Experience & service Design

Planning, creation and continuous improvement of products and services

learning

Research and Understanding: This stage involves gathering insights and understanding the needs, goals, and behaviors of the users or customers. It may include conducting user research, analyzing existing data, and identifying pain points or areas for improvement.

Ideation and Concept Development: In this stage, ideas and concepts are generated based on the insights gained from the research stage. Techniques such as brainstorming, workshops, and collaborative sessions are used to explore potential solutions and generate innovative ideas.

create

Alignment: Service blueprinting, ecosystem maps and impact maps are visual representations of the service experience, showing the different touch points, interactions, and processes involved. This stage involves mapping out the various components of the service, including front-stage (customer-facing) and back-stage (internal) processes, to identify opportunities for improvement and enhance the overall experience.

Prototyping is a crucial stage in service design, where rough or low-fidelity prototypes are created to test and validate ideas. These prototypes could include physical models, interactive mock-ups, or even role-playing exercises to simulate the service experience and gather feedback.

analyse & evolve

Testing and Iteration: The prototypes developed in the previous stage are tested with real users or customers. Feedback is collected to evaluate the effectiveness of the design and identify any areas that need refinement or improvement. Based on the insights gained, the design is iterated and refined to address the feedback received.

Evaluation and Continuous Improvement: After the service has been implemented, it is essential to monitor its performance and gather feedback from users. This stage involves evaluating the effectiveness of the design, identifying areas of success or potential issues, and making further improvements based on the feedback and data collected. Continuous improvement is an ongoing process to ensure the service remains relevant and effective over time.

case studies

genomics england - DNA as a service

Genomics England have moved into a new phase of their existence. They’re repurposing the service components and technology originally developed for the 100K Genomes Project to become the underlying service provider for the new NHS Genomic Medicine Service, which aims to deliver genomic testing for patients as part of routine healthcare.

Objective: Genomics England needs to keep the hard-won trust of their participants as well as engender the trust of future participants. They’d like to understand and detect opportunities for better serving their participants, in turn promoting their trust, with a focus on the various forms of engagement in place

Vision setting / Future Scenarios Storyboarding

Service Ecosystem Mapping

Outcomes

The Guardian - supporting free media

How do you get people to pay for the news, when it is freely available in so many places? What would people want in return if they did pay for your online news service? How do you keep journalism free and independent while still making it financially viable? How might we turn casual readers into fans and finally advocates of the services?

These are not complicated problems, they are complex problems. Co-creating value with the customers is a good step towards solutions. Understanding the ecosystem, as a group of related entities that affect each other to catalyse value, is another good step. Nurturing a culture of experimentation, “failure without fear” and space to learn is the only way to solve complex problems.

a Service Design Playbook for a New & Media Organisation

A big part of my participation in The Guardian’s product and service capability development was to help create a Service Design Playbook which suited the organisation. This included documenting and socialising best practice design frameworks such as service blueprinting, logic/impact and ecosystem mapping.

Service Blueprinting

Ecosystem Mapping

Ecosystem mapping: Services do not exist in a vacuum. The ecosystem shows how each entity may affect those it is connected to. The closer, or more “massive”, they are the more of an effect they share-like gravity. Depicted here from the organisation in the centre, through capabilities (digital & print), products and services, then finally to benefits (yellow). Benefits are what customers come for. How might we relocate benefits to increase access to them while reducing friction? How might we recombine elements to increase the value created by the relationships?

Impact and Logic Mapping

Having the provenance from business goals to the programme backlogs via actors affected, hypothetical impact expected and the metrics for measurement. A tool for setting up experiments and tracking health of services in the wild.§

BP - designing a future beyond fossil fuels

What does the future look like for BP as they strategically move away from their core business of making and selling fossil fuel products and they become a service provider? What happens to the forecourts and stations when most of the world is charging their vehicles at home? What other benefits can BP provide to their customers and how can they service them in the future?

Goals:

1. To map out BP’s capability and benefits ecosystem and design a new platform that unifies them

2. To show BP’s entities where they fit in this new ecosystem, when their features and offerings are modular and can can be used across the new platform

3. To discover and co-create valuable offers by integrating modules in the ecosystem and serving them via the platform

RBS (NATWEST GROUP) - Making engineering awesome

RBS (now Natwest Group) wanted to introduce service design into their engineers’ experience in order to analyse what they were going through to make them happier and more productive. Treating the engineers as customers we designed an insights engine to surface opportunities for innovation during the engineers’ journeys across different services at the bank. We used a collection of service design tools, technologies and processes to transform the engineers ecosystem to a data-driven enterprise which showed us where we could make changes that delivered clear impact against the goals.

