunas and more farm hands than facilitators. Joining online from October 2nd to 4th, I was immediately hit by the impressive numbers, (over 1000 delegates is massive for any conference in any field inc’ CHI?) the slick operation and the awe-inspiring and eclectic programme of talks, keynotes, workshops and panels.

Somewhat like dropping into a Eurovision final, the sets were spectacular, even the sound design was well, sound and the hosts, Adam Cochrane and Satu Samira Hamed smashed it with their chutzpah, wit and irresistible charm. This was not just showbiz but setting the tone for the whole event as an experience that was accessible, fun and for those in the know.

This kind of engaging staging is remiss in most (ahem) design conferences I’ve been to. Too dry, too cliquey, too distant from the real world? This conference turned all the bad habits of design events on their head. Yes, there was strong academic work, yes there were real-world case studies — all the bases were covered and importantly the mix of early and late-career practitioners was spot on. The balance of in-house and consulting was just right and interestingly pretty much without exception the former were streets ahead in terms of impact, integration and innovation.

The attention to detail and confidence of all involved reflects the vibrancy of the international scene as well as tapping into the particular Nordic vibe of the host capital, sitting pretty in the happiest country in the World with design deeply embedded in the culture and everyday life of the Finns. It might seem crazy but the hosts’ focus on happy was neither contrived nor artificial. Tapping into happiness helped align the widest variety of content that followed back to a central guiding and non-exclusive paradigm connecting people, itself a cornerstone of Finnish culture in harnessing tech to enable the most taciturn to talk is the truth.

Off stage, however, this smoothly operated event was less about Rock Stars riffing out the classics, although the back catalogues were aired, but rather it was some kind of a Woodstock moment of coming together to know, inspire and celebrate. Maybe my mind was tuned in to hear it but I was far more engaged by the practitioner’s tales than the leaders or consultants. It’s a tribute to SDN, which has carefully nurtured an active and self-sustaining community that is greater than the sum of its parts.

I was particularly taken by the shift from advocacy to action that ran through the conference. Most powerful in staging this agenda, was Josina Vink quoting Kimbell and Bailey as the need for countering the ‘perpetuating the dominance of certain logics over others.’ This talk was particularly strong on its basis of proper top-class academic stuff and turning in a practical outcome. The contribution in this peerless piece of work is an approach that aided in uncovering insights and helped with explicating and then also ‘amplifying the (un)logics’ encountered in environments.

The strong link between theory and practice also connected other inspiring and useful talks including the shifting of the product systems thinking presentation by Alessandra Molderings-Enriconi and many others that are worth watching on the conference reruns you can get on the conference website.

Not everything laid such solid foundations, however and alongside the obligatory spectre of AI, a couple of talks could have dialled up the practical contributions and a tad more innovation perhaps. But maybe I’m not the core audience here, and maybe the organisers were cannily balancing out the inspirational with the informative and nurturing the next generation? Fortunately, the multitrack format meant that it was easy to pick out a path to the most relevant sessions, although I did find that accidentally going off track often led to some valuable nuggets that you might otherwise miss. Again, great curation and organisation were on display.

Designist Remedy
At a time of much soul searching the wider design community, this outward looking community of conference goers and contributors countered the gloom of disempowerment among the leady and moans of technological positivism heeded by the worthy with the clarion call that ‘It’s Time for a Revolution in Boldness (Kristofer Kelly-Frere & Stephen Wood). Done with finding seats at tables and levelling up these bolshy designists*, with the Finland Station just a couple of stops away, have traction, a mission and are getting on with changing the world without a consultant or leader putting them right in sight. It’s interesting that this creative worker/activist stance is mostly, that there’s still some legacy leadership focus, ground up and while unstated more reform from inside than revolutionary coup. Perhaps this turn to practice so notably in the conference reflects the growth of in-house and the differing challenges and opportunities that brings compared to external practice.

There was a great panel on Finnish Design that reflected on the recent report by Ornamo. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the list of panel member but check the replay on the conference website for more. The locals certainly impressed, with a crucial keynote by Hanna Harris showcasing her phenomenal work as Chief Design Office at the City of Helsinki. The work here exemplified the design doing ethos of the conference and nailed the theme of making an impact — in doing such good work the Finnish designers demonstrated the value of ground-up design work representing and making a shift from establishment to community as the touchpoint of design.

Similarly, Satu Miettinen was inspiring in showing the practical use of design fiction in the service domain, something that again demonstrates the conference’s lodestone in authentically turning theory into practice. The diamonds on show here were not theoretical nor icons to worship and the impressive results were the stronger for that. And this is no mean feat, too many design conference presentations seem to pluck a theory out of the ether and then loosely attribute a practice to it a priori, like a post-rationalisation of what we do every day.

Host, Adam Cochrane picked up on this shift from thinking about service design to practising what we preach ‘through the integrity of design’ and co-host, Satu Samira Hamed reiterated the conference theme Designing for Impact Strategic Leadership with Service Design. It’s worth unpacking that theme as it was clearly carefully crafted and framed all of the content that followed and, in many ways, gives us practitioners a guiding principle and tactical framework to achieve progress — that’s what we’re all doing right? The impactful core of impact was subcategorised into:

Elevating Impact
Elevating the impact of service design as a transformative discipline

Impact Beyond Design
Drawing inspiration from diverse disciplines beyond service design

Theory of Impact
Investigating and dissecting new frameworks, mindsets and theories of service design to deliver great impact

Changing impact
Showcasing how service design responds to the needs of the economy, culture and emerging tech trends.

