Invention is the precursor to innovation. Invention is the process of exploring a hypothesis or prototyping a new idea, while innovation translates an invention into a solution that is adopted at scale.

Don`t confuse invention with innovation

Without an effective innovation process, there is no innovation or new and improved product or service, no market adoption, no revenue or impact. It’s also important to understand that at any given time in your teams and organizations, many will be thinking that innovation is a new ‘thing’, while others will be thinking it’s a ‘process’.

Demystifying Innovation

<ul><li>Problem diagnosis skills: To effectively solve problems, you must first learn how to diagnose, define, and frame the right problems</li><li>Navigating complexity skills: Today’s and tomorrow’s leaders need to develop the ability to deal with complexity and ambiguity and learn to adapt to changing needs of customers, contexts and climates.</li><li>Communication skills: Those who have the willingness and courage to communicate their thoughts and ask more questions and solicit ideas from their team will prevail.</li><li>Innovation-readiness: Those who are open to new experiences, accept failure as pre-condition.</li></ul>

New and Evolved leadership skills

<ul><li>First stage: initiating a project based on a problem hypothesis, creating a project (design) brief, and developing a research plan to investigate the assumed problem.</li><li>Second stage: investigating and validating the needs associated with the problem hypothesis.</li><li>Third stage: integrate insights and ideas into prototypes, frame and reframe the problem to solve, and test prototypes with external and internal stakeholders.</li><li>Fourth stage: designing, testing and implementing final prototypes, and then designing and delivering a solution to the problem</li></ul>

Four stages of Design-driven innovation

<ol><li>Strategic Design: design principles and practices to guide strategy development and implementation towards innovative outcomes. </li><li>Business Model Design: designing or redesigning of an organization’s or division’s business model to create value and prosper.</li><li>Employee Experience Design (EXD): design methods to designing programmes and experiences that employees desire. </li><li>Service Design: design principles and methods to service planning, development and implementation.</li><li>Customer Experience Design (CXD): marketing principles and design methods to designing product/service experiences</li></ol>

Business Design practices

<ul><li>What are we designing? (R&D, Sales, Marketing, HR, Management and Finance)</li><li>Who are we designing for? (Marketing and HR=customer facing)</li><li>Why are we designing? (Strategy and CEO)</li><li>How will we design it? (Production/Operations and Finance)</li><li>How will we know if we succeeded? (Management and Finance)</li></ul>

Examples of design-as-process activities

<ul><li>Product/Service: changing what you do or offer (e.g. mobile phone, OXO Company - Good Grip series)</li><li>Position/Market: changing who consumes it (e.g. new user)</li><li>Process: changing how you do it (e.g. Lean, Six Sigma, etc.)</li><li>Paradigm: changing why it matters and what value it creates (e.g. platform (iTunes) and organizational culture (fat or decentralized)</li></ul>

Four basic types of designed business innovations

If you strip away the perceived complexities and barriers from over-engineered internal systems and fear of failure, innovation is fundamentally a communication process.It concerns most people and their social systems intersecting with technological infrastructures and economic forces, to make decisions on the design and development and adoption of new ideas.

Innovation as communication process

Design-driven innovation demands an exploratory and combinatory mindset, one that blends critical thinking with strategic thinking, and curiosity and empathy with analysis and creative synthesis. The design mindset generates the seeing of unarticulated needs and patterns, and that triggers ideas and models for improvement that may be sketched or developed.

Human-Centred Design Mindsets

Innovativeness is the capacity and willingness to actively participate in the learning activities of the innovation process. It’s like a journey. It involves thinking (head), doing (hands/body) and refecting (soul). Innovativeness as a learned trait is an important indicator of one’s level of innovation-readiness and innovative capacity. It is mindset-dependent, but transcends roles, functions and job titles.

 Innovativeness

<ul><li>Communication skills: first listen and observe, and then speak, write, and interact effectively with others.</li><li>Perspective-taking skills: take on someone else's point of view when thinking and acting.</li><li>Analytical and critical thinking: analyze (processing data and facts into information), evaluate (questioning bias and interpretation), and conclude (converging on a decision or statement).</li><li>Strategic thinking: analyze critical factors and macro variables, and to synthesize information into an intent or vision for a course of action.</li><li>Creative problem-solving: think creatively about a problem</li></ul>

The key competencies associated with a design mindset and innovativeness

Human-centered design efforts require that all participants engage explicitly in divergent and convergent thinking practice. Divergent thinking involves generating many ideas or choices. Convergent thinking involves narrowing or choosing a single idea or choice.Divergent thinking spans creative, generative and imaginative thinking modes, while convergent thinking spans analytical, critical and logical thinking modes.When combined, these thinking modes help flex your mental muscles and push individual and team-based boundaries towards design-driven mindsets and innovative capacity-building.

