Developing ideas for services
When you are designing a service, how do you develop your first concepts and come up with ideas for improving existing services?
Mostly, if you’re working solo, you might work this out in your head, do some sketching, look at other services, go for a walk. There are lots of ways you might adopt to help you come up with ideas. But, service design isn’t really a solo pursuit.
Service Design is (or should be) a collaborative team effort. We need to work across organisations to share insight, knowledge and build cohesion with a shared vision of what our service should be doing or could do. We should be transcending teams and departmental boundaries and channel ’swim lanes’, after all, everyone of us makes decisions that impact the service outcomes.
Creatively working together with multiple groups of people is part of the job. And it’s likely if you are in a design or improvement role, you will take on a facilitative role in bringing people around the table to figure out what to do ad agree on this.
Developing ideas, and doing this collaboratively is a phase in service design I’ve often witnessed teams and organisations struggle with. The default usually is to say, hey, we’ll make a one stop shop, or a portal that solves this for our users, or another form. Or add something on to a service. Or just copy what others do. It can be hard to create the space for explorative discussion on how services can be designed or re-designed.
I wanted to find a way to help teams work together to develop ideas on making their services work for people whether its a new service or improving an existing one.
Before jumping into developing ideas and service concepts, there’s a few things to consider having in place first;
1. Know your starting point
There are lots of reasons you might be ‘service designing’ and how we develop ideas might differ based on this. So it’s good to recognise and share why this work has started, what the brief is, even if it’s not been explicitly written down and the rough intended outcomes at this stage. At the least, make the narrative clear of why this work has begun. Bonus if you can communicate that on a number of levels from impact on users to bottom line of the organisation you work for.
You might have different starting points. You might be inventing a new service offer, or you might be tackling an existing service. There’s lots of reasons you might be ‘service designing’ and how we develop ideas will differ based on this.
You might be starting with an opportunity space because of a new technology, a new market is opening up, the service is ready to expand to reach more user needs.
You might be starting with a problem like an increase in complaints, performance data is highlighting poor results, the company has reduced it’s risk appetite or something bad has happened.
There might be some new intent on the table. A policy, a new strategy, a doubling down on customer experience. Heck, even a senior person’s pet project idea being thrown at you.
It’s helpful to have a simple narrative together on why this work started, so everyone joining the process to develop ideas, understands where you are at.
2. Know what can and can’t be changed
Developing ideas, first needs to consider what you can, and can’t change or do. What is hard lined and unchangeable (e.g the current business model), and what is malleable for change?
Be cognisant of what you have the ability to change and what level you are, or can be designing at. Is it the what, or the how. Maybe it’s both.
I often talk about the what and the how of service design.
The what is the overall service offer, the stated or unintended outcomes the service delivers on, the dominant model of how it is delivered (e.g apply for something). Often elements of the business model defines this (how your organisation makes money or sustains itself in other ways).
You have to get a handle on if there are possibilities to change, challenge, reinvent the ‘what’. This means understand, or get a feel for if you think you can you change the underlying model, outcomes of the service, the strategy, its current dominant model for delivery.
The how, is how that offer is delivered. The sequence of steps to help users do a thing, the speed the organisation can respond, how inclusive and accessible those journeys towards to user outcomes are. Does each touchpoint of the service be that website, printed letters, phone lines or something else helpfully move people forward towards intended outcomes? And, the experiential nature of doing that, in more luxury commercial services, did they have a ‘good time’ or experience the level or flavour of customer experience we intended?
We should also consider where there is upcoming opportunity for change, for example, a tech vendor contract coming up for renewal. Some things that feel firm, over time, might be more malleable. Is this a chance to rewrite the service model and what we deliver at a point in the future? We should be open that things can change, even if we originally didn’t think they could be. For example, testing whether a piece of regulation is really needed.
Knowing what you can and can’t change, what we call constraints, will help you identify how to frame your concept and idea development.
3. Be clear on outcomes
Know what your service, or thing you’re going to develop needs to achieve. We’re talking outcomes. Outcomes for users, outcomes for the organisation. This is to ensure your ideas consider what it is you’re trying to help users, and your organisation achieve.