* I think the term came up in one of the panels with Ave Habakuk?

The Finland Station
The two outstanding talks for me were Anna Kholina on Design and Capitalism and the topper most highlight was Nina Hirvonen on Design Maturity. In both cases, the talks’ titles were a tad dryer than the top-notch content, in fact I only listened in to both kind of by accident and what a lucky chance that was as both highlighted Hidden Design Superpowers, authentically turned theory into practice and embodied the conference themes perfectly in terms of impact.

Kholina took us through the history, yes the whole capitalist context and via Marx and Lefebvre in a kind of Grundrisse of the practical design domain of physical, latterly digital space — concluding that we ought to give and make space that is not merely functional in the context of economic exchange but is meta-functional — open to citizens to make their own and designs’ opportunity to do this kind of social good at the level of the service experience — I paraphrase but what a tour de force to do the heavy lifting and conclude with novel and practical design trick. My note to self was ‘build user agency and non-financial gains into services’.

Nina Hirvonen did a similar amazing trick of virtuosity by taking that old, dry concept of design maturity and turning it into a living thing, the life force of organisations innovation endeavours embodied through the work itself — and the design work was the work as much as the product or service, aligning very much with my own research and ahem Engels rather than Marx?

What I particularly liked in this talk was that it disposed hifalutin jargon and how might we possibilities in favour of practical and principled practices that didn’t preach but produced positive impact and this involved the designers changing as much as the organisation and no seats at tables, just doing the work and making it better.

That many of the slides in this talk used the organisation’s vision statement and other collateral was strong evidence of successful integration. I particularly like to positioning of design (I termed this Design Intermediaries in my dissertation) and the non-exclusive messaging in slides, slightly paraphrasing here:

· Experience belongs to everyone

· Experience competency building is for everyone

· Designers contribute everywhere

Uncannily, every point in Hirvonen’s pitch aligned to the Foundation Practice in Resistant and Remediating Design and I made a note to self that success, as evidenced by this talk was predicated on ‘working the quadrant — strategy, delivery, collaboration and innovation’.

Where next…
There was little methodological innovation elsewhere — and that’s not maybe such a bad thing and maybe indicates the maturity of the field rather than stasis although the handful of presentations on method and measurements merely reflected the often rather siloed development of methods in service design in contrast to reusing the analytical tools in HCI that are so much needed to close the implementation gap.

So, what of the future? There were glimpses but little to suggest the revolution is permanent beyond the quietly, confidently and just craftily subversive cases that demonstrated impact as a sustainable and ongoing operation within all facets of an organisation rather than the big bang reveals of the design aristocracy. Indeed, the final panel session brought the focus back delivering progress, but not quite as we know it. No metrics or methods but practically how design powers up organisations through enabling people to do good stuff together.

While there is still some work to do the insightful practical challenges practitioners face and solve (including Alan Colville and Jennifer Briselli) were thrashed out in the same distinctive can-do designist way that typified the conference content. What Is To Be Done and indeed The Question of Organization kept springing to mind on how might we make this more real as I grasped the significance to the presenters as a whole.

Hei! Hei! Suomi…
I was not expecting to find a distinctive Finnish Service Design culture, but I did and, the energy and passion of the Finns that packed into Paasitorni in the Kallio neighbourhood in Helsinki kept me engaged over the three days. It left me with so much respect for the hardy practitioners and fair to say that all the most impactful and well, important content for me came from locals working on the inside of organisations. Maybe it is something in the Kaisaniemi Bay water?

Of course, The Finns played a starring role in proceedings as they rightly should, geographically and importantly in their distinctive and crucial contribution which had Nordic can-do social democracy and stoic work ethic running right through it like a stick of (granite) rock. And there was no shortage of Finnish exceptions to the rule, glad handing and design method acting at the zenith of extroversion that tore asunder all stereotypes. The ubiquitous mispronunciation of sauna by the non-Finns and even the few glitches (a fire alarm at a conference is a first for me) didn’t Faze(r) the locals either.

With my time in Helsinki over and my Doctoral Studies in Service Design at Aalto University ending, it was a fitting farewell from the city that felt like home for the last thirteen years. Remotely, I could only imagine the early Autumn chill starting and the light flurries stirring in the evening sky over Sibelius Park, I reflected on the conference’s theme resonating so strongly with my later work, Resistant and Remediating Design and indeed waxing lyrically in Let it Flow: Making Generative Service Design Work.

As my first piece of writing since those publications, I reflected on how far we’ve come in service design and how the conference set in stone that designist intention and impact:

1. A Shift from Advocacy to Action
Doing the work is where the action is rather than handwringing to get a seat at the table or talking about what might be

2. Growing Ground-up Design Work

In-house is where the innovation is and where practitioners are making sustainable and continuous positive change vs. the traditional agency and consulting models that lack implementation chops.