Divergent and Convergent thinking practice

Successful projects result from effective communication, enabled by a well-articulated project brief. A brief is a document that outlines key information, a plan, and a process relating to a project. A clear brief aligns team members and stakeholders, reduces confining objectives, and enables strategic decision-making. Innovation instructors create challenge briefs. To facilitate an effective project-based learning experience, a business challenge brief is used. The challenge brief outlines an open-ended driving question or business challenge that invites investigation and resolution.

Challenge briefs

<ul><li>Problem hypothesis: summarizes a situational or contextual analysis of the proposed problem and target end-user population. </li><li>Stakeholder map: key individuals or groups that have a stake in, directly influence, or are impacted by the assumed problem.</li><li>Stakeholder motivations: the goal-oriented drivers behind human decision-making and action</li><li>Target end-user population: a group that shares similar characteristics and is an intended audience for product, service, or process design research.</li><li>Project team schedule: who will lead which task on which day and over what timeframe.</li><li>References and sources</li></ul>

Key elements of innovation design brief

<ul><li>Problem hypothesis: </li></ul>What problem(s) are you trying to solve? (as a problem hypothesis)? What customer problem(s) are you trying to address? (as needs)?<ul><li>Stakeholder map:</li></ul>Who is most interested in solving this problem? Who is most influential in solving this problem?<ul><li>Stakeholder motivations: </li></ul>Why does this problem matter? What is the internal stakeholder motivation to start the project and solve the problem? What is the external stakeholder motivation to resolve the need?

Guiding Questions (part 1)

<ul><li>Target end-user population:</li></ul>Who is our intended customer/end-user for this problem/challenge? Why do they buy? Where are they located?<ul><li>Project team schedule:</li></ul> Who will participate in the innovation project? What is the timeline? Provide details of team members and associated tasks, activities (be feasible and realistic).

Guiding Questions (part 2)

<ul><li>Aim: to generate confrmatory insight from structured datasets</li><li>Deductive methods: survey, questionnaire, poll and lab experiment</li><li>Inquiry: seeks to answer tangible ‘what is’ or ‘what was’ queries: e.g. ‘how much’, ‘how many’, ‘where’ and ‘when’</li><li>Value: numbers-driven decision-making</li><li>Output: transactional data patterns, statistics and broad segment-level trends.</li></ul>

Quantitative research

<ul><li>Aim: to generate exploratory insight from unstructured datasets</li><li>Abductive methods: interview, focus group and observational or feld research</li><li>Inquiry: seeks to answer narrative ‘what, how and why’ or ‘what if’ queries below ‘where’ and ‘when’</li><li>Value: needs-driven decision-making</li><li>Output: narrative data patterns, latent needs and niche population-based insights</li></ul>

Qualitative research

Primary research involves direct engagement with the intended end-user or research subject population. (observation, interviews, focus groups, online chat rooms, questionnaires and surveys)Secondary research involves reviewing and analyzing information from primary research activities. (document analysis of print or digital media reports, whitepapers, and industry reports)Tertiary research involves referencing or citing summaries of completed analyses sourced from third-party primary and secondary research. (industry reports, mass media published articles, Wikipedia, etc)

Qualitative research data is often referred to as unstructured, narrative, or ‘thick description’ data

Thick data complements the more popular ‘big data’ (collected from large data samples), and when combined, they offer a complete view of the problem space in terms of what it is, how it occurs, and why it exists.For organizations, big data offers quantifiable evidence from a broad sample size for informed decision-making. Alternatively, thick data offers qualitative evidence from a very small sample size, shifting the dataset from scale (macro trend) to uniqueness of experience (micro meaning) based on human motivations and choices.

