Service design as a school subject

Since 2016, service design has been part of the Austrian national curriculum for secondary schools, integrated into a subject called “Business and Service Management.” ³⁷ There are approximately 90 secondary schools with a business focus in Austria and each school can individually define the scope of this subject, from 2 to 12 teaching hours per week. The work on the new curriculum started in 2011 with the objective of creating a subject addressing “business organization and implementation in reality.” In 2012, a nationwide working group was established to support the introduction of the new subject. Four years later, in 2016, the new curriculum came into effect by decree. Business and Service Management is now taught nationwide.

By integrating service design in the curriculum, a space for “doing” as a promoter for sustainable learning has been created, with a strong focus on a multidisciplinary approach and applicability to business practice in the context of entrepreneurship education.

Meeting different goals

As graduates will predominantly find jobs in the relatively unspecific “service industry,” they should be able to understand the nature of services as a whole. This includes knowing how services can be designed – including research, ideation, prototyping, and implementation – as well as identifying various stakeholders and considering backstage processes.

The subject in which service design is integrated was introduced in order to offer students the opportunity to link and practically apply what they had learned in different subjects.

Along with helping students acquire an entrepreneurial attitude, teaching service design will contribute to reaching the educational objectives of “active citizenship” and “employability.” Integrating a seminal (trendsetting) innovation approach makes students fit for actively “designing” their (and our) future.

Implementation

The big challenge was – and still is to a certain degree – the question of how to anchor service design in the schools as it is still a relatively young discipline. Two years before the new secondary school curriculum was launched, the “concept” of service design was presented to a selected number of potential multiplicators, such as teachers and school principals. The audience were interested, but initially uncertain about how service design could be brought into the classroom.

Thanks to the internet, we realized that Marc Stickdorn was living just around the corner in Innsbruck, Austria. We contacted him to set up some further presentations and workshops to help us understand what service design actually is, how it can be beneficial for high school students, and how it could be taught in school. Then, we asked him and his colleague Markus Hormess to set up nationwide teacher training in service design.

Nationwide teacher training

We set up these nationwide teacher training sessions as courses offered by the Pedagogical University Tyrol in Innsbruck exclusively to teachers that are responsible for this new school subject. There are two consecutive three-day courses: a “basic” course and a follow-up “advanced” course.

The three-day basic course includes basic service design tools, such as personas, journey maps, stakeholder maps, and prototypes, as well as the Business Model Canvas. It also includes some of the main service design activities: research, ideation, and prototyping. A big part of this first course is about the mindset and the iterative design process, as most of the teachers do not have a design background. The whole course is set up as a train-the-teacher course. As all participants are professional pedagogues, the course content focuses on service design in practice and gives the participants enough time to review and discuss how these tools and methods can be taught in school.

The three-day follow-up course adopts a more open “bar camp” or “unconference” approach. ³⁸ Topics range from case studies, to exchanging first experiences, to trying out lessons and prototyping classroom materials.

“Our course topic was ‘Street Food’ and we prototyped the entire situation with a rented truck so that we could even produce and test our kitchen prototypes in the actual situational context.”

— Marianne Liszt, Teacher at HBLA Oberwart/Burgenland

Gaining experience

In the winter semester 2016/2017, the third nationwide basic course and the second follow-up teacher training took place. More than 100 teachers in Austria have been through the training already and are passing on their knowledge to their students and colleagues, sometimes doing team teaching together with colleagues from other subjects.

Actually, implementing service design as a subject in secondary schools is a service design process on its own. Both teachers and students start with “sh!tty first drafts” and improve them iteratively: the teachers their lessons, the students the services they work on in their classes. In order to constantly improve this process, teachers can constantly exchange experiences and share teaching material through an online forum shared with the growing community of service design teachers in Austria. In addition, we have received requests from teachers to establish an annual meeting fostering a living community of practice of service design teachers in Austria.

1. Desktop walkthroughs are often a good start for prototyping and can help to visually connect customer experiences with frontstage and backstage employee processes.

   

2. Assumption-based personas are easy and fun to do for students, but are only useful when they are backed with research data afterward.

