What is a service designer?
Here at the School of Good Services, we get a lot of questions along the lines of “I’ve been doing X, am I a service designer?”
This is a tough question to answer. Not because it’s hard to work out if someone is designing services or not, but because there are vast and varying opinions on what does and doesn’t qualify someone as a ‘service designer’ that don’t seem to have a lot to do with someone's ability to design services.
There is a lot of gatekeeping in service design. Partially it's the academic roots of the profession (where if you don't have at least 3 letters after your name and two before who even are you?!) but mostly it’s because as service designers, we spend a lot of time justifying our existence to the people around us.
Over time, this constant justification of the validity of our role slowly erodes our confidence, makes us hugely defensive of the validity of our jobs, and with it, hugely defensive about who can and can't use the title of ‘Service Designer’
Gatekeeping Service design doesn't make it better, it just makes it less diverse
By doing this we think we’re ensuring standards, and making sure that when one of our future stakeholders encounters a service designer, they will be impressed by that person and therefore be much more enthusiastic about us as a result.
Far from making the profession more professional though, what we actually do when we put rules around who is and isn’t a legitimate service designer is we reduce the diversity of people who end up in the profession.
We end up with the people who call themselves a service designer because they have the privilege and confidence to do so, not because they are or aren't actually designing services.
Maybe they’re trained, have years of experience, are amazing at designing services….but maybe they’re not. Maybe they just feel that everyone wants service designers these days, its *kinda* like what they've been doing so hey, why not?!
On the other hand you have people who have been designing services for years, have acres of relevant experience and have been through more training courses that you can shake a stick at but still don't call themselves a service designer.
What’s the difference between these two?
Both could be equally qualified, or indeed unqualified but the difference is that one of these people has the privilege and confidence to call themselves a service designer and the other doesn’t.
Service Design is a role, with a set of things you need to be able to do. It isn’t an identity or club that you join because someone on the inside tells you you can come in
So, here are a few myths to on what we’re often told told grants us access to being a service designer and why they don't, and some thoughts on what it actually means to be a service designer.
I hope this helps to demystify what service design is and gives those who are on the fence about calling themselves a service designer the confidence to use your rightful title (if you want to!)
Things that don't make you a service designer
1. A degree
This might sound counterintuitive for a training school to say, but you don't need a degree in service design to make you a service designer. Degrees are great and there are some great ones out there. But they’re expensive and a pretty recent introduction to the industry. Some of the best designers I've worked with originally trained as scientists, writers, theater producers, even vets. You don't need a degree in service design to be a service designer. Having a degree in service design is great, but it’s not a requirement.
2. Experience as a “Service Designer”
Having a previous role that was titled ‘service designer’ is another of the biggest areas we think qualifies someone as a service designer.
To do that though, you have to have worked in a place that recognised service design as a job and that isn’t the norm. Maybe you were a strategist, consultant, producer, BA, Product Manager. If you were designing services before, that counts as experience.
3. Experience in a closely related field of design (on its own)
If you've been designing the interactions someone had with a service, or the digital UX journey alone, that doesn’t necessarily mean you've been designing services. Services stretch from the time someone thinks about doing a thing, to the moment they achieve that thing and involve all of the things required internally and externally to help your user to get there. Services are composed of the policies, systems, processes and people needed to deliver that service, so If you've been designing just the bit a user sees, that's great but it isn’t designing a service.
4. Designing processes (on it’s own)
There are a lot of professions tasked with process design or redesign. A lot of these result in similar looking outcomes to service design - service blueprints, new team structures, strategies for delivery etc, but there’s a subtle difference. Process redesign outcomes are usually based on organisational requirements rather than on user needs. Unless you’re designing a service based on the needs your user has of that thing, I’m sorry to say you’re probably designing a process, not a service. See this recent post on what services are
5. Using Service Design Tools and Methods™
Like any industry, Service Design has a lot of tools, methods, and ways of working.
Blueprints, user-journeys maps, double diamonds, business model canvases…the list is overwhelmingly endless. Being able to use these things to express your ideas or as tools to think out loud with your stakeholders is great, but it’s not a requirement.
Tools evolve because we need something to help us do something. Service Designers use the right tool for the job, if that’s a pen for you, then that’s totally valid.
Things that do make you a service designer
So if a relevant degree and experience in a role titled service designer isn’t a requirement, what the hell is?!
Designing services, from front to back, form end to end
This might sound obvious but it’s surprising how often ‘designing services’ is left off the list of skills required to be a service designer.
Designing services is the most important skill you can hone. That means seeing services, understanding what makes a good or a bad service and being able to understand the needs of your users and interpreting this into ideas for new or existing services.
Crucially, when we talk about ‘services’ though, we mean whole services*:
from end-to-end: this means from when the user starts trying to achieve a goal to when they finish - including both content and transaction agnostic to the department providing it
from front to back: this means the user-facing service, internal processes, supporting policy or strategy and organisational, financial and governance structures of the service
in every channel: digital, phone, post, face to face and physical elements
You can use any tools you like to do this. What matters is that the service you design meets the needs your user has of it.
*you might work in an environment where this is hard to do in reality. That’s ok. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you're not trying your best to get this to happen.
Creating the conditions for service design to happen
Service design is 10% design. The fun stuff above where we spend time listening to users, understanding problems and interpreting this into ideas for new services or changes to existing ones.
The rest of the 90% of our time is spent creating the conditions for service design to happen. Understanding constraints, reading laws, building relationships with stakeholders, getting funding, winning buy-in…
Sadly we often think these are natural skills that some of us have and some of us don't, or we think they magically come with experience or ‘confidence’ (that elusive thing that most people have but nobody thinks they have).
In reality though doing these things is a skill we can learn just as easily as any other skill. Given that we spend so much of our time doing it, it’s something we need to spend more time learning about.
Learning how to do this
Obviously, it’s entirely up to you on whether or not you call yourself a service designer. There are advantages and disadvantages to the title, depending on where you work. But hopefully this list has helped you to understand that you can, if you want, use that title if you’re actually designing services and helping to create the conditions for that to happen.
If you want to learn more about becoming a service designer, check out our Becoming a Service Designer course where we cover all of these things in detail.
Or, if you want to get better at creating the conditions for service design to happen, take a look at our courses on Stakeholder Leadership and Writing Business Cases for Service Design
Some other useful posts on the topic you’re new to service design:
Our co-founder Sarah Drummond wrote this great piece on what is service design
A post a few weeks ago from me on what we mean by ‘services’