Big Data with Thick Data

<ul><li>Big data is a combination of structured and semi-structured data collected by organizations that can be mined for information, machine learning, and predictive modeling.</li><li>Big data draws broad patterns from massive amounts of data from large end-user or customer samples</li><li>Big data is used for informed decision-making to improve operations, customer service, marketing campaigns, generate revenue models, and proft-oriented strategies</li><li>Big data aims to answer ‘what’ happened or happens based on transactional events</li></ul>

Big data

<ul><li>Thick data is unstructured data in the form of thick description or narratives, that is mined for insights on human behaviour</li><li>Thick data draws deep human-centred patterns from small end-user or customer samples</li><li>Thick data is used for insightful decision-making to better understand people, their contexts, motivations and behaviour, and to design desirable products, services and impactful strategies</li><li>Thick data aims to answer the ‘why’ behind what consumers do or think</li></ul>

Thick data

Aim: to generate information from quantifying patterns; to identify expected behavior; and validate problem hypothesis (prescriptive)Methods: survey; questionnaire; focus group; interviews (scripted, closed)Output: seeks to answer the ‘what’ from a research questionValue: data-driven decision-makingExample: Net Promoter Score (customer recommendation)

Needs analysis

Aim: to generate meaning from stories, collect data (natural language), discover patterns of meaning and behavior, and develop insights (iterative)Methods: observational research and empathy interviews (guided, open-ended)Output: seeks to answer the ‘what, how and why’ of a research questionValue: insight-driven decision-makingExample: Latent Need Discovery (customer pain points)

Need finding

<ul><li>Observations: Both ‘facts’ and ‘interpretations’. Facts describe a situation or object as explicitly seen or heard. Interpretations describe a situation that is judged based on tacit knowledge of a similar context.</li><li>Findings: ‘Summarized facts’ that propose common meanings or themes refecting the facts, based on patterns and/or bias.</li><li>Insights: Synthesized interpretations of the facts, findings, and patterns refecting a deeper understanding of the people and situation or context</li></ul>

Need finding research (and analysis) aims to generate

An observation as fact is information that is observed to be true. Facts are verifable data that we all see and which can be quantifed. For example, we can verify that a smartphone is rectangular-shaped, broccoli is a source of iron, or that 600,000 people attended an event.

Observation as fact

An observation can also be an interpretation, a source of narrative data based on personal beliefs or prior experience.For example, we believe that broccoli is a healthy food choice, or that we attended the biggest event of the year

Observation as interpretation

Qualitative data can be verified through quantifiable measures, such as noting repeating patterns of similar behaviour within a context.For example, many people choose to add broccoli to their meal for its taste as well as for its added nutrients.And you may conclude the concert you’re at is well attended based on scanning the venue, the long lineups to the bathroom, and the merchandise being sold out.

Qualitative data can be verified through quantifiable measures

Lean Research plan: outlines the design research efforts necessary to discover the needs lurking below the surface problem. Prompts: How will you investigate the problem or user need? Where will you observe and interview your target customer/end-user in your research?Research Methods, Objectives and Outputs: outlines the desk and qualitative research methods that will be used to investigate the problem space to discover needs. Each method will have an objective and an expressed output.

Creating a Lean Field Research Plan

Place: Find a comfortable spot that allows for observation from a distance. With a notebook in hand, write notes on how people arrive and leave. If possible, use a camera or smart phone to capture objects and specifc locations.People: Observe with fresh eyes. Take notes on what you see (as facts), and what you interpret (as interpretations). If possible, use a camera or smartphone to take images.Patterns: While observing and taking notes and photos, look for patterns of behaviour shared across different types of people, objects and/or specifc locations.

Preparing for Field-Based Research

People: the demographics, roles, behavioural traits, and quantity of people in the selected environment.Objects: the items people are interacting with, including furniture, devices, machines, appliances, tools, etc.Environments: the visual observations about the place and space (i.e. architecture), lighting, furniture, temperature, atmosphere, etc.Messages: the words and language overheard, and the environmental messages or signage.Services: the organization’s offers (as services) which the target population is interacting with, within the selected feld study context.

