Hey friend,
Fancy seeing you here!
Recently I was joking around on twitter that the main thing you need to be good at as a service designer is drawing those chevron shapes at the top of journey maps (they are darned tricky!)
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In all seriousness though, service design skills can seem like a bit of a mystery. What do you need to be good at as a service designer? Let's explore...
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Q. What skills do service designers need?
Service design is a broad practice that requires you to hold lots of complexity and work with lots of people. In this edition, I am sharing my take on what I see as the core service design practitioner skills. Each skill outlines why it's important, some examples of what this bucket includes, and a recommended resource if you're keen to learn more!
Of course, this list is not exhaustive, and most service designers will have strengths in certain areas and room to grow in others.
(For our purposes, I'm leaving out adjacent skills you may need in certain roles, such as project management and scoping, business development, people leadership and so on.)
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Design Research
Why it's important: Since service design is all about uncovering service actors' and stakeholders' needs, skills within design research are critical to being effective. You need to be able to plan, execute and synthesize research in order to find what's working and not working in a service, and root the design process in the needs of the people involved. Broadly, design research skills encompass:
- research design and planning
- research execution (e.g. interviewing, survey design, fieldwork)
- analysis and synthesis of research data
- foresight/futures trend analysis
Recommended resource:
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An example of synthesis in progress! First board is data in a table (copy pasted from raw notes) by participant and important service moment. In the second board I'm starting to do my initial sort and cluster of the same data, and layer in analysis/thoughts in blue and purple.
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Service Prototyping and Testing
Why it's important: In order to assess ideas and proposed changes to a service, we need to be able to find ways to 'try' them out, that are low investment and risk. Service prototyping and testing includes making prototypes of individual touchpoints (e.g. a sign up form) and end to end service experiences (e.g. roleplay of a grocery delivery service). Since services are very diverse, this is mostly a mindset of being able to 'fake it' quickly and easily at the early stages of a project. These skills could encompass:
- UX/digital design
- role play/service scripting
- large scale/physical environment prototyping e.g. thinking about spaces/architecture
- 3D making skills (could also go as far as IoT type prototyping with hardware and software)
- video prototyping
Recommended resource:
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Organizational Change
Why it's important: The material of service design is the organization, as Stephen Taylor at Harmonic Design says. Being an effective service designer means you need to be very adept at working with and within organizational dynamics. These skills include:
- change management
- stakeholder engagement
- implementation management
- measurement and metrics
- business model design
Recommended resource:
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Workshop Design and Facilitation
Why it's important: Service design requires effective cross-functional collaboration and bringing together of people from across an organization. The service designer's role is to create an environment and framing that enables successful participation, perspective sharing, and problem solving. In addition, workshop design and facilitation skills support co-creation with service users. These skills include:
- participatory design methods and theory
- workshop flow/planning
- activity design
- group facilitation
Recommended resource:
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Service designers design and facilitate workshops of all types, coming up with custom agendas and activities to meet project objectives.
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Visual and Communication Design
Why it's important: Service designer use visualization to make the invisible, visible, and to create representations of complexity. Effective and clear visual communication through artifacts like journey maps and service blueprints help us to wrangle with messy services, build shared understanding and see new connections. Core aspects of this skill include:
- sketching
- data visualisation
- information design
- presentation layouts
- graphic design
Recommended resource:
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Communication Skills
Why it's important: Service design is fundamentally a 'people' job - requiring excellent communication skills. Whether it's listening to stakeholders in interviews to really get to the bottom of their perspective, presenting research findings to build an understanding of user needs, or making a case for trying a new way of testing service ideas, service design work benefits from these skills:
- active listening
- storytelling
- presentation skills/public speaking
- writing
- 'difficult conversations'/negotiation skills
Recommended resource:
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Storytelling and public speaking are helpful skills for service designers who need to communicate and feel comfortable presenting to groups of people.
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A Skills Self Assessment for Designers
A tool I like for reflecting on your skills is The Moment's Innovation Designer Capability Map. Their framework has 12 key capabilities and a scale from novice to expert that allows you to plot your 'profile' on a spider diagram. Fun! (In this framework, service design is one of the competencies. It's fun to compare and contrast how people look at these skills!)
Thanks again for having me in your inbox. I appreciate it!
In service,
Linn
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