New Role, New Challenge.
By: Adam Walker
Tags: Design Thinking, Mobility, Strategic Design, Innovation, Service Design

This week I’ve taken on a new role at the strategic design agency Nacar. From here, I will be embedded within the airline Vueling, part of the IAG group. I will be leading the Service Design initiative within their Innovation Lab working across the airline. In practice, this means I will help combine the business needs and innovations in technology with human-centred design. My main focus will be to assist Vueling in becoming a fully fledged customer-focused and design-led organisation while leading the in-house service design team to ensure best-in-class experiences across Vueling products and services.

Embedded within the Innovation unit I will be applying my skills within a large organisation that has startup tendencies. This is a new chapter in my career that I’m greatly looking forward to. Having been in a consultancy/agency role for the last seven years, I’ve been lucky enough to learn how to work around the constraints of big organisations. But now is the time to put all that experience into practice, by working directly within one.

I will be working across different horizons on products and services that could range from things like the current check-in processes passengers go through at the airport to developing a more environmentally friendly airline of the future. The teams that create these will have design and research capabilities embedded within them. To deliver great service design, we need to be proactive in providing the right conditions for good human-centred design to flourish.

As I’ve written about in the past a strong focus on people is key to the success of Service Design. By that I mean not just considering the customers but also partners, employees, and other relevant stakeholders. Applying this focus from the outset helps uncover unique insights and opportunities that may otherwise be missed. Vueling’s users are people with all levels of needs and capabilities.

The best way to understand this diverse set of people is to actually interact, speak with and immerse yourselves in their lives. That goes for both customers and the staff members involved in the delivery of the services.

To give you an example, front line ground staff within airports often get the brunt of customer/passenger frustration, often unfairly. In many cases, it’s likely the legacy systems and process that are to blame, not the humans trying their best to work with them. If they had better processes and tools in place, they could provide a better service to the passenger. Only by working with people like ground staff, understanding their position from a human perspective, can we in turn design best-in-class services and experiences across the organisation.

We’re designing services, so it’s vital we consider the context in which these services are being used by people. Are they first time flyers, or do they fly regularly for work? Are the fully enabled or do they have some form of impairment? Are they tech savvy or do they still rely on paper tickets? Are they new to the job they are carrying out, or have they been in that role for a number of years? Context is key, and utilising ethnographic research as part of a service design approach is the best way to uncover these details.