POEMS framework

<ul><li>A need is something that is necessary; a critical tension with a present state</li><li>Need owners focus on the present state, since it is something that is essential or very important; wanted or required</li><li>A need requires immediate action, since it demands satisfaction or resolution</li><li>Needs can be diffcult to detect. Unlike a problem, a need is something that may kill you if you don’t address it. For example, protecting your bare feet in the snow to avoid frostbite is a need</li></ul>

Needs

<ul><li>A problem is an issue; a tension between the present, and a desired future state</li><li>Problem owners focus on the desired state since it involves resolving issues associated with goals, values and preferences</li><li>A problem may or may not be solved, based on priorities and the type of unsatisfed needs</li><li>A problem is surfaced as something that costs time, money or energy. The solution must be an improvement over simply living with the problem. For example, a problem is that you want new boots for use in the snow</li></ul>

Problems

Sift through observed facts: Take time individually to sift through your own data and highlight some key observations as facts. . Identify each key fact as one datum and add to a data sorting board (e.g. physical or digital whiteboard).   ‘I enjoy grocery shopping as an escape from the busy household’Sift through interpreted facts: Sift individually through the interpreted facts, which are also called assumptions. These usually combine one’s personal experience or tacit knowledge of what was seen or heard, and are important contributions to the data set.

Data Sorting: Sift, Sort and Label (Step 1/3)

<ol><li>Sort both observed and interpreted facts: Sorting involves moving the key data points into thematic groups based on themes and/or patterns that are observed individually and as a team.</li><li>Label facts into themes: Labelling involves questioning each theme or pattern that you have surfaced and sorted, which are supported by both facts and interpretations.</li></ol>

Data Sorting: Sift, Sort and Label (Step 2-3/3)

<ul><li>We observed that some customers combine their food shopping with personal ‘me time’.</li><li>We learned that some customers view the grocery store as an escape from their daily routine, where they can spend time listening to their favourite playlist or podcast, while also getting food for their family.</li><li>We infer that remote working grocery shoppers need an escape from their busy lives, and want an experience that combines a mini getaway with practical meal planning.</li></ul>

Вraw insight from your investigation efforts (Example)

Once the teams have generated a few problem statements, each member should vote on one problem statement that best refects the needs discovered from the data analysis process.It’s recommended that teams employ the technique of dotmocracy, where each member of the team has two votes. Each member selects their top two statements. The statement with the most votes is selected and proceeds to a round of peer or stakeholder feedback.

Setting up the feedback loop for the problem statements.

Framing is the process of defining an issue, problem, or context that influences how it’s perceived and evaluated.Framing is important in explaining or making sense of an issue, context, or problem and is influenced by personal narratives and conceptual metaphors.This framing effect is a well-researched cognitive bias in decision-making, and its effectiveness depends heavily on how the issue, problem, or question is presented.

What is Framing?

How we frame the question is critical in solving problems that seek divergent, novel and innovative solutions.The most effective way to overcome this cognitive bias is to frame the question or problem differently and seek out individuals with different perspectives. This strategy is all about reframing, a process of identifying and then changing the way an issue, problem or situation is viewed. The reframing effect enables biases and perceptions to be challenged and potentially changed.

“Business Design is like therapy for your business”— Starbucks executive

This textbook aims to guide, instruct and inspire the next generation of innovation designers, managers and leaders. Building upon an evidence-based innovation development process, it introduces, explains and provides visual models and case examples of what Business Design is, how it is applied across sectors and organizations, and its impact on decision-making and value creation. Students will read and analyze design-led innovation business cases from across the globe, discover multi-disciplinary strategies (from marketing to anthropology) and practice applying a designer’s toolkit to find, frame, and solve business problems in contemporary ways. Throughout the book, students will break down the process of innovation and move from initiation to implementation, engage in iterative feedback loops, and develop concrete plans for personal and professional collaboration and workplace application. For MBA and senior undergraduate students, this book offers a step-by-step and comprehensive reference guide to creative problem framing and solving – inside and beyond the classroom. It integrates marketing principles and management frameworks, with anthropological and design methods reflecting the diverse and in-demand skills vital to tomorrow’s workforce. For instructors, this book offers a way to confidently engage learners in the realm of design practices and strategies relevant to business decision-making. The pedagogical framework, along with a comprehensive suite of techniques and templates, offers both novice and experienced teachers a step-by-step reference guide that facilitates skills development in creative problem framing and solving.

business

Business

books

Books

product

Product & Design

Angèle M. Beausoleil

Business Design Thinking and Doing

<ol><li class="ql-align-justify">Weaknesses of style, and it is notoriously difficult for a person who has completed the formal part of his education to change his writing style.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Structure of the document: If a person's writing is unclear, it is most likely because the ordering of the ideas conflicts with the capability of a reader's mind to process them.</li></ol>

The reasons why most people fail to write clearly

There is a limit to the number of ideas you can comprehend at any one time.The mind cannot hold more than about seven items in its short-term memory at any one time. Some minds can hold as many as nine items, while others can hold only five. A convenient number is three, but of course the easiest number is one.