3. Hidden Design Superpowers
Service design work helps teams, individuals and organisations in the broadest sense, do good work and make the work they do rewarding, including remediating agile and supercharging customer centricity and collaborative innovation. Of course, and as many conference contributors acknowledged, design is not the only seat at the table to do this kind of good stuff.

4. Impact Beyond Metrics
The lack of holistic service flow measurement cases diminishes impact assessment of service design in general which in turn privileges financial or non-financial uplift and weakens the integrity of great service experiences.

5. Service Design Innovation
There was little on the methodological innovation horizon, which given the headline-grabbing profile of AI is surprising. The need for formal method invention and application of structured frameworks such as UML and open reusable patterns of service blueprinting and deliverables, for example, hinders progress of the field project level ad-hoc reinvention

Kiitos!
Having been swept away by the classy operation, inspiring and practical content and the engaging staging I will certainly be following and dipping into SDN again. With the next conference hosted in the US, it will be interesting to see how service design crosses the waters. Perhaps a more technologically entrenched culture will expect different things from service design, certainly enabling deeper collaboration with development peers and taking opportunities in conversational services through the FLOW methodology might help unify the key innovation practices of our time — service design and agile delivery.

I’m incredibly grateful to be given the opportunity to attend this conference by Lloyds Bank. The ideas in this post are my own and are not reflective of my employer, any organisation or other person. I should also here give my infinite gratitude to Aalto University in giving me the opportunity and support to conclude my Doctorate in Service Design practice. Kittos!

© John Knight 2024

We’ve all seen the elaborate blueprints that are popular in our practice. The forest of fluorescent post-it™ notes every emotional peak or trough in a current experience. These can be things of beauty or resemble the ramblings for a Beautiful Mind. We’re at a point where more than ever before we need to give social value of design not through potential but through service design realisation.
Cool to dream but affecting positive change through producing services is where designers can make real (and even more) difference.

Ever since, I commissioned experience map I became cynical and that has only grown for a number of reasons. The biggest doubt comes from relying on documentation. This seems completely at odds with the hegemony of agile and lean in service production. Rather than documentation this approach (agile/lean) focuses on continuous, incremental and frugal upgrades from Minimal Viable Service to Sustainable Living Service.

In other words, polished, complex and appealing ‘Pixel Pushing’ produced ‘maps’, blueprints’ and schemas demonstrate ‘Deliverables Bloat’ rather than leanness and implementation readiness. Then there is the cool and trendy notion of the ‘speculative’, ‘design fiction’ of the future. It’s a promised land of milk and honey that we need to build in the here and now. Not through stickys but through graft.

Then there is the technology gap where the focus of much service design is abstracting surface-level signs of a service into ‘Journeys’ (Shostack, 1982). If you’re on a journey in a service encounter it’s maybe not good — you just wanna get the task done, quick. As static snapshots of activity these abstractions of what could be to some extent undermine the primacy of Living Services. Of course services are co-produced by the people living them but with technology we’re stuck in middle ages. Technology is not the implementation problem but the social good opportunity. It’s the material and energy of service realisation.

The notion of dynamically created and evolving services is to some extent counter to the orthodoxy too — which focuses on mapping extant to future prescribed services. While blueprints may exemplify design craft (they look good and useful) they don’t map to service architectures and platforms that are integral to service delivery and operations. Service design artefacts don’t integrate well with the needs of service engineers, producers and developers — get into those lower level backstage operations and you’ll find a plethora of manual work and automation possibilities.

The dynamic nature of living services is one reason why another plank in the orthodoxy is broke. Instead of legions of researchers immersing themselves in limitless ethnographies — make and test services from paper to real world. Evidence based blueprints good — but living service data on real usage (service flow) even better. The kind of waterfall orthodoxy on how to deliver Human-centred services goes against everything we know from Steve Jobs to err’ Human-centred Design. Design Anthropology is an exception and maybe Ethnography too, but the point is moving from understanding to intervention which is where the rubber hits the road.

There is a deeper question on service design deliverables. Why do we need them at all? If the goal is to improve an existing service (i.e. not Green Field Design) then practitioners should operate ‘In Service’ rather than separate from it or via any form of abstracted knowledge. This would mean truly participatory design (with service agents) not before production but within it. There is a risk is that short, incremental change may not build to strategic positive service transformation. A structured framework for delivering agile service design, would help. This would begin with founding projects on the basis of a Minimum Viable Service (MVS). An MVS focuses on enabling access to a simplified, stripped down version of the service.

Such a proposition is by nature basic and supports a few use cases, but is built to ensure it enables core functions and proves the viability of the service. An MVS is, however, more than a conceptual proof of concept. Its adoption and use enables early data collection that can help develop richer features, but more importantly enables mapping service supply and demand data. In this sense, a simple digitalised entry point for healthcare becomes the first manifestation of a Living Service, where data is used to enrich the experience and start to build a critical mass of users. Having established a strong and sustainable user community, the next phase of Minimum Living Service (MLS). This is focused on delivering an optimised experience that can drive broad adoption. Finally, a Living Sustainable Service focuses on facilitating value co-creation and operational excellence.

In conclusion, moving to service design realisation is the next stage in maturing our discipline. It means taking a more open-minded view on technology and reverse engineering tweaky services from the north star. We shall never lose Polaris or we ain’t doing service. Likewise, we need just enough research to get that minimum viable service so we can get actual data from use. These tweaks will maybe go some way to move from service design to service design realisation — a slight semantic shift that could help amplify our contribution to nicer world.

