BT - Defining Design Language

Situation
During my time working as a Lead Service Designer at BT Group, proving the value of Service Design and embedding Service Design thinking, the importance of terminology agreement, understanding and socialisation was required so that our teams are talking the same language. Whatever you do internally always works its way to a customer in some way shape or form, wether it be confusing experiences or slow time to release new products and features.

Task
The task was to create a set of terms for what we mean by 'service', 'user goal', 'journeys' etc. that can be used across the BT Group (EE, BT and Plusnet) teams when they build, design, measure, learn about and implement new products, features and services.

Action
Running a series of workshops with a group of SMEs to educate on the importance of the task, ensure views and opinions are captured and also drive decisions on the naming of our required terms.

The workshops ensured that;

1. Encouraging collaboration between teams and business units to form a shared understanding of our user needs.

2. Joining up the dots between the digital teams and the real world. Helping teams zoom out from the detail of day-to-day delivery to see things from a customer’s perspective.

3. Spotting the gaps where we know less about our users. This helps us learn more about our users’ unmet needs and helps identify opportunities to innovate.

Result
A defined set of terms were created and rolled out across BT consumer group so that;

BT Group a high-level understanding of their many user journeys and services. With a lot of squads working on similar journeys, work could begin work to avoid duplication of effort and disjointed experiences that could significantly affect users.

With a shared high level view of journeys and user goals teams can more successfully collaborate on designing changes.

With our user goals identified, the next step is to use these to name our services. But why is this important?

By naming your services around user goals it helps:

1. Users find your service — and helps them understand what that service does.

2. The business and teams focus on helping our users achieve their goals.

4. Product Owners align metrics and measurements with what users are trying to achieve.

5.Identify design patterns that are used so that we can design for consistency and efficiency.