The Magical Number Seven

All mental processes (e.g., thinking, remembering, and problem solving) apparently utilize this grouping and summarizing process, so that the information in a person's mind might be thought of as being organized into one giant conglomeration of related pyramids.If you think about communicating to that mind, you can see that the problem is ensuring that what you say will fit somewhere into the existing pyramids.

The Need to State the Logic

The vertical relationship serves marvelously to help capture the reader's attention. It permits you to set up a question/answer dialogue that will pull him with great interest through your reasoning.What you put into each box in the pyranmid structure is an idea. An idea is a statement that raises a question in the reader's mind because you are telling him something he does not know.The way to ensure total reader attention, therefore, is to refrain from raising any questions in the reader's n1ind before you are ready to answer then1.

The Vertical Relationship

Fill in the top box1. What Subject are you discussing?2. What Question are you answering in the reader's mind about the Subject"?3 What is the Answer? Match the Answer to the introduction4. What is the Situation?5. What is the Complication?2. Do the Ouestion and Answer still fol!ow? Find the key line6. What New Ouestion is raised by the Answer·"?7. Will you answer it deductively or inductively?7. If inductively, what is your plural noun? Structure the support points8. Repeat the Question/Answer process at this levei.

The Top-Down Approach

You can work out the ideas from the bottom up by following a 3-step process.1. List all the points you think you want to make.2. Work out the relationships between them.3. Draw conclusions.

The Bottom-Up Approach

The key characteristic of all opening Situation sentences is that they anchor you in a specific time and place, and thus establish the base for a story to come. You begin writing the Situation by making a statement about the subject with which you know the reader will agree, because you are telling him something that he knows to be, or will accept as, true. If you find you don't want to begin by making a statement about the subject, then either you have the wrong subject, or you're starting in the wrong place to discuss it.

Where Do You Start the Situation?

Using the previously established truth about the subject as its starting point, the Complication goes on to tell what happened next in the story that inevitably leads to a Question.<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Have a task to perform - Something stops us from performing that task - What should we do?</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Have a problem - Know the solution - How do we implement the solution?</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Have a problem - A solution has been suggested - Is it the right solution? </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Took an action - Action didn't work - Why not? </li></ul>

What's a Complication?

Part 1: The pyramid principle: logic in writing -- 1. Why a pyramid structure? -- 2. The substructures within the pyramid -- 3. How to build a pyramid structure -- 4. Fine points of introductions -- 5. Deduction and induction: the difference -- 6. How to highlight the structure -- Part 2: The pyramid principle: logic in thinking -- 7. Questioning the order of a grouping -- 8. Questioning the problem-solving process -- 9. Questioning the summary statement -- 10. Putting it into readable words.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

writing

Reading & Writing

Barbara Minto

The Pyramid Principle

A service, simply put, is simply something that helps someone to do something. The parts of a service might be provided by a number of different organisations but, to a user, a service is one continuous set of actions towards that end goal, regardless of who is providing it.

What is a service?

The only person who gets to decide what the service is, is the person who has the goal they need to achieve – and that’s your user. It’s your job to orchestrate all of the pieces of this service in as seamless a journey as possible, even if you don’t provide the whole service yourself.

Orchestration of service

The service must be able to be found by a user with no prior knowledge of the task they set out to do. For example, someone who wants to ‘learn to drive’ must be able to find their way to ‘get a driving licence’ as part of that service unaided.

Principle 1. A good service is easy to find

Where your user starts will depend on how much they’re already aware of what services might be available to meet their needs. Your job is to make sure that they can get from this goal to the service you provide, without having to resort to support.

Good services are verbs. Bad services are nouns

Without understanding what our users are trying to achieve, and reinterpreting our services in language that our users can understand, we often place users in a situation where, to find something, they need to know exactly what they’re looking for.The less you know about the situation you’re in, the support available to you or what you should do, the harder you will find this search. Needless to say, even the most patient people wilt at the prospect of this almost impossible task.

Understanding what users trying to achieve

Rather than using the words your organisation uses to describe the tasks it has completed, try to find out some of the words your user would use to describe what they’re trying to achieve.<ol><li>Avoid legal or technical language</li><li>Describe a task, not a technology</li><li>Don’t use acronyms</li></ol>

Nouns are for experts. Verbs are for everyone

The purpose of the service must be clear to users at the start of using the service. That means a user with no prior knowledge must understand what the service will do for them and how it will work.