We need to be clear on the service outcomes for users and the business, or have at least, an indicative idea of what these might be, or what we’re being told they need to be.
Your outcome can change over the course of developing a service, it might do more, or less for users as you size your service. But start with a shared understanding of what you think it might do.
This is part of developing a service concept or idea, but sometimes if you’re starting with an existing service, you can carve in the sand proposed outcomes of what it is supposed to be doing. This should be shared somewhere either in the cultural ether, a strategy document or what the business evaluates as success in any monitoring it does (even if at this point that monitoring is just sales figures). I personally like to write them down and put them on posters for each service an organisation runs.
If the outcome doesn’t exist clearly, lead upwards and state it. Someone has to do it.
4. Build from data
First, we need some sound insight. Whether it’s new user needs we’re not serving or understanding how broken our service is, we need something to jump off from. And this should be rooted in research that gives us a real understanding of needs.
Whether it’s research on what your users are trying to do, and if you or others are not meeting those needs. Ensure you have a good understanding of your user needs. And understand the context those users will be using your service. What are they going through? When are they using it? Where are they? This is the foundational kind of user research I always promote organisations do before developing ideas that does’t come through surveys.
Service performance data is helpful if you’re looking at a live service. It’s always good to map this to a user journey, or service experience map of some kind to help analyse whether this is helping you to meet user and organisational outcomes, overall and at each stage of the service.
Testing is concept development
There’s much more you could and should have in place like understanding strategic roadmaps, recognising budget constraints to general cultural appetite. But I want to switch to focus on creative concept development when it comes to service design. It also goes without saying, with any conceptual developments or ideas, we should move into test and learn approaches, but, before we get there, we need some ideas. If you’re interested in more, I do cover this in my Agile service design course.
Developing concepts and ideas
There are so many ways to develop ideas but I wanted to share a few personal favourites of mine that I use specifically in service design and share a deck of questions we use when developing services. These are;
What If…
Comparative Services
How might we…
What If…
What if… questions for Service Development
This question set and card deck is suitable for developing existing services or developing early concepts for new ones. We wanted to provide a suite of questions that could be helpful to this phase of service design, and focus on services specifically.
We broke the questions down into three categories.
What the service needs to be
How the service works
Designing a good service
What the service needs to be
These questions are best suited for when you can change the service model, or what it offers. Or you have the opportunity to develop a new service offer.
But don’t let us limit you. It can be interesting to use these on an existing service that isn’t performing.
It’s there to stretch the imagination. Should you do more or less for users? Could your service outcomes change? Should the service do less?
How the service works
These questions focus on generating more ideas around how the service is delivered. Focusing on a more micro level of the design of how the service is delivered.
Designing a good service
These questions take the principles of Good Services and turn these into actionable prompts for developing ideas on existing services
You can use these to focus on the whole service, or zoom into a specific step or stage for users.
What if… questions for concept development
This deck is for developing early concepts and ideas, to problems and opportunity areas.
These are not specific to services but can be used for products and services. They focus more on solution based responses and are framed as ‘What if the solution was…’
You can use them to develop ideas for a communication strategy, a user experience, or a product. They’re not extensive, so feel free to develop your own questions.
Download the cards
We’re making the cards free to download here.
What If…Creative Concept Cards (A6 with 3mm bleed)
What if…Service Cards (A6 with 3mm bleed)
This A6 cards are separated page by page. These have a 3mm bleed on them so can be sent to the printers for A6 sized printing and trimming.
We’ll upload an A4 layout shortly so you can print them on a standard printer, cut along the horizontal mid point and fold each card, like a greetings card. Making it easier to print these in-house and use. Maybe use a bit of glue to hold it together.
How to use the cards
We made the questions into cards, A6 size. I really like using cards as a way for introducing small challenges into a group. You could;
Hand these cards out to groups one by one as an exercise, using all three categories to develop some thinking and discussion on current services. Ask groups to develop a range of ideas on post its, then introduce another card. Repeat in cycles then ask teams to come back together, vote on the best early ideas and then flesh these out into storyboards or more rounded concepts.