   

3. Creating first assumption-based customer journey maps to introduce journey mapping and emotional journeys in class.

   

4. The Business Model Canvas is a great tool to connect service design with other business and economic subjects in school, like management, financing, or accounting.

   

5. Using various warm-ups with students in class changes the relationship with the teacher and breaks out of routines that students are used to in classrooms.

   

6. Students at the school HBLA Oberwart used service design methods to create a food truck service on campus. ³⁹

   

Prospects

Given the fact that service design is still in its infancy in schools, it will – without a doubt – stay exciting. We will academically monitor and evaluate the further process of implementing service design in secondary education in Austria during the upcoming years. One of our research questions is how students benefit from early service design education in their professional and maybe even in their private lives. Also, we hope with growing experience within our community to be able to offer profound guidance on how to effectively and successfully implement service design in secondary school curricula. Nevertheless, we can already see some initial results that we would like to share.

The individual degree of implementation at each school seems to depend on several influencing factors. One of these factors could be how service design is introduced to schools on a national level. In Austria, this is done through a mixture of a top-down approach (by including service design in the national curriculum of secondary education) and a bottom-up approach (by training teachers and establishing a community of practice), which seems promising so far. Another route to success might be to start with small projects and learn iteratively, tolerating – or even welcoming – errors as a source of knowledge for further improvement. Moreover, it is certainly helpful to raise awareness within the school (amongst all related stakeholders, such as teachers, students, parents, partners, and so on) and also between schools, by communicating about service design activities, exchanging experiences with colleagues, and staying open-minded about student involvement.

Indeed, one of the key drivers might be an open mindset and the willingness to share experiences and to learn from others. Finally, school principals are key stakeholders that also need some basic service design knowledge to understand the design process, methods, and tools. This knowledge will allow them to understand school projects related to service design, and how students and schools can benefit from these.

“Service design is also an attitude, an open, sensitive observation and perception of events that very often initiates a change process.”

— Bernadette Zangerl, Teacher at HLW Landeck/Tirol

Engaging employees

Offices were invited to participate, and seven with a range of conditions were chosen to become “Greenhouses.” The staff got to attend a three-day crash course in service design, testing methods, tools, and the approach. The offices were introduced to the service solutions and got to perform the final iterations on a local scale.

They adapted the solutions to their everyday conditions and prototyped, interviewed customers, generated ideas for adjustments, and made the final designs. A central support function was set up, with service designers from Transformator Design and headquarters staff to moderate the process and coach the offices. So far 24 offices have become Greenhouses.

“We thought maybe that solutions could be implemented without the employers having an understanding of the customers’ needs and why we needed to change. This was a mistake, but that’s the great part with this whole approach – it’s based on making mistakes, but making them early, admitting them, learning from them, and adjusting as you go.”

— Pia Rydqvist, Customer Service Manager, Arbetsförmedlingen

The result was a range of revised solutions that headquarters now knew would work well in large and small offices, in cities and in the countryside, and from the customers’ and the employees’ points of view. The changes were implemented with great buy-in from the front-line staff and created a sense of organizational ownership.

1. Employee journey mapping to learn and adapt service design principles internally.

   

2. Example of a customer journey made by the internal team being used as a tool for understanding and change management.

   

3. Greenhouses as a tool for the employees to use their customer expertise, zoom out, and create space for creativity in their daily operations. ⁴⁰

   

4. The management structure for coaching the organization toward full ownership and a mandate in the transformation process. ⁴¹

   

When the first concept was implemented in 320 offices it resulted in a reduction in time (from 50 minutes to just 10) spent on practical registration in the first meeting, freeing time for focusing on the individual’s ambitions and needs. The decrease in citizen trust stopped, and employees say that the service design approach helped soften hierarchies and erase prestige, leading to drastically increased health and work satisfaction.

“Learning will take some extra time in the beginning, but we believe customer-driven development must be built in as a natural part of the everyday work.”