© John Knight, 2023, Aalto University of Arts, Architecture and Design

John is also Communications Chair for the BCS Interaction Group (which publishes UsabilityNews.com), Editor of Interfaces magazine and a Design Research Society Council Member.

We met up to talk about how simplicity and ethnographic research can help foster designs that are innovative and appealing.

(The views and opinions expressed in this interview are strictly those of the author, who is acting in a personal capacity and not commenting on behalf of any attributed organisations including his employer.)

Complex user experiences

Giles Colborne: What’s your role at Vodafone?

John Knight: I work across a number of projects doing some design work, quality assurance and evangelising user needs to internal stakeholders. Covering design and implementation in a company with such a global reach means you get to handle a wide variety of projects with a really diverse team – which is great.

GC: Do you think that mobile, with it’s small screens, is a more limited environment for a designer?

JK: No – it’s richer- it sounds back to front but it’s true. Web is about how you maximise use of screen space. But mobile is multi-modal – you’re combining sound, haptics [tactile feedback such as vibrations], what’s happening on screen and the feel of the device itself.

The interaction is also more complex, it’s more of a journey than stand up and use. With PCs, the mouse and keyboard feel pretty much the same and the interaction has become more standard and its more static with a fixed screen and input devices. But with mobile its very different, you have a huge variety of devices and they don’t all work the same.

Plus, a user journey might start out on a PC, then move to mobile, then pops out the back end as a response. So user journeys are often more complex and thus richer.

GC: What kind of experiences work well in the unpredictable environments that mobile users find themselves in?

JK: I think that things that are successful tend to be, as Gerhard Fischer puts it, ‘under-designed’ or as I put it products have latency. What I mean is that good design does not try to fulfill every possible function and hardwire experiences. Instead, you leave space for users to bring in other things, and to combine them – The iPhone is a case in point, its sparse and simple and following from the previous point the context of use is critical to the experience.

Simplicity and ‘under-designing’

GC: Design teams are always under pressure to add features. How do you design latency into the UE?

JK: As UE practitioners we try to think of ourselves as giving people tools, rather than defining their entire experience. I like to promote the idea that the more open-ended and the more connected a product or service is, then the more successful it can be. But it’s harder to predict where that success will come from. This is the space where a lot of innovation and interesting design problems are – designing sociability as Jenny Preece puts it.

A good example of that is online communities like Twitter or Facebook. These sites often don’t do much more than support user’s conversations, they are the props upon which people adapt and use. It’s the actual interactions and the customisation that makes those experiences so successful and often the technology and the UI in themselves are nothing new.

GC: Would you say these tools are innovative?

JK: I think innovation often comes from users or more correctly usage. This is where interesting and unforeseen things happen – where people adopt and shape technology beyond instrumentalism. There’s nothing innovative about communication technologies per se – innovation is in how people use them. I think the trend in consumer products and services is to create tools that are simple and connected so that users improvise and mash them up rather than big, fixed systems with discrete interaction models – again this is well known and core to Web 2.0.

Say a user is taking a picture and suddenly she realises that she can blog it like Nokia does. She had one goal – a picture for herself – but the options have led her in a different direction, to something new and pleasing. That’s magic and, thankfully, while a lot usability issues have been fixed there is still space for a little magic.

GC: How do you know you’re designing the right tools?

JK: Perhaps having spent too much time designing or with designers I have moved away from the fixed model of a UCD process. Sure, we need tools and methods but in reality the interesting stuff is from hunches and what I call forensic design and research; you involve users when you cannot be certain or you have a trade off or you have no ideas but design, creating something new is the focus. I don’t think that’s a new idea – but it’s more established in product design or fashion design.

Being involved in product design has made me think beyond use and instead think about consumption and design for engagement. You need more than an hour in a lab to discover how people use it in their day to day lives and this is a much more complex design problem and the meanings, value and utility of possessions in consumption is unpredictable

GC: Do you mean because ethnographic research is so unpredictable?

JK: Yes, but I’ve found I’m not so interested in proving things as I was in the past.

If you’re interested in innovation then you don’t have to prove that X is better than Y. You’re looking for pointers and new directions that can move designs.

Finding innovation

GC: How do you make sure you get those pointers?

JK: I can never remember who started this idea but I certainly believe it: If you want to observe innovation you have to watch people at the fringes, whereas traditional market research and even UCD means you’re asked to look at people in the mainstream, to get the widest coverage. Being at the fringes doesn’t mean they have to be young and trendy. You must be using technology in a different way – even if you’re getting it wrong.

GC: At cxpartners we get some of our best ideas come from watching people fail or miss the point in ethnographic studies.

JK: You could ask three people at the extremes on advice on design directions. They’re not representative, but they’re invaluable because they help you gain insights that you can productise. What matters is the outcome not the metrics – well for innovation or ideation anyway.

GC: Your approach seems to be focused on the high ground – what are people trying to do, rather than where should a button go.