Principle 2. A good service clearly explains its purpose

Purpose of your service =what your service does +why it does it +how it does it +who it’s for

Purpose of your service

Clearly express what the service tangibly does for your user. Be factual, avoid marketing promises. Stick to the functionality.What outcome will it achieve for the user?

What does the service do?

Sometimes how your service works is almost as important as what it does.Who is able to use it?How is it paid for?Is it a subscription or a one-off purchase?How quickly can you do the thing you’re offering?What is it about the way your service works that makes it quicker or more convenient for your users than any other?Are there any other benefits to your service besides basic convenience?Is your service sustainable or funded/made in a way that benefits society at large?

How does the service work?

This will probably be obvious to your user if you express what the service does and how it does it well enough, but you’ll also need to explain that it’s not possible to use the service to users who aren’t eligible or suitable for the service so that they can be moved out of the journey as soon as possible.

Who is the service for?

Possibly the most crucial of all: make sure you explain to your users why your service exists and what outcome it will achieve, both personally for the user and for society.Clearly communicate this to users – through things like the service name, description and even the interface of how it works.

Why does the service exist?

A good service must clearly explain what is needed from the user to complete the service and what that user can expect from the service provider in return. This includes things like how long something will take to complete, how much it will cost or if there are restrictions on the types of people who can use the service.How long something will take to complete, how much it will cost, whether they will be contacted and what else they might need to do after using your service are all things that a user needs to know to make a decision about whether or not to use your service.

Principle 3. A good service sets the expectations a user has of it

Whether that effect is big or small, knowing what to expect helps people to plan and take control of their situation. It gives them power – and in some cases the ability to make another choice if what you’re offering isn’t going to work for them.Most people base their expectations on past experiences, so if another company in another country has done something, the likelihood is someone is going to expect the same of you at some point.

Tell users what to expect

Universal expectations. These are the things about your service that are fundamental to what you’re delivering and are universal to almost all users because other similar services work in the same way.Assumed expectations. When someone doesn’t know what to expect, then an assumption usually takes its place. These are usually assumptions that are easier or more convenient for the user. Outlier expectations. These are the things that only some users might expect, based on a previous experience of a similar service elsewhere, and can very often be based on a better experience a user have had.

Three types of expectation

You won’t need to explain universal expectations to users when they sign up to your service. You will need to monitor these closely, though, because if any universal expectations aren’t met at any point, they will have the most severe effect on your user.Assumed expectations are  the things that are the most important to explain upfront to your users, because although they’re obvious to you, they won’t be to your users unless they’re experts.Outlier expectations. You won’t need to consider them in your service now, but you do need to watch out in the future.

How to ‘manage’ expectations

A good service helps the user to achieve a goal – be that start a business, learn to drive or move house – in as much of a seamless stream of events as possible. This starts from the moment that a user is considering doing something to the moment they have achieved their goal, including any steps needed to support the user after they have reached their goal.

Principle 4. A good service enables a user to complete the outcome they set out to do

What your user expects from your service when they arrive at it is very often not the same as the service you provide.What’s important isn’t the scope of what you provide, but whether or not the part of the journey you provide helps your user to reach their ultimate goal.

Consider all of the steps involved in
helping our users to meet their end goal

What it also shows us is that when we try to solve one small part of a user’s problem with one small slice of a service, we often don’t achieve the results we set out to achieve.Often, the perceived cost saving we think we will achieve in providing a smaller part of a whole service is outweighed in the number of people who have to provide additional elements of their service to pick up the pieces

Perceived cost saving

<ol><li>Understanding what your user is trying to achieve.</li><li>Get a good understanding of who else delivers parts of this service and how they relate to your organization.</li><li>Look at your organization’s ability to deliver all of this service; if this isn’t feasible, define what a rational scope for your part of that end-to-end service will be.</li><li>Consider which part of the service it makes sense to deliver first. Start small and build or improve in increments.</li><li>Look at how data gets shared between the organisations delivering this service, are there things you could share that make it easier for your user?</li></ol>

Thinking about whole services will
change what your service is

People base their understanding of the world on previous experiences. If there’s an established custom for your service that benefits a user, your service should conform to that custom. But be mindful that not all customs benefit users – some have been put in for the benefit of the organization running the service rather than users. Avoid customs that negatively affect your users or those that are inefficient or outdated.