— Pia Rydqvist, Customer Service Manager, Arbetsförmedlingen

Effects on organization

Customer-driven development is now seen as an essential part of the organization’s future, and in June 2016 a permanent support function was implemented to establish the Greenhouse concept throughout the organization. So far 2,000 employees, including 400 managers, have been introduced to service design and the importance of a customer-centric approach, but the goal is to offer it to all employees. The support function will make sure that:

• — Customer knowledge is shared and collected so that the development of services can be conducted in local offices.

• — Future national development projects will be coordinated in Greenhouses.

• — The Greenhouse framework continues to be relevant and contributes to creating better services, based on needs of the citizens.

“We can’t go back to the way we worked before. Once you’ve learned the tools and methods, and more importantly adapted the approach, you can’t keep [from] applying it to everything in your work”

— Anna Palmgren, Head of Arbetsförmedlingen, Växjö

Workshops

The workshops created awareness among public service organizations of the role and importance of service design. Consequently, we have participated in two projects planning the future of Thailand’s public transportation system:

1 The Service Design Research for User Insights and Needs in High-Speed Trains (HST) Project, a co-creation project between TCDC, OTP, and Livework, resulted in the implementation of the design principles of space and services within the development of high-speed train stations. This project illustrated the importance of the design to the public sector, as the HST Service Design Principles were under the Terms of Reference of OTP, the organization that handled the Thailand HST feasibility study program.

2 The Hua Lamphong Train Station Improvement Study Project is a study of the unchanged, century-old Hua Lamphong train station. Our team applied service design, starting with field research, user studies, and moving on to a complete service design process. The result was physical improvements, including updates to the passenger waiting area and commercial area around the station, as well as a feasibility study of the new service design and the establishment of a new business model for Hua Lamphong Station in the future.

In 2014, we invited service design experts Marc Stickdorn, Markus Hormess, and Adam Lawrence to disseminate their knowledge more widely by hosting two types of service design workshops. First, a “Train the Trainers” program trained service design facilitators, who then acted as knowledge disseminators themselves, facilitating future service design workshops. Second, our guests facilitated co-creation workshops to initiate three projects in different service sectors: the healthcare sector with Bumrungrad International Hospital, the hospitality service industry with Thai Hotel Association, and the tourism sector with Designated Areas for Sustainable Tourism Administration (Public Organization). The concepts and prototypes derived from these workshops have been implemented in these organizations.

Additionally, we set out to involve the education sector in supporting and amplifying service design. This initiated cooperation among five universities. Choosing the topic of “Service Design for Public Transportation,” with a high-speed train as a service design development target, teachers and students from all five universities together learned the concepts and process of service design and created prototypes showcased in the “Service Design for Public Transportation” exhibition.

Training courses

We also created short-term service design training courses for the general public under the Bangkok Service Jam project, as well as hosting special service design training courses for 13 universities under the miniTCDC project, disseminating knowledge through workshop facilitation. The workshop results were service design prototypes in each local case.

After accumulating lessons, opportunities, problems, and obstacles from our service design program (which has mostly focused on the service sector in the past few years), in 2015, we challenged ourselves as well as the agricultural and manufacturing sectors with the question, “How can we transform Thai businesses from manufacturing and product-oriented companies to customer experience – and service-oriented companies using the service design approach?”

Large company adoption

We introduced the service design approach to two large-scale Thai companies – namely, STC Group, a leading company in the agricultural sector, and PTT Chemicals, a manufacturing company – and we were able to convince the executive boards of both companies of the importance and benefits of service design’s principles, processes, and tools. We also initiated co-creative service design projects based within these two organizations by gathering the companies’ staff and various stakeholders: we invited the production, product R&D, sales, and marketing departments, as well as top-level management, to join our service design workshops and training programs. We and our team facilitated the workshops, executed the whole service design process, and concluded with product and service prototypes.

This is a starting point in applying service design and the design thinking process. These companies may not have transformed themselves within a few years, but feedback from the companies is quite positive, as they have gained experience during these workshops and training programs. They have adopted new approaches which have given them a better understanding of their customers and the way their departments think and operate. They are creating prototypes and testing minimum viable products and services, comparing their prototypes with their existing business processes. The new approaches have led to changes in their manufacturing and in the organizations themselves.

