The different 'flavours' of service design

And the benefit of trying them all

I was asked recently what advice I would give people just starting their careers in service design. My answer relates to something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently - the different ‘flavours’ of service design. My advice was to try out working in every sector. Do a bit of agency work, try your hand at Government (both national and local) and spend some time in a charity. If you want the full set, sniff out a startup that has enough money for service design!

The reason I said that was because you learn something different from each setting.

Agency

Let’s start with working in a design agency. This is how I trained as a service designer. I spent five years working at Snook on a wide variety of projects. Pre 2020 the agency market was a little different to now, but I’d take a punt that the ‘flavour’ still remains fairly similar.

Fast paced, output focused design that struggles to reach implementation - would be how I’d describe service design in agencies. That might sound a little harsh. There are definitely agencies, and great people within them, that will challenge all of this and buck the trend. I certainly hope this was something I managed to do during my time working at Snook.

But it’s just a fact that the nature of agency work means you’re not working within the organisations that will make the change happen - you need to help them understand how to do it themselves. This can lead to you sometimes feeling a bit removed from the impact. Agency work also tends to be focused on outputs because procurement is focused on buying things. Good agencies will interrogate this when they get through the door and good client/agency relationships allow for challenge throughout with the continuous ability to pivot towards whatever will add value for the organisation and the people within it.

I learned so much working in an agency. Many of these skills have proven invaluable as I’ve moved into freelance. I know how to manage relationships with clients, I know how to cost a proposal, I know how to run a project and manage a budget. And the things I will always love about working in an agency are the variety of projects and the strong culture. Being part of a team of people working in similar ways to a common mission while getting to try designing across many different subject matters. I loved it.

National Government

I’ve never worked in a national Government department. I’ve worked for a national NHS body and I’ve done agency projects with national Government. So my view of this part of the world is much narrower.

I think my overriding take on Government work is how digitally focused it tends to be. GDS have done amazing work over the years, setting standards, building libraries and developing governance. That, coupled with the rise in digital transformation across the public sector, often means there is a heavy digital component to a lot of national Government work. Working at NHS Digital I obviously felt that - but the clue is in the name there.

Again, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this kind of work. Knowing the basics of good form design, navigating the technical complexity of integrating with legacy systems, wrestling with data structures, skilling up in accessibility - all these things make you a better service designer.

I learned so much from my short time at NHS Digital but I always felt quite far from reality, far from people. The NHS is such a people based service at it’s heart. It’s about the delivery of care. Yet in 18 months I only worked on the digital parts of services. I say parts because they were often just that. Products people used as part of a much wider end-to-end health and care journey. The people part of the service wasn’t within our remit.

Local Government

It was my time at Newham Council that got me thinking about these different ‘flavours’ in the first place. That is because the work I was doing there felt slightly different to the work I’d done before. While I’d worked with councils before via Snook, this was my first time working as part of an in-house team.

While there were aspects of my work that felt familiar, designing the website pages for the service and the forms people use to submit a complaint; other aspects felt less familiar. Like designing an internal process for triaging complaints. This work was intrinsically linked to people’s jobs, the work the staff that ran the service did on a day-to-day basis to investigate the complaints.

This flavour of service design is all about people and it warrants a different approach. In this situation a service designer is an extra pair of hands who doesn’t have to keep the service running at the same time as redesigning it.

As a service designer, you’ll bring time and an outside perspective. You’ll bring an understanding of best practice in digital and user centred design. You should have the time and space to integrate co-design and/or user research approaches into your work. You’ll be able to cross silos and join up journeys.

This ‘flavour’ of service design gets you really close to the action. You’re working side-by-side with the people who run the service, helping them figure out how they can make things better for the people who use the service. There is often a bias towards action, things get done and changed. But none of this happens without building trust and that’s the main skill you need as a service designer in this setting.

Private sector

I haven’t been directly employed by the private sector as an in-house service designer. I worked embedded in Tesco’s service design team for 6 months via Snook and I did a 3 month contract at Lloyds Bank. I’ve also done bits of bobs of other private sector work via agency. So that is to say my experience of in-house in the private sector is somewhat limited.

My sense is that there is huge potential for service designers in the private sector. Something that always made me prickle a little at Snook was how reluctant service designers sometimes were to be put on private sector work - they equated the private sector with corporate gain and wanted to do the ‘good for the world’ projects. But working in private sector will teach you about business. Again, an essential skill for service designer.

And a huge swathe of the service industry is run by private sector businesses that we interact with every day. We book train tickets, buy groceries, apply for credit cards, go out for dinner - the list goes on. And in amongst all this there are pretty interesting problems to be found.

Third sector

Service design is still emerging in charities. The biggest thing I’ve observed here is that, often, charities don’t see themselves as service providers and don’t view what they provide as services. This makes service design a challenging approach to integrate.

I spent a year working at drug and alcohol charity WithYou. I’ve also worked with numerous charities since starting Joy; DrinkAware, UKSIC, The Cancer Platform, The Health Foundation. I think this is where the interesting intersection of the digital and the human side of service design come together. You get the frontline feel of local Government with greater freedom for digital transformation. The challenge comes with how to position service design to organisations that don’t think they deliver services!

This is obviously just a snapshot of each sector and largely based on my own experiences. I’m sure there will be people out there that have had different experiences to me. I’d love you to comment and add your take on the ‘flavours’ I’ve identified.

I’m always happy to chat about things like this. If you’re just getting into service design I offer free walk n talks and if you’re working in the sector but need some support, I offer paid mentoring. Find out more about my mentoring offers on Joy’s website.