Principle 5. A good service works in a way that’s familiar

There is a delicate balance between working in a familiar way, and breaking out of this to set a better way of working.Try to do something new without properly testing it with users, and you risk creating a ‘new’ way of working that is unusable because users have no prior experience of it.Equally, sticking with a way of working that doesn’t work for users just because that’s what everyone else does can be just as damaging.

Disruptive Service

Crucially, though, changes to expected ways of working in your service require a critical mass to be usable by all users. The bigger the shift from the norm, the more ubiquitous this will need to be for users to become familiar enough to be able to or want to use your changed service.

Critical mass of changing service

<ol><li>Research how your competitors work and look for patterns in what they do.</li><li>Understand if there is an easier, more intuitive or more effective way of doing what you’re doing.</li><li>If there is, test it to understand how different this is from your users’ existing expectations of how your service might work.</li><li>Make sure that any changes you make are intuitive.</li><li>Share the changes to the way your service works with others so that your pattern can become ubiquitous.</li></ol>

Making sure your service works well

A service should not work in a way that assumes any prior knowledge from the user.

Principle 6. A good service requires no prior knowledge to use

We need to think about:<ol><li>How does someone know your service exists when they need it?  Does your user know your service exists?</li><li>How do they find it once they know it’s there? Can they find it using their own logical searches for what they’re looking for?</li><li>How do they access and use it? Does the service clearly explain what it does? Does the user know what to expect and what is expected of them?</li></ol>

How to design service for someone with no prior knowledge

The service must work in a way that does not unnecessarily expose a user to the internal structures of the organization providing the service.

Principle 7. A good service is agnostic to
organisational structures

Separation of data. Review what data flows through your end-to-end service, who collects it and who has access to it.Incompatible processes. This can be one part of a journey that takes a certain amount of time, and doesn’t match up with the deadlines of another.Incompatible criteria of use. Try to map out all of the mandatory requirements in your service and see if these are consistent across all touchpoints.Inconsistent language. Create a taxonomy of the things a user might need to refer to and make sure that these are the same in all areas of your service.

Four fundamental ways that cause siloed, fragmented journeys of our services

A good service requires as minimal interaction from a user as possible to complete the outcome that they’re trying to achieve. Sometimes this will mean proactively meeting a user’s needs without them instigating an interaction with your organisation. This may mean occasionally slowing the progress of a service in order to help a user absorb information or make an important decision without having to contact you to help them.

Principle 8. A good service requires as few steps as possible to complete

Services are made of small pieces, but they are more than the sum of their parts. How many steps your service has and how quickly your user goes through them is often as important as what those parts do.The number and pace of the steps within your service can be designed in a way that best suits what your user wants to achieve, rather than just evolving from the conditions they’re in.

Services are made of small pieces

There is a simple rule: the number of steps in your service should be equal to the number of decisions your user has to make, no more and no less.Don’t just design the steps of your service, design the space between them.

Number of steps in your service

<ol><li>Review where decisions need to be made in your service. If you have too many steps, look to merge these into fewer steps to make the journey simpler for your user. </li><li>Allow users to focus on one task at a time. Users need to be able to focus in order to make a decision. Look at areas of your service where multiple decisions have been merged into one step and consider breaking these down.</li><li>Think about how fast or slow your steps need to be. Look at how big the decisions in your service are, or where your user might need to be more focused and ‘present in the moment’ to experience something.</li></ol>

Deciding how many steps your service needs

In reality, although there are points in a journey where failure has more of an effect than another – being able to complete a service from start to finish is far more important than having a great experience in one moment, then not be able to complete the rest of the journey.

One moment in a service is more important than any other.

When we build a minimum viable service, we should be aiming for a service through which most of our users will navigate to achieve the goal they set out to do. Starting from the point of view of a minimum viable service rather than ‘product’ forces us to think about which areas need to be in place before your service is usable.

Minimum viable service

While it’s vital for services to be consistent, they are also complex and varied, and some parts of your service will need to look and behave differently from the rest.However, consistency is very often mistaken as uniformity, where we aim for a service experience that is exactly the same across all parts of the journey, all channels, and between different users.When users need a solution to a complex problem, it’s a human, tailored response that they need, not a scripted bot. But responding and working with a user’s individual circumstance with freedom requires empowered staff.