1. Talking about the customer journey and touchpoints.

   

2. Making and testing a low-fidelity prototype.

   

3. A discussion on a customer journey during a service design workshop.

   

4. A multifaceted collection of insights helps guide our projects.

   

Creative district

To promote TCDC moving to Charoenkrung and to apply design thinking and service design on a larger scale, we and our partners initiated the “Co-Create Charoenkrung” project. The project’s aim was to revive and develop Charoenkrung district – once a significant economic and social area of Bangkok – to become a creative district of the future. The project, which ran from July 2015 to June 2016, was conducted using service design thinking and doing principles and processes, focusing on co-creation among experts on creative cities, architecture, and design, as well as key stakeholders in the district.

In co-designing the creative district, we invited designers and local people (who are not only users but participants) to express the problems and articulate the opportunities and needs of the community. This led to a concept of project development in various forms, steps, and processes: starting from design research, gaining insights, generating ideas, co-designing, making paper prototypes and 1:1 full-scale prototypes, and testing and evaluating with the local people in the real spaces. The ultimate goal of the project involves not only developing the creative district but also developing a “co-creation model” as well as the principles and processes of service design thinking and doing which can be applied to our beloved Thailand.

Our service design programs and schemes have just started; nonetheless, they have raised awareness among the public, business, and social sectors and provided essential outcomes. These include service prototypes for future investment and development. Our creation and dissemination of service design knowledge through workshop facilitation, together with project-based and co-creative schemes with other organizations and communities, have publicized and developed service design knowledge, as well as reinforcing the service design network and ecosystem that will create economic and social impacts in Thailand in the future.

As a result of these activities, we’ve seen major engagement with service design. From March 2013 through June 2016, 1,500 people attended our service design workshops. Additionally, our YouTube channel has logged more than 87,000 views. TCDC has encouraged 30 public and private organizations and 30 universities to participate in service design activities.

The challenge

Deutsche Telekom operates in 14 countries, serves 160+ million customers, and has an annual turnover of around 70 billion euros. As a formerly state-owned company, we are mainly driven by technology and infrastructure. Just over seven years ago, the design department was established to challenge every product and service while driving customer centricity in order to achieve a best-in-class customer experience: a daunting challenge for a tech giant that used to be run by the government.

Our goal

From the 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos to the boardrooms of billion-dollar corporations, design thinking is a widely embraced approach to creative problem solving. Thanks to the increasing importance of customer experience as a key differentiating factor in most businesses, the role of design is changing – from form-giving to strategy-giving. Design has adopted a strategic leadership role and, by doing so, caused a major hiccup for large corporations in which design has traditionally played a less prominent role. We had one goal: a best-in-class experience for our 160 million customers. And we knew that in order to accomplish that, we needed a sustainable mind shift across major parts of our organization. This is the story of how it happened.

“Over the past few years we have successfully worked on more than 200 products and services for Deutsche Telekom and managed to climb the design ladder from a focus on form to focus on processes, slowly working our way up to a focus on strategy.”

— Philipp Thesen, Chief Designer, Lead Telekom Design

From doing to thinking

We leveraged the potential of design by integrating design thinking into the fundamental processes throughout the company. There are only about 100 designers in our team, so we could never hope to keep up with the increasing need for design. That’s why we created tools and assets that would serve the organization while leveraging the potential of design and design thinking. We operationalized the processes and methods that we derived from our experience of design doing. Additionally, we analyzed existing design thinking methods while adopting approaches from various schools of thought, including from Stanford University and HPI.

Ultimately, we took external methods and hundreds of interviews and weighed them against our own internal expertise and experience in order to create a standardized set of methods and tools tailored for our organization.

This led to common ground, a clear understanding of responsibilities, and clean integration within the existing organizational structure. We created a selection of 17 methods, customized for our needs, along with detailed personas and practical tools and templates. It’s the standard toolset of our daily work and it helps us to collaborate in a way that is both efficient and customer oriented. The toolbox is continuously extended and updated. It’s available as a book and online within our corporate design tool, Brand & Design, a platform we created for our colleagues to distribute and leverage design.

