This is Service Design (Remotely) Doing
By: Nupoor Rajkumar
Tags: Service Design Thinking, Remote Working, Service Design Tips, Human Centred Design, Service Design

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit India. The very next month, I began working with a public health organisation Noora Health.

If you’re a Service Designer or if you’re familiar with the field, you’ll know that it is highly collaborative and co-creative. As the pandemic struck, we were thrown into the deep end and had to change overnight, having to rapidly find remote ways of doing what we usually did. For example, we couldn’t do simple things that we relied on like writing on and then sticking paper post-its on walls while facilitating multiple live conversations!

It’s been over a year. I’ve worked collaboratively with other internal and external stakeholders to conduct design research, design new service models, improve existing services, design the experiences of individual touchpoints within a larger service, run rapid experiments to test out prototypes and pilots and what not!

It’s been hard, but we’ve been learning and adapting.

As the third wave slowly creeps upon us, here’s a gist of what I learnt while being a remote Service Designer. Hopefully, it will help some of you with tools and methods, and maybe give the rest of you the feeling that there’s some hope in the world to do good work even when you’re sitting at home in front of a Zoom video call in PJ bottoms and a work shirt.

1. Remote Research

How does a human-centred Service Designer learn anything about their users remotely? We interviewed people on phone calls and video calls, and sent them surveys. Naturally, understanding body language was impossible, so we had to rely on what people said, and their voices. How did they sound? Sure, or unsure? Happy or sad? Wait a minute. Was that the sound of someone’s voice shaking like they’re about to cry?

When video calls were possible, we paid attention to facial expressions as long as the quality of the video was decent. Guaranteed, it is difficult to dig deep with remote design research, but it is possible to learn quickly, and it helps service designers make more informed design decisions.

Listen and learn.

2. To Mural, or not to Mural?

I am grateful everyday for Mural, and I know a few other people who are too. Mural allows me to think in colourful digital post-its, using arrows and icons to draw out user journeys, make service maps and blueprints, spotting pain points and ‘wow’ moments alike. It’s the closest thing to what we as service designers did pre-pandemic.

But for most other stakeholders I was working with, it was a real difficulty at first. Visualising journeys, maps and blueprints in ways that people can understand them has been the absolute need of the hour throughout my journey as a remote service designer. Writing on paper post-its with markers and sharpies while other people are seeing you do it in person is one thing, but it is much harder to hold someone’s attention on a digital platform like Mural even if you’re sharing your screen. Many people I needed to collaborate with wouldn’t understand Murals if they were shared after completion either. They wouldn’t know where to look or what to do. So while one solution was to train people on Mural (something we eventually began to do organically, and it has helped), the other, quicker solution was to just copy paste! Some of us found it easier to think on Mural, so after we were done our thinking, we would copy relevant content from our digital post-its to Google Sheets and Docs and sometimes Slides too. Visualisation for collaboration has to be contextual for the people who will consume it — make it easy for them to understand, and only show them what they need to see! It is double work to create multiple versions of the same thing, but in the end, it’s much quicker than training if you want more people to collaborate faster.

Just copy, and paste.

3. Experiments for the win!

How will you really know what works remotely unless you try? So we tried. And we keep trying. Apart from user-facing experiments, we also ran multiple experiments internally as well.

A good example of the same was when we conducted an on-the-spot role-play on Zoom. Role-playing is a great way to prototype services, and they’re usually done with optimum eye contact, name tags and cardboard cutouts. Remotely, all we had was a scenario on a slide and some of our faces (depending on whose internet was working that day, of course), but this helped us focus on the words that were being said — the conversation. The remote role-play provided us with insights that would have been different from an in-person one, I think, but they were useful nevertheless.

Run ALL kinds of experiments!

4. Zoom in, zoom out, document. Repeat.

Zooming in and out of a service model, journey or blueprint is a rule of thumb for Service Design, but it is challenging to do this remotely. In-person, the service designer can easily reach out to people working on various touchpoints, artefacts and channels that form a service. Usually, everyone is in the same room or building at the very least, and peeking into someone’s laptop (with permission, of course) or hijacking a meeting (again, with permission) is relatively easy. Remotely, I have had to find people on Slack, reach out to them within virtual meetings and set up calendar invites with individuals and smaller teams just to track the status of and understand how they’re thinking about various touchpoints. This is where documentation comes in. While this is great practice for in-person service design (or anything else, really) as well, it is particularly useful for when you’re zooming in and out of a service remotely.

Reach out to people as mentioned above to zoom in, put it all together in a blueprint / map to zoom out, and then document everything you heard and did. Definitely repeat.

Maybe it’s time you call Bezos to get that view from the spaceship.

5. Making Decisions

As mentioned earlier, Service Designer is hugely collaborative and one definition of ‘collaboration’ says, “(it is) the act of working together with other people or organisations to create or achieve something”. Remotely, this basically means a lifetime of calls. While Slack, Zoom, Gmeet, Teams, WhatsApp and even Mural either adapted quickly to make way for audio and video calls or had already preempted the need, it is simply exhausting to be on calls all day. And honestly, how many calls do we attend that are actually useful? While doing service design remotely, one of my biggest learnings was that collaboration is only useful if (a) the collaborative session is planned ahead, and (b) someone decides to be the decision-maker and makes final decisions after hearing everyone else out. This is probably true for non-remote situations too, but absolutely imperative for remote ones. If you’re leading the service innovation process, make the decisions.

Ok some people might. But it’s OK!

6. Communicate, don’t just Slack

I first learnt and then participated in creating a culture that has begun to use Slack fruitfully. We try to name channels better, copy paste Google Drive folder links under “channel topic”, describe the channel as needed, use threads for conversations around specific topics, and pin necessary things of course! This is great and every team or organisation should create their own Slack etiquette, but we can’t rely on it. There are many internal stakeholders in the organisation I work for who do not understand and use Slack the way we want them to. And no amount of training really helps — they just work differently! So what’s the solution(s)?

Having to DM people outside of Slack channels repeatedly can be painful, but it helps.

Regular check-in calls for projects work as long as someone always has an agenda.

Slack reminders help me remember when to communicate with who and about what. Also, scheduling messages in advance is my new favourite thing to do.

My last resort is picking up the phone and calling individuals directly… because with the kind of collaboration service design expects, we’ll all be calling people 24x7.

What she said.

7. Don’t forget to connect!!

Especially when you’re new to an organisation (like I was in April 2020), it is incredibly important to connect with people, even if you are remote. And work-related, pre-planned Zoom meetings just don’t cut it. Find (virtual) time to talk about non-work stuff too. They’ve got to eventually trust you to collaborate, communicate and visualise as needed. And then believe in you to make good, practical, creative decisions. So, connect!

Sigh. We all do, don’t we?

Well, that’s all, folks!

How have you done Service Design remotely?