Consistency of service

<ol><li>Consistency across user journey. Ensure that you think about the minimum viable service, and make a plan to ensure that there are no gaps in your user’s journey that have been neglected.</li><li>Consistency in each channel. Make sure you’ve tested each channel from start to finish with your journey, and have tested what the transition is between these channels.</li><li>Consistency over time. Organise regular reviews to make sure your service is tested from every angle on a regular basis.</li><li>Consistency between users. You may offer premium versions of your service, but make sure it is clear why you do this.</li></ol>

Four dimensions of service consistency

A service should direct all users to a clear outcome, regardless of whether the user is eligible or suitable to use the service. No user should be left behind or stranded within a service without knowing how to continue.

Principle 10. A good service should have no dead ends

Some of these dead ends will be for legitimate reasons – for example, a person who isn’t qualified for a place at a certain university won’t be able to get a place at that university.But some happen because we failed to account for a particular situation a user might be in – for example, they might not be able to provide proof of their previous qualifications because they qualified a long time ago.

Dead Ends

This is the one ‘intentional’ dead end your user might face – where someone has a situation that simply doesn’t fit your service. For example, someone lives too far away for you to deliver to them, or doesn’t meet the criteria your service has set out for another reason.Although your service might not suit them, try to deal with these dead ends as elegantly as possible, providing onward links to relevant support where possible. Just because they aren’t able to use your service to reach their end goal doesn’t mean your service isn’t part of their journey to be able to do this.

Reason for a Dead End 1. Users are not eligible to use your service

Sometimes dead ends happen more gradually than simply giving someone no option to continue. Services that are very simple for those on the ‘happy path’ often hide complex and hard to navigate side routes that don’t necessarily ‘stop’ a user from doing something, but slow them down to the extent that they can’t get what they need to do done.If your service has complex elements further down the route, it’s best to explain these at the start, rather than giving users the expectation that your service is simple all the way through.

Reason for a Dead End 2. Users have strayed off the beaten track

Common barriers within your particular service<ol><li>The ability to remember long numbers</li><li>The ability to follow complex instructions</li><li>The ability to remember dates, times and appointments</li><li>The ability to get somewhere physically</li><li>The ability to get somewhere or do something during working hours</li><li>The ability to read a language fluently</li><li>The ability to read PDFs or access ‘non-accessible’ digital services</li></ol>

Reason for a Dead End 3. Users can’t do something

Just as you have done with the things you presume your user can do, the first task is to identify all of the things you assume your users will have access to at any given point in their journey, and analyse what happens when they don’t have access to these things.As a rule of thumb, you should try to minimise this list of absolute requirements to as few as possible while ensuring your service is secure.

Reason for a Dead End 4. Users don’t have access to something

<ul><li>A phone number</li><li>A bank account or credit/debit card</li><li>An email address</li><li>Official identification, such as passport, driving licence or state-issued ID card</li><li>An address, or proof of address</li><li>Any of the above, in the country that you’re operating in</li><li>Any unique identifiers your company uses to identify that user, for example, policy numbers, account numbers, booking references</li></ul>

The most common things most services
presume users have ready access to

Many of our stereotypes about who has and who hasn’t got access to the internet are simply wrong. However, much more damaging is our presumption that access to the internet is stable and predictable.

Access to Internet

The service must be usable by everyone who needs to use it, regardless of their circumstances or abilities. No one should be less able to use the service than anyone else.

Principle 11. A good service is usable by everyone, equally

This is why we need to go beyond thinking about accessibility, with all of the inherent biases that come along with creating a baseline of ‘normal’ versus those with ‘access needs’, and start to think in terms of ‘inclusion’ of a full spectrum of needs instead.With services, it’s also important to consider how all of these needs will affect each user across each channel, rather than just looking at the experience of a digital service.

There’s no such thing as a ‘normal’ user

Services in the internet age are not only defined by the user who’s looking for them but composed of ‘small pieces loosely joined’

Service design is a rapidly growing area of interest in design and business management. There are a lot of books on how to get started, but this is the first book that describes what a "good" service is and how to design one. This book lays out the essential principles for building services that work well for users. Demystifying what we mean by a "good" and "bad" service and describing the common elements within all services that mean they either work for users or don't. A practical book for practitioners and non-practitioners alike interested in better service delivery, this book is the definitive new guide to designing services that work for users.

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