Service Design during a pandemic
By: Davide Gianni
Tags: Service Design Tips, Design Process, Service Design

How to design with urgency

#1 Be brave and take decisions

In the context of the recent changes in the Italian political landscape (not for me to judge here), I was reminded of this speech from Mario Draghi on the occasion of the ceremony for his honorary degree.

Draghi offered his advice to the future generations of public servants and one point particularly resonated with me: in times of crisis, be brave and take decisions.

Whenever we are presented with challenging circumstances and uncertainty, the temptation is always to avoid making choices. However, it is important to remind ourselves that ’inaction is still a choice’ which can still be very harmful. According to Draghi, public servants not taking decisions in a time of crisis ultimately are betraying the trust and the mandate they’ve been given by the community.

As a Service Designer, during the pandemic, I felt often overwhelmed by the difficulty to make decisions with the same level of confidence as I would have had under normal circumstance. Projects were urgent and surrounded with lots of uncertainty and it became very tempting to simply say ‘I can’t do this, there is not enough time to do good service design. I cannot help you in this context’.

However, my perspective changed after reading the book What CEOs need to know about design by Audrey Crane. The author points out that 'the alternative to good design isn't no design, it's bad design'. Extending this to the context of service design: services are always designed, what changes is the conscious effort we make in designing them well.

This consideration moved me to take responsibility to design to the best of my knowledge, being brave and taking decisions with the information I possessed.

This journey was hard and scary, but ultimately very rewarding. I started appreciating more the value of good insights from user research; I learned how to deal better with risks; I started re-using work strategically and I focused more energies to collaborate better with my stakeholders. These lessons I will expand in the next points.

#2 Never discount User Research from your plans

If the first lesson is all about making decisions with information scarcity, the second one is all about making sure that you collect more information over time to make better decisions.

When facing urgency, the temptation to discount user research from your work and rely just on previous experience and best practice is high. Some common justifications in this context are ‘there is not enough time to explore’; ‘we need to make decisions’; ‘we don’t have time to talk to the users’.

However, user research is the best investment to provide your future self with the right information to make better design decisions. In other words, not carrying out user research will condemn you to make blind decisions in the future.

As a Service Designer your intention should not be to fight the timeline and make research a blocker but instead to find the best way to make space for it in your plans. Maybe it is scope, maybe it is design quality, but leave time to research and understand your users.

At the beginning of your project, urgency will force you to make decisions ‘at the best of your knowledge’. It is important you document carefully your assumptions and recognize the ‘design debt’ your decisions are potentially creating. When insights from research will be available you will be able to verify your assumptions and iterate accordingly.

I’m comfortable saying that most of the projects I have been in would have had a very different result, if I didn't have the luxury to work with some brilliant User Researchers, which managed to gather user insights despite tremendous time-pressure.

#3 Learn to be comfortable with risk

I still remember my feelings and emotions when I first started my project with the NHS during the pandemic. I was genuinely scared of all the things that could go wrong and all the risks surrounding the service we had to design.

However, having to deal with such a risky project inspired me far more than I initially thought.

I decided that I shouldn't avoid risks but instead learn how to deal with them better.

Firstly, I looked at involving more subject matter experts during the design process to validate more rigorously the service prototypes.

Secondly, I spent far more time than before trying to ‘break’ the services at their idea stage, to make sure they were ‘bomb proof’ by the stage they were implemented. This meant exploring different ways to highlight service gaps, trying out different models to identify more risks (e.g. FMEA) and learning how to document and communicate better risks to the stakeholders.

Finally, dealing with risks more regularly forced me to think about Minimum Viable Services not only as of the services which can deliver more value to the users, but also as the ones we were are more confortable to pursue given their risk profile. This meant for example avoiding features from first releases that needed more user research for us to be comfortable with.

#4 Re-use and share

One of the daily challenges that design teams faced during the pandemic was the difficulty to recruit participants for remote research and testing.

In this context being able to re-use others’ people experience in similar contexts can be incredibly helpful.

While working with the NHS, I was lucky enough to have a colleague sharing some service patterns that he previously developed in a similar domain to ours.

For those new to service patterns, the idea behind them is pretty simple: when organizations develop numerous services around similar user needs, it will be possible to identify some common elements or patterns. Service patterns are normally developed to drive consistency across existing services, but they can be really helpful also to speed up the initial stages of design.

Having access to service patterns allowed us to kick off the design work using previously tested design ideas while waiting for insights coming from user research. This made it possible to save significant time, and eventually meet the hard deadlines we were given.

This experience made me appreciate once more the efforts by the Government Digital to make teams Use and contribute to open standards, common components and patterns. Or more simply, re-use and share.

#5 Value your Stakeholder’s knowledge and experience

If like me you work in a consultancy, you might be familiar with the quote of Robert Townsend ‘consultants are people who borrow your watch to tell you what time it is, and then walk away with the watch’.

This expression refers to the practice of consultants to re-use stakeholders knowledge in projects, adding to the bad reputations of consultant not delivering real value to the organizations which hire them.

Despite the criticism, this practice is quite reasonable when understood in the context of learning-credibility tension that consultants face when joining a new organization (HBR). Consultants are expected to project expertise while they are still learning about the problem, and if they make any mistake this might compromise their image in front of the client. So over time in the industry have spread informally a variety of verbal and non verbal tactics to not compromise the consultant images while developing knowledge. Amongst these, re-using stakeholder knowledge to craft resonance with the audience is arguably one of the most common.

This practice stopped making sense as soon as the pandemic hit. It was obvious that no one had experienced before designing digital service during a pandemic, so there was no point in trying to pretend to have any exclusive knowledge about it. Clients and consultants were both trying to orientate themselves as best as they could to carry out their work.

If anything this situation reinforced my belief that as a Service Designer your solution has to be developed not for, but together with your clients and stakeholders, especially when designing with urgency.

When times are pressured, clients and consultants should both contribute to the problem resolution, playing different roles which make use of their unique knowledge and point of view. Clients often have domain knowledge and expertise that it will never be possible for the consultant to match in the short period of time they will be on the job. On the other hand, consultants can bring experiences from other organizational settings and are often less involved in the problem space, providing 'fresh' opinion to the situation.

I found this combination to be extremely effective, so as a Service Designer I'd personally recommend for you to value your stakeholder's knowledge and experience while empowering them with a new mindset, process and toolset to make better decision.

Service Designers should be facilitators of change, not know-all.