A hitch-hiker's guide to service design

A presentation at Generate Conference London 2018 in in London, UK by Richard Rutter

As designers we want to create solutions that are easy to use and - ultimately - help customers achieve the outcome they desire with the least amount of effort and fuss.

If you haven’t been brought in explicitly as a service design team, your remit as a designer might seemingly be limited to improving the interface. A nicely designed user experience is undoubtedly something to strive for, but ultimately it will be in vain if the end result isn’t there for the customer.

Often we designers are placed in these circumstances because organisations misunderstand where the real problems lie, possibly because they are saddled with incumbent large IT solutions, perhaps the political will is not there, or maybe they have the right outcomes in mind but are looking in all the wrong places for solutions.

This talk will equip you with tactics and strategies to go beyond the interface and make a real difference. Whether you’re in-house or an agency, this talk will tell you how to ask the right questions, how to navigate the politics, and identify ways to get the right conditions in place to make an impact.

You’ll take away approaches for finding and nurturing champions as a way to pushing beyond the interface and making fundamental differences to customers’ experiences. The remit might not be there, but the conditions and opportunities might be if you look in the right places and nudge in the right directions.

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