In this post, service designer Andy Ireland reflects on what it has been like to move from a lead product design role to a service design role at BT.
I’ve spent close to 10 years working my way through graphic design roles, into the world of digital design as a user experience designer, honing my UI skills until becoming a product designer. The opportunity to become a service designer within BT Consumer Digital came up — an opportunity I was so lucky to have in our current climate. It’s something I’ve always wanted to explore.In this post I am picking up on the past 12 months of my service design life from the moment I switched roles to the present day.
I hope this post inspires and gives some insight for anyone considering an opportunity in service design or anyone who is just curious about the role.
So, what are the differences?
From problem solving to problem framing
Something I really struggled with in my first few months of becoming a service designer was the move away from having something tangible to show and share at the end of a working day.
As a product designer, my ‘bread and butter’ was to take a brief or problem and come up with a creative solution that would both solve a problem and meet a brief. For example: increase order numbers, input a new way for customers to pay for something. All things that are essential to great digital products.
My role as a service designer within BT was to look at new upcoming initiatives, customer problems and goals and to be able to identify what should / should not be worked on as well as ensure all the dots across the business are connected. This is something we are enabling all our designers to do with the help of service design as we progress along our UCD maturity model.
Framing the correct problem to solve is key to solving customer problems and ensuring you have the best services for your customers — as I explained in a previous post How Service Design is improving our ways of working.
Becoming proactive rather than reactive
…And by this I don’t mean that product designers are not proactive, far from it!
What I mean is that as a service designer, a lot of my role has been to work with various teams — including product designers and alliances both within and outside of digital — to build a holistic picture of the customer problems to focus on. I do this rather than taking on a brief, problem, innovation, idea or whatever comes my way.
This has been the most rewarding part of my job. As a product designer it was very rare that I was able to frame the problem or have a chance to be involved (this has changed a lot at BT in recent times). Problem framing and proposition creation happened in other teams and was ‘thrown over the fence’ to the digital delivery teams.
In BT Consumer we are seeing huge benefits in involving our delivery teams within the problem framing and identification space and my role has been primarily to plan, facilitate and articulate those conversations again, connecting the dots and providing direction and strategy to the business.
Having a holistic, front to back view
The biggest difference in my service role compared to product dsign is having a ‘holistic, front to back view’ — not just across the various channels we have such as retail, digital and contact centres, but also across both the front end (what a customer sees and interacts with) and the back end (behind the scenes ways of working and tech) that we have here at BT.
There is a wealth of information, interaction, conversation and collaboration to both facilitate and contribute to at this high level.
Being able to have this view and work with all those across it really helps with the problem framing exercises we undertake as well as connecting teams and people together, again to improve and ensure our customers can achieve their goals by using our services.