JK: One of the things I’ve learned is that we often think too much about designing interfaces. If you design an interface, there is a tendency to put too much in, you think about the buttons and the visual layout, even the use case (if they are tied to an interface) can lead you to overburden the UE. The interface is the end point and we should not forget that. The experience – all the technical functions and the interactions are what you really want to design – users do not see that and it’s the hardest but most valuable thing we can design as UE practitioners.

Summary

People often think that innovation is a matter of luck or genius. But John’s point is that by watching people in unusual or extreme situations you uncover new needs or ways of looking at problems that lead to innovations. And that through simplicity (‘under designing’ the user interface) you can make innovative ideas accessible to the mainstream.

For companies looking to stand out in a crowded market, ethnographic research insights and great user interface design can deliver powerful differentiators.

The sequence of 11 questions is intentional–but use them in any order that works and let me know if they help. Every question also has a set of considerations to explore and go into extra depth if needed. Please let me know your thoughts and if any changes are needed at john.knight@aalto.fi

1. What is the mission?
2. What is the problem, opportunity, options and possible solutions?
3. What are the risks and rewards?
4. What is possible and impossible to do?
5. What is the impact?
6. How does the outcome sustainably generate value?
7. What are the elements of the experience?
8. How is value co-created and consumed?
9. What happens after design?
10. What is the best way to complete the mission?
11. What is the design rationale?

© John Knight, Aalto University 2012

Citation:Knight, J. Jones, S, Sayar, D, Copeland, D and Fitton, D. (2020). Do It Fluid: Innovation in Smart Conversational Services Through the Flow Design Approach. In:Smart Systems Design, Applications, and Challenges, João M.F. Rodrigues, et al., [eds] IGI Global, 2020, pp. 238–258. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-2112-0.ch012

First published:May. 06, 2012

Service Design Questions and Considerations

1. What is the mission?

1. Does the mission align with our strategy and values?
2. What happens if we do or don’t do the work?
3. Who is involved?
4. What assets, information and data do we already have?
5. What is the size of the problem/opportunity?
6. How accurate and stable are the requirements?
7. What are the key service elements?
8. What is the outcome?
9. What barriers are there?
10. Are the timescales achievable?
11. When is the best time to deliver the outcome?
12. Do we need to do this now?
13. What else could we do?
14. What barriers are there?
15. Do we agree on what needs to be done?

2. What is the problem, opportunity, options and possible solutions?

1. What is causing this problem and opportunity?
2. What is driving the need to deal with it?
3. Why is this an important issue?
4. What must the solution do?
5. What must the solution not do?
6. What could the solution do?
7. What could the solution not do?
8. Is there an expensive fix?
9. What are the cheap alternatives?
10. Where is the biggest opportunity? Content, UI, Tech? etc

3. What are the risks and rewards?

1. Is there a compelling business case?
2. Is there a compelling reason for growth, organisation or customers?
3. Is there enough research?
4. Are we able to do the right thing?
5. Is the vision and roadmap clear?
6. Are we being over cautious or ambitious?
7. What could go wrong in development?
8. What could go wrong when live?
9. Is there clarity on what needs to be done?
10. Is there clarity on the solution?
11. Is there sufficient audience/domain knowledge to do it?
12. Is there insight on competition/best practice to follow?
13. Is there too limited scope for improvement/design/change?
14. Are there a limited number of alternatives available?
15. Are we being over ambitious/cautious?
16. Is the scope deliverable/requirement unclear?
17. What could stop the service in the water?

4. What is possible/impossible?

1. Are the requirements fixed?
2. What is the obvious solution?
3. What are the less obvious solutions?
4. What is the right thing to do?
5. Can we do the work properly?
6. Do we have the right support from other teams?
7. Do we have the right team and skills?
8. Do we have the management support?
9. Does the work align with other team’s priorities?
10. Is the right technology and tools available?

5. What is the impact?

1. How does the work affect the platform?
2. How does the work affect the experience ?
3. How does the work affect the business model?
4. How does the work affect our customers?
5. How does the work affect our people?
6. How does the work affect our sustainability?
7. What problems might the solution cause?
8. What are the business/human risks/benefits?
9. Who & what will be affected/involved? & how?
10. What support/resource is needed before, during and after use?
11. What are the best/worst potential outcomes?

6. What are the key service elements?

1. Who — audience/user/profiles?
2. What — use cases/scenarios/inputs + outputs
   branding/design guidelines?
3. Where — context of use?
4. Why — business/personal/social drivers?
5. How — components, standards, data, tech etc?

7. How is value co-created and consumed?

1. Personal — worth to the person?
2. Social/cultural value?
3. Economic — financial worth?
4. Ethical — force for good/bad?

8. What happens after design?

1. How will the service be known through awareness?
2. Adoption?
3. First use?
4. Bonding?
5. Familiarity?
6. Habitual use?
7. Improvisation?
8. Attachment?
9. Detachment?
10. Is the organisational design feasible?
11. When and how will the service be self-sustainable?
12. What is the cost of production and operation?
13. What is the operating model?
14. How will service operations work?
15. What kind of vision, mission and values will the service manifest?

9. What are the candidate solutions

1. Best
2. Acceptable
3. Easiest
4. Innovative
5. Safe
6. Worst

10. Is the proposed service right

1. Accessibility
2. Usability
3. Service Flow
4. Engagement
5. Delight/pleasure/fun
6. Flow, the peak+ebb/in the moment experience
7. Fit with everyday life/practice
8. Personal/social reward/benefit
9. Sustainability
10. Are there other relevant qualities?