Goals:

1. To use the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework capture impactful, key journeys from a customer-centric “outside-in” perspective and turn them into visible data.

2. To create a reusable and democratic system of work, a system of data and an insights engine to analyse and track impact with.

3. To ultimately make the engineers happier and more productive across functional, consumption and emotional aspects of their jobs.

Ministry of Justice

Her Majesty’s Courts & Tribunal Services  is an executive agency of the Ministry of Justice. It’s responsible for the administration of criminal, civil and family courts and tribunals in England and Wales.  With so many different courts and tribunals, of different sizes and in different jurisdictions the tools and practises they use have divergently evolved, over time, to be very different.  Many use a mixture of online and offline, digital and analogue tools and it is often not easy to check that their practices adhere to policy. Scheduling and Listing (S&L), the process of getting hearings into courts with the correct resources and parties matched, is one such area that needed reformation.

Vision

HMCTS had the vision to create a single, digital service which could work across all jurisdictions and scales.

Hypotheses

• HMCTS Scheduling and Listings Officers could use a common, but personalised, digital solution to replace all their current tools.

• A digitally connected S&L tool would alleviate many of the issues of inefficiency caused by poor resource visibility and management, such as judiciary, courtroom and legal professional availability.

• Communication would be improved by a single, connected solution which would reduce errors and increase customer satisfaction.

• A digital S&L tool would improve reporting for business intelligence, operational dashboards and management information.

• All parties involved in S&L would benefit from and prefer the new tool to their old ways of working.

Methodology

Jobs-To-Be-Done and Persona research (in the form of interviews, shadowing, and workshops) was undertaken across several courts and tribunals to discover their usual ways of working and behaviours.

Two separate prototypes were introduced for HMCTS to test the above hypothesis.  An OTS product and a Custom Build Tool were both configured to do the job of S&L.

Over a period the two products were taken to different geographies and jurisdiction and tested with users.

Usability testing for efficacy, efficiency and satisfaction were carried out over time through a series of Performance Simulation exercises and interviews.

Results

The findings from research and testing validated all hypotheses and recommendations were made as to how to design the S&L service of the future.

Anaplan Mobile Framework

Interviews, Sketching and Design Sprints

Workshops and Reviews

Low Fidelity Wireframes and Prototyping: Sketch Cloud & Atomic

High Fidelity Wireframes and Prototyping: Sketch & Principle 

thomson reuters - connecting data and its provenance

the challenge

"On 3 January 2018, Europe will see the update to the Markets in Financial Instrument Directive (MiFID II) and the accompanying Regulation (MiFIR) come into force. Focusing on core principles of the creation of fairer, safer and more efficient markets, this broadest piece of financial industry legislation ever will significantly change market structures. Now is the time to be selecting and integrating systematic solutions to prepare for this vast regulatory change."  Bloomberg

Goal:

To create a service which allows Thomson Reuters, their suppliers and customers to better audit and manage their informational assets. A platform to transform the ways in which Thomson Reuters manages third party data and content, from sourcing and onboarding, to building products.

Broad desire:

To enable the Finance & Risk department to adopt a more transparent approach to data management and in doing so become more efficient while gaining exposure to fresh insights.

The solutions:

Revelation is a platform which will transform the way in which Thomson Reuters manages and audits digital data content and product.

The platform ingests all obtained Thomson Reuters and 3rd party data, breaks down contracts and rights to create specific supplier services, and provides capabilities to recombine these into new products and services whilst offering auditable information on each entity's aspects through digital interfaces.

Users can view information, from various datasets, and combine or manipulate them with new tools. Everyone, from product developers to salespeople and customers can gain transparent insights on every aspect of a product and its constituent parts.

The system can identify new opportunities, using machine learning algorithms, to suggest the best information and packages a client should have.

NBC Universal - Unwrapt

A platform to gift people TV shows and movies from various networks. We designed a fresh look and feel with an interactive prototype for the app.

Concept: “Fun-damentalism”. People are getting militant about brightening up their friend’s day. Giving a gift can bring about a change in the way they feel through positive action. Unwrapt empowers the consumer to change their loved one’s day for the better.

Ministry of Justice

Creating an analytics platform for the Ministry of Justice's digital products and services.  Working with different departments and stakeholders to research the requirements and then craft a solution that takes event-based data and analyses them.  The output reports and visualisations are instantly shareable with all audiences to provide business intelligence, management information and operational performance analysis. Staff can strategically plan and model at the BI/MI level as well as being able to nimbly run operations with interactive dashboards and tools.