“We aligned the design process and the integration of our methods and tools within the development process with our German and European colleagues that work on customer-facing products and services.”

— Ole Schilling, Senior Design Manager

We strongly believe that visibility is key and we actively communicate and showcase our customer-centered ideal. This is also why we launched a new format for interaction called Customer Lab. On a regular basis we invite real customers, selected on the basis of our personas, to challenge existing products and proposed product innovations. This approach is especially powerful because it generates valuable feedback and insights which we embrace by inviting our colleagues across the company to share this knowledge and drive the visibility of our topic. Inviting the management team so that they can experience customer feedback firsthand is a simple, yet extremely powerful tool. Live and direct – customer-centric design.

Educational framework

Although we invited our colleagues at an early stage to engage with us and discuss how to implement customer experience KPIs with existing processes, the reality is that within large corporations change happens in baby steps. So, we need to foster a culture in which the principles of design thinking are largely embraced within corporate culture and values. The logical next step was to create an educational framework.

1. Consistency leverages product experiences across products.

   

2. Getting all stakeholders on board as early as possible.

   

3. Testing and learning.

   

4. Speedport Neo – customer-centric design.

   

5. Prototyping early.

   

6. Sharing experiences and creating ambassadors.

   

7. Product experience is brand experience.

   

8. “Design Thinking Doing” – the custom- tailored handbook for customer-centric design at Deutsche Telekom.

   

9. Establishing design as a leadership discipline for digital transformation.

   

In order to drive real change we created a space and program dedicated to focusing on design thinking: the Telekom Design Academy, a place where we teach our methods and the use of our tools but also support our colleagues with real project facilitation. We realized that the demand for project facilitation and on-the-job design thinking training can be applied to specific topics. Demand far exceeded our expectations, which is why we had to start staffing our internal and external teams immediately.

Learnings

We come from a strong legacy of design doing. This entitles us to create and implement processes and tools for our colleagues that will drive change within our company. Integrating design into processes ultimately brings us one step closer to integrating design into the corporate strategy. For now it’s clear that we still have a long way to go to become a more design- and customer-oriented company, but we are well underway and design has taken a leadership position within the company.

Changing the emphasis

BSO was originally set up with a focus on enhancing processes from a compliance and efficiency point of view, adding extra steps to gain the trust of the different country operations. “This often resulted in cumbersome processes spread over many departments,” explains Business Services Director Simona Simion-Popescu. “This meant that the backbone of our services was not especially customer-oriented. And because the 22 country operations now see the added value of a shared service center, requests for even more services have added to the complexity of our operations.”

The challenge for BSO was to change the approach and the setup of its processes. “We needed to find a way to get things right from the outset when launching new projects and services so as to respect compliance and governance while providing an excellent experience for customers,” says Continuous Process Improvement Leader Vladimir Tsaklev, who is managing the project at BSO. “We needed to build an organization where there is a continuous focus on customer centricity and implementing in a sustainable way. This is where DesignThinkers Academy came in.”

Learning by doing

The project kicked off with a workshop to establish proper ownership with relevant senior-level stakeholders from inside BSO and the client organizations. Further details of the program were developed with these leaders and a pilot customer journey workshop held on Service Management, a relationship management framework for internal customers. Similar workshops with other departments were set up within which customer journey mapping and employee journey mapping were key components.

“Workshops with relevant stakeholders from the country organizations and a number of external customers typically take two days,” explains Tim Schuurman from DesignThinkers Academy. “We go through the standard service design approach, including persona identification, interviews with customers, customer journey mapping, and the ideation part, prototyping. Where customer journey mapping focuses mainly on improving the services provided to customers and business partners, employee journey mapping aims to create an environment for them to work in a customer-centric way. In other words, customer centricity is approached from both an internal (employee) as well as external (customer) perspective.”