11. What is the design rationale?

1. At least three alternative solutions considered ideally from a long-list
2. Design is evidence based and assumptions/risks known
3. Everything extraneous has been removed
4. Solutions meet requirements and can be measured
5. Solution is feasible and well communicated
6. A case is made for the solution

First off is a framework for looking at skills across a whole team:

Second is a personal skills honeycomb: a way for individuals to map the current and maybe future skill sets in a way that allows hybrid/unicorn and cross-functional careers.

Here’s a Design skills matrix

And here’s one for research

Please let me know if you’ve used these or have any feedback.

It’s hard to put design at the front of development
Recent debates within the UX, UI and Service Design communities have highlighted often compromised state of the digital design profession. In these discussions designers stewardship of the experience is seen as hard job to do when faced by the expedience of agile and the focus on instrumental values (e.g. cost, profit & financial benefit) of Lean. While the arguments over the direction of digital design continue, let’s focus on practical ways to rebalance product development methodologies toward a more holistic set of attributes comprising accessibility, usability, engagement and reward. The Experience wheel is one way of helping to rebalance bottom line with design value.

The lack of such an all-encompassing, mapping of experience quality is a problem. Designers concerns on the quality of the experience, the need for accessibility and to deliver value-adding improvements are often marginalised in favour of small, technically expedient tweaks as I found in the I conducted a couple of years back — Go with the Flow-Accelerated Digital Design in the age of Post-agility. Stakeholders, product owners and developers have an advantage in being closer to value realisation (through releasing increments) and business benefits (features and service releases) that what is often seen as designer’s job of colour in. Of course, we know that’s not the reality, but the business value of design is often hard to articulate and land — when everyone else is building out and getting stuff out the door.

However, development focus on features is often at the expense the needs of the people using the stuff that’s made. It can mean that projects are created without accounting for the full set of user (human) needs, even when experience goals (e.g. SEQ scores) are they can often fail to be reconciled after go-live. The instrumental drive is often submerged or put aside in KPIs, business cases and the like, all of which drive a specific product or service direction that can be at the odds of the people using (and developing) the new thing. If not submerged then debate over product and service direction rage in sprint planning, resurface in research and slow velocity in rework as different stakeholder views play out in strategy, design and development driven rework. If we all agreed more, earlier and inclusively, stuff would be better quality, delivered quicker and teams might be happier.

Holistic goals deliver better products and services
A simple, holistic, scalable framework that can be used by teams at every stage of the product and service lifecycle would alleviate these problems. Experience goals can easily be set, and if necessary operationalised through KPIs, teams can check back during design and development to make sure the experience matches the vision, analytics and user research can measure predicted and actual experience quality and any organisation can adopt the framework and use it to align their activities to human-centred design metrics.

How the framework evolved
A few years back, I tried to crack this problem through an Experience Design Framework (EDF). Publishing the first version in 2004, I wanted a mandala that would, in one single frame, define all the elements of experience and the means to design it — based on human-centred design principles and methods. Early iterations of the framework, centred on interaction and barriers to HCD adoption. These were early days, when usability was still a buzzword and the first iPhone and Android OS years away. That first paper noted ‘The authors thus set about identifying a set of user-centred methods that would be cost effective, flexible enough to apply to any design lifecycle and, most importantly would be useful and relevant to the needs of the designer.’ Presenting the early version at the Design Research Conference with my colleague Marie, spurred us to iterate the framework and continue findings ways to help drive HCD. 15 years later, today, things are significantly different. HCD has matured into a business-critical practice, design thinking as entered into the lean, entrepreneurial culture of our time and the importance of the quality of experience a given in any digitally mature or transforming organisation. That said, there is still some way to go to fully account for the broad range and interconnectedness of experience qualities that span accessibility, usability, reward and engagement.

A new solution to accounting for quality
Evolving EDF into a practical, principled and scalable tool for teams to assess the potential and actual quality in use of a product or service has taken some time. Now the framework includes the four core quality areas as before, butaugmented with consistent and more granular quality criteria. For example, usability now contains the three quality attributes defined in the ISO standards of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. This new iteration of the framework helps in design decisioning and organisational transformation through experience-led product and service goal-setting, in-flight evaluation and in-life validation through mapping user experience quality on an Experience Blueprint.

The power of the newly named Experience Wheel — it structures and anchors discussions about the potential quality of solutions in a holistic manner. It also helps to substantiate and underpin data from research and analytics in order to give a balanced and comprehensive map of experience quality. In other words, this scalable framework helps in practical design decisioning as well as supporting organisation’s adoption of HCD driven experience design — whether that pertains to product, service or experience.

