March 17, 2022
March 17, 2022
The U.S. needs Service Design. Without it, we’re throwing bodies at gaps in I.T. systems. It sounds gruesome and, in a way, it is…
Imagine you’re a parent and your kid is diagnosed with asthma.
You call your insurance company to find out how much rescue inhalers will cost out-of-pocket. After several menu selections and holds, you finally speak to someone. You explain your situation and ask your question. They put you on hold. For a long time. They come back apologizing.
The information they got doesn’t exactly answer your question. They’re not incompetent, but your confidence in them is flagging. They put you on hold again, giving you fifteen minutes to think.
Your kid needs rescue inhalers. Having to worry about the cost hurts. Then a voice. Sincere apologies, the voice says. They’re working hard on their end. But the answers aren’t complete or certain. Thanks for your time.
The next day on a call with your child’s nurse practitioner, they recommend a treatment you’ve already tried. Aren’t people paying attention? Listening? Don’t they look at their records? They’re sorry. They didn’t see that.
More precisely, their “system” didn’t make it clear. On the other end of those calls, their system has problems. Gaps. It's actually several archaically convoluted I.T. systems that your information is scattered across. Fragmented. Sometimes duplicated, conflicting, with no source of truth.
These are the information gaps that quality, safety and efficiency fall through. To fill the gaps, they train people to learn the I.T. systems’ quirks—throwing bodies at the problem.
On each "Hello", service staff need to be ready to connect with people, understand their needs and resolve issues for them. It often comes down to heroic levels of unappreciated intellectual and emotional multitasking. The employee rapidly clicks through tabs, collects a cryptic bit of information about your situation and writes it down in a note—being a present listener while navigating the peculiarities and limits of their I.T. system. They do this numerous times with varying results until they burn out and quit.
On average, it costs employers over $4k to recruit, onboard and train new hires.
Then there’s the cost of sabotaging team culture and service quality. There’s the clinician who feels ashamed to have lost their patient’s trust. The staff who see daily how system screw-ups have real consequences for patients.
In focus groups, colleagues share that their I.T. systems’ complexities get them so frustrated it creates palpable tension. They turn on each other and feel like they can’t rely on each other, because none of them can rely on their I.T. Like open wounds, system gaps make organizations and the people they serve vulnerable.
It’s not just in healthcare. I’m sure you, the reader, can come up with a dozen other institutions that operate with these convoluted I.T. systems. Banking and lending systems. Utility providers. Social services. Taxes. Justice systems. Education systems.
With one tap you can watch people from all over the world do everything from short comedy videos to live tarot readings. In a handful of swipes and taps you can do a 3D walkthrough of a house on the market, get directions to the open house and find a gas station on your way there.
Technology can do so much cool, useful stuff gracefully, efficiently. But for some reason, it rarely does the “boring but essential” stuff well. Like, make it easy to see multiple doctors using multiple difficult EHRs, file taxes, or file for unemployment without being charged with fraud.
In my experience, most orgs that create products and services want to treat people right. But as large groups, we don’t instinctually distinguish between making and designing things.
Anyone can put a pen to a page and make a mark. Just as any group of people can come together and make a piece of software. Or decide on how a workplace and its processes are set up.
Whether it’s a house, a dress or a digital service, when you design you:
Most people don’t get to see the understanding and envisioning steps. They see the thing that got made. They notice the way it looks. They equate design to what the designer did making it look polished.
Hell, so many UX researchers and designers are on a team of one or under four. Without experienced representation, they’re easily overcommitted. Overworked. More easily pressured to take requirements from PMs. Polish their wireframes.
After all, if design leaves a vision vacuum, someone has to fill it. It's a vicious cycle of setting UX teams up to fail or implode. Within this vicious cycle, folks are ok with research happening in a vision vacuum. Or skipping research altogether. Without good qualitative research, there is no Service Design.
Service Design improves the employee experience. This improves service quality and cost. Service Designers examine what employees do front stage as well as backstage to deliver a service.
If you build tech in the U.S., Service Design is probably unfamiliar to you.
[Service Design] has reached a ‘new normal’ in Europe. However, it has not yet reached this level of maturity in the United States. As described by Jamie Nicholson, the Product Research lead for Product Experimentation at Facebook, ‘In the US it’s all about innovation, whereas in Europe it’s more about service design.’
-Myrthe Montijn, The State of Service Design 2021 - and beyond
In the case of employees using creaky old IT systems, Service Design would apply human-centered research & design to improve outcomes.
But because of that “vicious cycle”, human-centered design is regarded as an optional luxury. It’s only resourced for some software.
I once heard someone say their dev team didn’t need ux research & design because the I.T. they were building was “only” going to be used by employees. They felt ok saying this because we don’t have a culture that treats service employees like important people. They accept the idea that it’s their job to deal with a crappy I.T. system UX.
This mentality dehumanizes and devalues employees. And it makes everything more expensive, risky and crappy for everyone.
Most dev teams don’t build consumer-facing software products. They build enterprise software. Enterprise software is paid for by a customer and used by its employees. The disconnect between those two parties makes understanding users’ needs a difficult and delicate process.
It’s not uncommon for a company’s sales team to become the ones who inadvertently dictate what gets built. I love sales folks. They make sure we all go home with paychecks. Yay. But investigating and understanding meaningful user needs is not in their wheelhouse.
Yet, so many enterprise software teams are pressured to make what buyers ask for during the sales process. Executives end up creating feature requests that internal teams have a hard time negotiating. Employers may believe they know what their employees need, but few actually do unbiased research to find out.
Dev teams without proper qualitative research and design resources (UX) are often inundated with an unfiltered inflow of feature requests.
Taking ad hoc requests creates a reactive, heinous space. Teams burn out trying to keep their fingers in the dyke. Talented people try to make space to build something that’s fundamentally better. But can never get enough time or energy to get it moving. Job satisfaction drops.
Creative thinkers move onto novel pastures. They’re often missing out on how damn impactful this enterprise space can be.
If ad-hoc papercuts & fire drills are driving away your talent, I’d wager you’ve got an under-resourced UX team stuck in that “vicious cycle.”
With human-centered research and design, you can replace that endless stream of ad hoc feature requests with a vetted set of insights, hypotheses and concepts to test. The big mindset shift is bringing human-centered research & design to the enterprise space. Also known as: Service Design.
User Research is a tool of the proactive. It’s about planning ahead. It prepares the table for good design. For good engineering. For good product management. Being buried under a pile of feature requests is the plight of the reactive.
Personally, I’m done with being reactive. Because we can do better.
Approach Service Design as a way to establish a partnership between enterprise development teams and “users’ leaders.” You’ll need their approval to enroll your users in qualitative studies.
Changing the status quo takes long-term commitment. You’re going to come up against a lot of signals that people are weary about the commitment and risk of big change.
Service Design Republic offers professional development courses as well as research & design services. We’re committed to social principles of anti-oppression, anti-greed and anti-smokescreen.
Our professional development courses are small, live and hands-on. Students examine and respond to real case studies about the efficacy of an important service.
We are currently running a case study on K-12 teachers and parents. How they think about signals of learning. And how well their grading I.T. system supports meaningful learning. You don’t have to work in education to benefit from this case study in class. You’ll learn how the insights were gathered. Then practice directly responding with design hypotheses and sketches. Every quarter, we do a case study in a different industry.
Learn more about Service Design.
¹ADP “Calculating the True Cost to Hire Employees” It costs employers an average of $4,129 and 42 days to fill an open position according to a report by the Society of Human Resource Management