1. Canvas tool used for sketching future or “What if?” scenarios.

   

2. Canvas tool to visualize the value exchange between main stakeholders.

   

3. Participants in action, mapping stakeholders and prioritizing relevance for the customer.

   

4. Working with the customer journey map, building the stages first.

   

5. Prototyping the imaginary scenarios and presenting to the team.

   

An ongoing process

Periodic sessions with relevant stakeholders reflect on the process for building the customer-centric ecosystem. Focusing on how things are done is vital as new ways of collaboration basically determine the successful implementation of new service concepts.

“The idea is to turn this way of working into a regular routine that continuously builds on a customer-centric mindset in a sustainable way,” adds Tsaklev. “You don’t talk about change – you ‘do change’ and learn to collaborate in a way which leads to changes in mindset, and ultimately, genuine transformation which is anchored within the organization.” A train the trainer model (as part of the workshops) assures capability building in tools and facilitation so that programs can be run independent of external trainers and consultants.

Broad involvement

In addition to internal (country organizations) and external customers, the senior management levels at BSO have also been involved from the outset, helping co-create the program and running a customer journey workshop on Service Management. Simion-Popescu welcomes this approach: “Employees are seen as customers and key stakeholders. By building empathy for one’s colleagues and understanding how that empathy was developed, people understand each other better. This in turn means you automatically become a customer-centric organization and automatically collaborate in a way that is customer-centric.”

“The initial skepticism about seeing service design as a means to build a customer-centric mindset quickly changed as we worked with tools such as the customer journey map. Together with proper facilitation, this creates a practical way of working which is understandable for all participants.”

— Vladimir Tsaklev, Continuous Process Improvement Leader

Phased outcomes

An ambitious goal like becoming the best shared services organization in the beverage industry requires changing people’s behavior – and that does not happen overnight. Tim Schuurman reinforces the importance of celebrating small wins at different phases of the project. “At the outset you have outcomes such as ensuring senior management commitment, engaging stakeholders in customer journey mapping, and sharing the customer journey narrative with employees. As the project evolves, the goals are improved employee satisfaction, enhanced customer satisfaction, better financial results, and a best-in-class shared service center.”

The BSO project now has been handed over to the organization and is running independently of external consultants and trainers. Within the first year, the service design approach has achieved widespread support from stakeholders, along with a commitment to continuous involvement (design research) from customers in all major change initiatives.

Some 90 employees have shared the customer journey narrative and 2 customer (employee) journey workshops a year are planned for each service department. Last but not least, some 20 new short-term and 20 mid-term service concepts have been introduced across 4 service departments. The fact that the executive management of Coca-Cola Hellenic has now decided on an organization-wide scale-up of the service design project speaks volumes for its success.

Various levels of questions

Often the starting point for design research projects consists of a few layers. Most urgent and obvious are the short-term and specific questions from the project team (e.g., developers and designers). They are working with an agile approach that entails developing new features in a fast-paced process. They are naturally most interested in specific answers to the questions they encounter in their current work, preferably to be delivered on short notice. The issues they face often change over time, so in various stages of the design research process new or altered interests and questions may come up and will get folded into the ongoing design research. It is of course very important to answer these questions, but gearing all of the design research toward answering them will limit the scope of the research to what is already in the focus. This risks not touching on more surprising angles on the topic that might have been discovered via design research.

Other stakeholders in the team and the wider organization (e.g., product managers and researchers) usually also have an interest in exploring more holistic overarching themes related to the type of product or service they are working on. Finding the answers to their more strategic and long-term questions needs a bit more open-ended exploration. Ideally the design research approach caters for both these types of stakeholders and their questions: while collecting data to answer specific short-term questions, it is also possible to collect data to answer more strategic and long-term questions.

“We need to cater for questions from different types of stakeholders, with different speeds and focuses.”

— Katie Tzanidou, UX Research Manager, Google

Various speeds for exploration

Catering for a moving target through design research demands a process of regular quick update meetings to align the ongoing work with the progressive thinking of the various stakeholders. During these meetings the intermediary results from the design research are shared, even if they are still rough and unrefined. There is no point in waiting until the end of the design research process before making the insights and research assets available, as the team may then already have moved on and no longer be engaged with the explorations. Meeting regularly and aiming for progressively informed conversations ensures that the results of the design research get better over time and are better aligned to the needs and interest of the stakeholders.