A practical tool to help designers and developers

Here’s 3 ways you can use the wheel:

Plotting expected experience metrics with teams to drive a holistic approach to quality in project initiation by setting experience KPIs and mapping them to the wheel

Using the wheel in ideation to assess different options, alternatives and trade-offs by plotting them on the wheel’s centre

Using the wheel to capture test data after go-live at regular intervals to demonstrate quality improvements

I’d love to know how you’ve used the wheel, get intouch @worldok_ or via my Aalto University of Arts, Design and Architecture profile

John Knight,©2021, Aalto University of Arts, Design and Architecture

Agile is not just a new addition to the Service Design’s domains burgeoning ‘Sticky-note’ design toolkit. Rather the nexus of lean and agility (AKA Sprint)is arguably, as big a break in modes of production as the factory method of manufacture. In this case, long in-depth ‘up-front’ research and design was condensed into short sprints where research, design and development worked in parallel. For service design, the implications of agile/lean on the service experience are more profound than changing how the work done. This is because of the unique properties of digital materials used in the production of products and services and the underlying philosophy of lean that takes a socio-technical approach to continuous improvement.

Digital products and services are endlessly mutable. Sprint exploits this affordance through iterative releases of increasing quality and personalisation. This mutability challenges the fundamentals of service design orthodoxy where blueprinting new services (Green Field Design) wins out against fixing existing ones. Similarly, wholesale design oriented to an (unspecified but distant) time (Design Futurism) in prioritised over the here and now. The case was entirely different. Instead, the need to increase access, enhance the consultation experience, contribute to improving healthcare provision and cost of service through the pragmatic use of technology in the shortest time took precedence.

Speed of deployment and rapid, incremental enhancements make sprint service design approach relevant to any domain. Lean’s focus on value, flow and frugality also make it particularly important to public service, where cost to value ratios are highest. This has repercussions for the service experience and modes of design, production and operation. In the first case, this could mean running short releases of incremental change that focus on unlocking value with minimal impact on resources at all points within the service ecosystem. In the latter case, it means industrialising the process and focusing on reuse.

Service design ought to frugally tweak services toward optimal flow rather than focusing on big ticket projects that disrupt and cause unforeseen adoption issues. That is not just a pragmatic approach to framing any specific context for design, but it is also the embodiment of the ethical design tradition. Use the minimum of resources to extract the maximum of value. The focus on value has two implications. Firstly, frugality ought to inform all our plans, methods, deliverables and interventions. Secondly, a focus on value should not just be the cornerstone of services in general (Vargo and Lusch, 2004) but the experience too. While value could be realised through a thoughtfully envisaged future service it could also be more prosaic, increasing throughput (Service Flow). Not only is design work a service production cost but cost to value ought to be a factor in practice. Without this boundary, design becomes not only utopian but disconnected from its real-world context in the here and now. To do this, any agile/lean service operations project should deliver high Sprint Value to low Sprint Cost. Similarly, the impact of a release should be to provide increase Service Utilisation and lower Operational Cost. These rather dull factors should be both a spur for designers’ creativity and critical be areas to tackle through design thinking. This also means that all design work should be continuously estimated, and outcomes measured in order to maximise value and to steer further sprints. As happens in lean/agile.

This frugal attitude is in many ways at odds with much of the literature. Here the holistic nature of services rationalises expansive research where everything needs to be known before anything can be done. This knowledge is then abstracted into design deliverables. Not only should we focus on minimalistic and lean descriptions, but we should rigorously question how deliverables aid service production. That could mean defining the most expedient deliverables (reused or custom cut-downs) for the case at hand using the Shaping Game, for example. This workshop activity involves team members regularly checking back on project fundamentals through a collaborative question-based game that asks members to reflect on:

A structured framework for delivering agile service design, would help sensitise service design for the full range of service production roll out phases. This typically begins with founding projects on the basis of a Minimum Viable Service (MVS). An MVS is focuses on enabling access to a simplified, stripped down version of the service. Such a proposition is by nature basic and supports a few use cases, but is built to ensure it enables core functions and proves the viability of the service. An MVS is, however, more than a conceptual proof of concept. Its adoption and use enables early data collection that can help develop richer features, but more importantly enables mapping service supply and demand data. In this sense, a simple digitalised flow becomes the first manifestation of a Living Service, where data is used to enrich the experience and start to build a critical mass of users. Having established a strong and sustainable user community, the next phase of Minimum Living Service (MLS). This is focused on delivering an optimised experience that can drive broad adoption. Finally, a Minimum Sustainable Service focuses on facilitating value co-creation and operational excellence.

© John Knight, 2018

Service design projects rarely explicate the technologies that underpin them. At the same time, numerous (000s)of services get delivered with little design and a lot of development focus. Is this an omission? Or maybe intentional stance against technological positivism, that prevails in the current period? In either case, maybe its time to rebalance the people vs. technology equation. For one things using well-known, proprietary tools and platforms can rapidly accelerate service implementation. Indeed, whether the tech that delivers the service is left undefined in a service blueprint or whether enablers are defined, the fact is building from scratch is not just costly and inefficient but also goes against every tenet of contemporary service product including reuse and refactoring.

The decision to use an existing technology in service production is often a pragmatic one, where the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. It’s conceivable that this might affect the service experience, although this might be offset by reduced costs and accelerated delivery times. In some cases, rather than deprecating quality the opposite can happen: the quality of the platform contributed to high levels of usability and user satisfaction. Adapting an existing platform (rather than building a custom solution) can mean rapid deployment, reduced costs and good levels of quality including service flow compared to waiting, paying and hoping for a potentially better bespoke solutions. Less directly oriented benefits include the assured and high levels of security, data integrity and support that you get with custom.

