When time and budgets are tight, it can be tempting to build quickly with a skeleton team, and focus on the technical demands of a product or service. This approach is often rooted in the assumption that technological rigour alone leads to a successful MVP. But this approach can lead to failure to meet user needs, underpinned by communication breakdown due to siloed working.
Incorporating service design methods and approaches which are grounded in user needs, use facilitation best practice, and visualise interdependencies, can help to prevent this from happening.
In a previous post, my colleague Louise shared how service design can add value beyond Discovery. Using the following insights I’ll go deeper how service design can continue to support teams as part of development or build phases of work.
Making work visible
Service designers can work with teams to articulate processes and journeys to make them visible. In a development or build phase these visualisations can be used to understand the component parts and dependencies in a system, align the team to ensure everyone has the same understanding of these elements and to gain knowledge about which team members can provide different types of information about the different system components.
Making work visible is essential to understanding the context of a feature where tight deadlines can mean a disproportionate focus on delivering features, at the expense of a more holistic view of a product or service. This can sometimes lead to service failure caused by blind spots in design and development. For example a technological decision about where data should be stored relating to a particular feature, can limit the use of that data elsewhere in the product or service.
Making the context of a feature visible through facilitation and visualisation techniques helps teams to understand whether any decisions made now will restrict possible changes later on. For example, service designers can translate process maps into a narrative which, when paired with user research, can help to reveal which features impact one another. Additionally if further evidence is required to make a decision, the team understands who is best placed to advise on any given element, or what further insight or data they need to gather.
Surfacing user experience
The user experience of a product or service is a key element that service designers can make more visible in helping teams make better decisions.
Storyboarding is one particularly effective way I’ve found to bring the more intangible parts of a product or service to life, and especially to bring developers closer to what users might experience. This involves a multidisciplinary team coming together to use user research insights to create a flow of the steps an end user takes in different scenarios. This helps build everyone’s understanding of the users’ experience. It can help to clarify and align a team when they’re making decisions about key functionality as the narrative device brings a previously unclear journey to life. For example, when a team needs to decide when the changes in the status of an application should be surfaced as notifications to a user.
Translating dependencies across disciplines
Ensuring an overarching and holistic view of a product or service means that service designers often act as interpreters. We simultaneously need to speak the language of delivery driven developers, outcome motivated product owners and user focused researchers. Service designers can help bring together these different languages through understanding who needs to hear what version of the product or service story and how to make it land best with each discipline (to reach the common goal). This breaks down complexity to a scale appropriate for the team – so we can define and size problems to solve them. It allows teams to solve the right problem, in the right way, increasing the probability of service success.
It might seem counterintuitive to slow down and storyboard a user experience when deadlines are looming, but it can be the fastest way to ensure that a product will meet user needs and expectations. Applied in this way, service design can provide teams with a shared language and a collective vision, helping us move from isolated tasks to a single, focussed direction. This holistic approach enables us to build products that not only work well under the hood but work for the people who use them.
The importance of facilitation and visualisation
Service design methods and approaches can help to derisk the development and build process. The combination of facilitation and visualisation approaches I’ve shared here are focused on making work visible at all times, revealing the context surrounding feature-driven work, and, most importantly, surfacing user needs and experiences. In acting as interpreters, and storytellers, service designers can help multidisciplinary teams and stakeholders best achieve their goals, while not compromising the technical rigour and focus needed for a successful product or MVP.