This is easy to say, but definitely not easy to do. It is a big challenge for researchers to work in such an open, transparent way while going through a few weeks of successive research stages. They need to open up the work process to produce and share intermediate results in quick joint cycles/iterations. This is a real challenge for researchers, as they usually tend to desire time to germinate thoughts and conclusions. Between STBY and Google we have tried, tested, and improved this process over time, based on a joint belief and trust that this would be the best way forward. From both sides we saw the benefits and decided to push for this. Of course, there were moments of trial and error, followed by reflection on what worked best and what we wanted to change. For each project both parties were very flexible and open to adjusting our styles of working and trying different things.

This highly collaborative and transparent approach doesn’t just ask a lot from the research team; also, the client team need to figure out how to best deal with this (e.g., the team need to decide who to involve in each stage). It can become quite messy, as stakeholders need to understand what stage the project is in and what the status of the intermediary deliverables is, so the process does need to be managed quite actively. It is important to guide expectations carefully as most of the materials shared are not yet finished. We have learned the value of sharing the research documentation at an early stage of the design research, even if we do not yet know exactly what may come out of it. The process of building on intermediary results, and jointly discussing the progressive filtering and prioritization process, helps to progressively refine the analysis and final results to better cater to the moving target the teams are working on.

“We have tried, tested, and improved this process of working over time, based on joint trust.”

— Katie Tzanidou, UX Research Manager, Google

Working with shared online platforms

So, regular meetings are important, as is sharing the design research materials in a progressive and accessible way. We use shared online platforms for this, such as Google Drive and Google Sites. Google Drive is the shared project sandbox where notes and preliminary assets are exchanged and discussed with the core project team. Google Sites is the platform to share the more consolidated outcomes and assets from the various stages of the project with a wider group of stakeholders in the organization. To guide this process of continuous exploration and filtering, we use a simple matrix that indicates what findings may be most valuable to spend more time on (the Know/Don’t Know matrix).

1. Project flow with both quick iterations and more long-term explorations.

   

2. Know/Don’t Know matrix.

   

3. Pyramid of project deliverables.

   

4. Co-creative user lab with research participants and project team.

   

5. Visual documentation of social context of use.

   

6. Visual documentation of positive/negative user experiences.

   

Various layers of deliverables

The intermediate and final deliverables of the design research project need to cater for the various levels and speeds of the stakeholders involved. They need to offer both a quick overview of key findings and a deep/rich repository for further exploration. They need to be very accessible and easy to scan, as some stakeholders are looking for actionable recommendations and others for more general inspiration or grounding.

“By layering the design research deliverables, we offer insights for different levels of interest.”

— Geke van Dijk, Strategy Director, STBY London & Amsterdam

This is where layering of the design research deliverables is key. Different assets created throughout the design research process fit into different layers of what we call the “pyramid of deliverables.” ⁴² The base of the pyramid consists of organized and structured fieldwork documentation (e.g., annotated customer journey maps, interview notes, diary or probe study returns, selected video clips, etc.), the middle layer of the pyramid contains the fully described and illustrated insights that answer the specific project questions (e.g., recurring pain points, typical profiles of people or events, opportunities for improvement, etc.), and the top layer offers a highly selective summary of the key takeaways from the design research and the recommendations that can be derived from those.

Additional added value across projects

While the middle and top layers of the pyramid answer directly both the more specific short-term and the more strategic long-term questions posed by various stakeholders involved in the project, the base layer of design research assets offers a more general treasure trove of materials that can also be mined for other purposes than the current project. When the design research assets are created in a structured way across projects, they can offer additional valuable insights over and above what is taken out of each project. They can be mined for other purposes as well, such as exploring new upcoming questions. When done well, the overall collection of assets from various projects adds up to a treasure trove with a more long-term value for an organization. This is where considerable extra mileage can be generated out of the original project budget.