The ‘reuse, refactor, reclaim’ approach is inherently lean and frugal but somewhat contrary to the prevailing ‘Blue-sky’ thinking in service design. There are good reasons service design has privileged human agency over technology in the past. However, with ubiquitous computing’s quality and modularisation, this position is at best misdirected and at worst a break on progress. Harnessing machine agency for good should be the goal of any service design project as much as refining the nuances of existing human needs for a new service. Part of that rebalance is shifting the focus of quality toward the sustainability of any given service. That means framing outputs and continuous refinements of a living service with a focus on unlocking service flow, load and experience. Triangulating quality in this way not only focuses on throughput and thus costs, but also resourcing and of course the all important human factor of service satisfaction.

©John Knight, 2018

We’ve all seen the elaborate blueprints that are popular in our practice. The forest of fluorescent post-it™ notes every emotional peak or trough in a current experience. These can be things of beauty or resemble the ramblings for a Beautiful Mind. Ever since, I commissioned experience map I became cynical and that has only grown for a number of reasons. The biggest doubt comes from relying on documentation. This seems completely at odds with the hegemony of agile and lean in service production. Rather than documentation this approach (agile/lean) focuses on continuous, incremental and frugal upgrades from Minimal Viable Service to Sustainable Living Service. In other words, ginalised, complex and appealing ‘Pixel Pushing’ produced ‘maps’, blueprints’ and schemas demonstrate ‘Deliverables Bloat’ rather than leanness.

Instead, of aliging to that prevailing approach, the focus of much service design is abstracting surface-level signs of a service into ‘Blueprints’ (Shostack, 1982). As static snapshots of activity these to some extent undermine the primacy of Living Services. The blueprints also embody an architectural metaphor where interactions track to fixed paths and lacks relevance to living services where agency replaces ‘journey’s. The notion of dynamically created and evolving services is to some extent counter to the orthodoxy which focuses on mapping extant to future prescribed services. Service design artefacts don’t integrate well with the needs of service engineers, producers and developers. While blueprints may exemplify design craft (they look good and useful) they don’t map to service architectures and platforms that are integral to service delivery and operations.

There is a deeper question on service design deliverables. Why do we need them at all? If the goal is to improve an existing service (i.e. not Green Field Design) then practitioners should operate ‘In Service’ rather than separate from it or via any form of abstracted knowledge. This would mean truly participatory design (with service agents) not before production but within it. There is a risk is that short, incremental change may not build to strategic positive service transformation. A structured framework for delivering agile service design, would help. This would begin with founding projects on the basis of a Minimum Viable Service (MVS). An MVS focuses on enabling access to a simplified, stripped down version of the service. Such a proposition is by nature basic and supports a few use cases, but is built to ensure it enables core functions and proves the viability of the service. An MVS is, however, more than a conceptual proof of concept. Its adoption and use enables early data collection that can help develop richer features, but more importantly enables mapping service supply and demand data. In this sense, a simple digitalised entry point for healthcare becomes the first manifestation of a Generative Service, where data is used to enrich the experience and start to build a critical mass of users. Having established a strong and sustainable user community, the next phase of Minimum Living Service (MLS). This is focused on delivering an optimised experience that can drive broad adoption. Finally, a Living Sustainable Service focuses on facilitating value co-creation and operational excellence.

Services by their dynamically co-created nature (AKA Generative Services) are co-produced in the moment by active service elements including human users, this means that pre-production design outputs including blueprints can never fully represent the live service. A more agile aligned approach would put more emphasis on production, to get service analytic data to optimise and shape the next service increment

1. Design Anthropologist

Combining anthropology and design futures to envision near to next blended experiences (people and technology) using communal participatory design methods to build working MVP prototypes.

2. Design Thinking Auditor

Systematically auditing the quality of ‘Design Thinking’ operations including stationery compliance, practice and theory knowledge and contributions to the field including new methods and recipes.

3. Experience Platform Architect

Closing the gap between technology and design platforms to reduce green-field production and maximise reuse and interoperability through applying development and creative skills together.

4. Digital Constructivist

Beyond the hybrid design/developer these are the principled, human value architects who can construct the new digital product and service landscape from scratch, junk or class parts.

5. Service Flow Optimiser

Measuring as-is and to-be service flows in order to derive metrics, impact costs as well as identifying flow blocks, accelerators. doldrums to be re-designed and put into service as pre-production proofs for testing.

6. Open Design Facilitator

Helping communities to use the building blocks of old design methods and the new constructivist approach to enable them to be digitally independent and service value creators as well as consumers.

7. Audience Autonomy Protector

Using artificial and human intelligence to the assess risk to humans of any to be launched product or service using an ethical framework that (may) include autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and fidelity.

8. Design Data Analyst

Quantitative and qualitative data analysts who can triangulate usage related data with predictive models to measure experience holistically and feed insights into in service optimisation programmes.

9. Experience Artworker 2:0

Integrating existing design and development tools into single intelligent bot platforms that automate production of assets and repetitive task such as ideation and product long lists. Machine learning and personalisation will then be used to generate and deliver endlessly mutating digital experiences.

10. Interface Stylist

Monitoring fashions, fads and trends in seasonal collections and the digital culture to identify critical currents and ideas to apply to experience platforms, touchpoints and flows.