My favorite thing as a designer is collaborating with clients to answer big, messy questions. The process often involves several moving parts, including institutional knowledge of the organization, internal and external procedures, and services.
Layering onto that are the people using the services, their discrete needs, and their challenges. Imagine your nonprofit organization as a train station with essential dependencies that must happen to run smoothly. Service design is a tool that can support and capture the critical moving parts and pieces to make beneficial decisions to better serve your community's changing needs.
Service design is unlike user experience (UX) design, which tends to identify a specific problem or touchpoint with a beneficiary. Service design is a problem-solving approach that takes a holistic view to "connect the dots" of your organization, services, and clients. You may already be familiar with terms like "human-centered design" and have even implemented user interviews and user testing techniques to understand your clients' needs. These insights will support your service design for implementing solutions at your nonprofit.
As we're connecting the dots, we start to examine how things relate to one another. What are the dependencies, where are the gaps, where are the opportunities? Service design uses a variety of approaches to streamline and improve the way people interact with your organization. Ultimately, we use our findings to support a consistent, meaningful, and remarkable experience for the people you serve.
Principle 1: People-focused. Service design starts and ends with the people who are the foundation of your organization, including your clients, volunteers, internal team members, and other stakeholders.
Principle 2: Participatory. Service design encourages active communication, sharing your team's insights to co-own the process and solve problems together.
Principle 3: Research-based. Service design includes utilizing your clients' knowledge (e.g., interviews, surveys, feedback) and data or analytics about how they're interacting with your service.
Principle 4: Iterative. Your service design will grow and evolve, depending on where you are as an organization or on extenuating factors.
The main tools used for service design are a user journey map and a service blueprint. These two complementary methods help us see multiple layers of our services. Combined, they capture iconic experiences over time.
Here is an example of a customer journey map for an online shopping experience. While it is not nonprofit-focused, the same principles can be applied. Each stream is a shopping task's main touchpoints that articulate the central moments, client emotions, and pertinent observations. It maps what clients are doing, thinking, and feeling. Note: a user journey map is not a single customer experience. It's an aggregate of experiences compiled from user research and subject matter experts in your organization.
All good user journey maps include the following:
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Adding discrete layers to the client's experience is done in a service blueprint. This captures the organizational needs that support the client experience: team, technology, processes, policies.
Here is an example of a service blueprint for an online shopping experience.
Taking our online shopping example into consideration, we layer additional streams captured in our user journey map, such as processes, tools, staff, and policies needed to support those experiences.
All good service blueprints include the following:
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Through collaborative methods that engage both customers and service delivery teams, Service design helps organizations gain an authentic, end-to-end understanding of their services, enabling holistic and meaningful improvements at your nonprofit.
Characteristics of service design:
Exygy partners with social impact organizations to design and build technology that improves lives. If your nonprofit is looking to rethink or strengthen your service design, reach out to the Exygy team or subscribe to our newsletter.