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.

Last month, we ran a session called Getting into Service Design.

It sold out within a day, with a waitlist of over 100 people and 200+ submissions of questions for the session. There was a demand!

Why products and services need to consider each other in meeting user needs

5 steps to raise your organisation’s service design capability, and a free tool to help you plan how to do it

A common question I’ve been asked throughout my career is ‘what makes a good service designer?’ There’s no one perfect ‘mould’ a service designer should be or fit, but when I’ve interviewed for the role, I’ve looked for several recurring skills and experiences.

To design something you have to - at a bare minimum - believe that it exists. And this is the problem we have with service design.

Services are invisible by they’re nature. They help our users to achieve an end goal, but they are more than the sum of their component parts. Services are also made of the connections between the products, systems and information we interact with

The things our users need from our services aren’t unique, and the problems we have in delivering those services aren't either

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?”

Here are five things that you don’t need to be a service designer, and two that you do

When designing a service, there are many questions we need to answer - who are our users? What do they need from us? What could we do to help them achieve their goal?

But there is one question we’re often afraid to ask. It’s by far the most common question that comes up in Good Services courses, and that’s ‘what is my service?’ 

I made a scale to measure the quality of services using the 15 principles of Good Service design. Here’s why.