Choose a series of cards as discussion prompts around a table. Select the group of questions you think are useful to what you’re focusing on. Perhaps the How the service works, if you service is already live.
Use them by yourself. Work through them to stimulate ideas on designing a new or improved service
Having the questions on cards means you can create varying games and activities to work with these. There are lots of combinations and ways you could use these, we’d love to know if you use them, what you did with them, send us a picture and explanation.
Comparative Services
Services can often be invisible, as can the user experience. So I like to use comparative services for developing ideas. This helps to connect people with seeing services, and the elements that they are made of. I like to use a simple framing of;
What if (service/company)
delivered (outcome/user need)
What if IKEA
Delivered A way to file taxes
Sometimes the pairing might not always feel appropriate (e.g a corporate service being used as a comparison with a Government service), but I do think it helps us facilitate others to think what the characteristics are of a service that we use and recognise, and to apply the principles, offer, and way it delivers the service to the outcome we’re trying to achieve.
There is a level of abstract thinking to this. We’re not saying pay taxes by selling furniture. So helpful questions include;
What do we notice about service x in the way it delivers for users?
What can we learn and borrow from them?
What would we not apply from that service?
You can embellish this format with some further categories. For example;
What if (service/company)
Helped (users)
To (achieve this outcome)
What if Ikea
Helped New businesses
To File taxes
What if John Lewis
Helped New parents
To Schedule their childcare
You can run this as an exercise in lots of ways. I’m a big believer in moving from slide decks into physical ideation tools. So you could;
Print a range of service names onto small cards, or ask people to fill in blank cards of services they recognise
On a second small card, add in the service outcome or user need, and if you like the user group
I often then get people to work in partners, takes the edge off being in a big group, document ideas onto one post per idea then switch partners to a timer of around 5 minutes.
We then pick good ideas, or ‘kernels’ as I like to call them and develop them a bit further as a larger team into an idea template. I typically tend to ask for ideas to be named (makes it easier to talk about them) and sketched. We’ll often move later on into storyboarding these ideas as a user journey to get more of a feel for it.
I encourage visual thinking at all times. If working with groups who feel nervous to sketch, or using visual language doesn’t feel comfortable to them, I will make a set of ‘stick it on’ elements and a useful template that mimics a key touchpoint or blank journey map. So if we’re working on a digital part of a service, I’ll have some gridded wireframes and web elements ready to stick down
How might we’s
Now, I’m as skeptical as the next person on seeing ‘How might we’ statements applied to systemic sized challenges we are reckoning with. So I stay away from that hero complex form of design thinking.
But at a workable level, how might we can be a useful phrase. What’s important to recognise is ‘How might we’ questions start from different framing points.
You might want to use How might we framing around service outcomes.
How might we deliver on this service outcome?
Or, how might we solve this problem?
Or how might we help users with this unique thing we noticed during our research?
There are a range of ways of having something solid at the centre of this question that grounds it a bit more.
My hot take is, never run these sessions without introducing some primary research replay to a team. That’s why I encourage, where appropriate some visual, audio, or film based research in discovery to help ground these types of questions and to have other assets in the room that might include a journey map or stages of an existing service.
Solidifying ideas
An early idea on educating the public about nature at Loch Lomond Trossachs and National Park from a creative workshop I ran on the visitor experience and learning about nature/biodiversity (2024)
There are countless approaches to developing ideas for services, these are just a small flavour of possibilities.
What I find helpful is producing templates to help ensure we capture and name concepts, and then visually communicate them. Always encourage lots of early ‘kernals’ - small, early, unformed notions of what something could be. You can then build on these, choosing a few to work through collaboratively and fleshing out.
I hope these are helpful tools if you find this part of the process difficult or stalling when working with others.
If you’re interested in delving into way more of this, I’m running my agile service design twice this year. The next course is in June, and the last one takes place in November.