The challenge:

HMCTS and CPS did not have adequate processes and systems to measure their performance.  So they could not proactively improve the efficiency of their services. M.I. was slow to come and could only be used retrospectively.

The broad goal:

To provide the business with the means to extract, analyse and report on data and information from the Common Platform system.

The broad desire:

To enable users to understand how well they are performing against performance metrics; measure current and previous performance; and help highlight the most urgent actions to take

The MoJ wanted to have ways of monitoring efficiency across HMCTS and CPS activities in order to act in ways which led to improved operations across the organisations

From passive to active help from data

The broad solutions:

Data Supply – extract Common Platform data into a single view store and provide HMCTS and CPS with a data feed to meet agreed requirements

In-System Reporting – provide operational staff with the means to manage the business on a day to day basis, assisting in the planning and allocation of work

Cross-Domain data – work with the domain design facilitator to identify and support the resolution of cross-domain data issues. Data protection and IdAM

Main issues:

• This was new to MoJ. "Faster horses may have been ordered from Mr Ford" 

• Users have different needs and aptitudes

• New roles and hierarchies are rolling out

• Geographical dispersion of the organisation and their different ways of working

• HMCTS and CPS look at very different aspects of the same information

• "M.I." is usually an afterthought

• A brief had to be created as the users are not sure what they need

• No legacy system

• No historical data to analyse

HYPOTHESES AND RESEARCH QUESTION

1. OPERATIONAL WORK COULD BE MADE MORE EFFICIENT WITH THE PROVISION OF TRANSACTIONAL AND PERFORMANCE ANALYTICAL DATA

2. DATA VISUALISATION COULD IMPROVE THE DIGESTION AND COGNITION OF ANALYTICAL INFORMATION FOR OPERATIONAL USERS

3. THERE IS A NEED FOR NEAR TO REAL-TIME DATA ANALYTICS FOR DECISION-SUPPORT

4. IS CONSISTENCY REALLY NEEDED ACROSS HMCTS AND CPS REPORTING

WHAT WOULD SUCCESS LOOK LIKE?

• A DECREASE IN MANUAL DATA INPUT VIA AUTOMATED ACTIVITIES AND SHARED DATA 

• A DECREASE IN THE AMOUNT OF TIME ANALYSTS SPEND COLLECTING AND PREPARING DATA FOR REGULAR TASKS AND REPORTS

• IMPROVED FLOW OF CASES AND MATERIALS THROUGH PROCESSES

• IMPROVED NOTIFICATION OF THRESHOLD BREACHES

lebara group - customer experience

Over a decade old, Lebara is one of Europe's fastest growing mobile companies with five million active customers, 1,000 employees worldwide and operations in eight countries. Lebara’s vision is to be the brand of choice for 1 billion migrants by 2020. To that aim Lebara has expanded into new products and industries such as video on demand, money transfers, travel and more. The challenge was how to unify Lebara’s digital presence, which had grown organically with no oversight or unification of experience.

debenhams - ux for new platform

As part of the drive to improve customer experience across all its platforms, Debenhams partnered with UserZoom, a user experience research and testing SaaS platform, to help create better UX as shoppers become increasingly mobile.

We worked with Debenhams to help design the experience for their new digital presence.  User research, such as interviews, workshops, card sorting and other exercises were undertaken to understand the needs, before engaging UzerZoom's platform.

burberry world - platform uxd

While working with R\GA London we helped Burberry design the Burberry World platform integrated with a Salesforce base.  The platform was to be used by the full spectrum of their supply chain, from customers to suppliers with a consistent design and experience.

RESEARCH

• Workshops with stakeholders from customers to suppliers

• Field visits and ethnographic studies

• Salesforce capabilities and gap analysis

UBS Neo - PLATFORM UXD

Looking into the future of what its clients will need from their Investment Banking partners, UBS decided to undertake a ground-breaking initiative. Working with a team of 36 UX designers we created UBS Neo, an entirely new approach to investment banking client engagement. UBS Neo is a platform that unifies and delivers the very best of UBS; its people, content, research, trading ideas, pricing and execution capabilities. It was developed to provide the firm’s clients with a seamless cross-asset experience, and a fully integrated cross-functional experience, all in one place.

faberge at harrods of london

Fabergé commissioned AKQA to create a trompe l'oeil for their centrepiece window installation and we helped them deliver it. We engineered three over-sized, spinning thaumatropes - a popular Victorian toy, normally hand-twirled, that blends two images into a simple animation. 

An iPad app, embedded in a “magical dressing mirror”, helped visitors place themselves in digital versions of the spinning thaumatropes and share the results online.

research

• Real world - digital UX planning

• iPad application

• Animation pre-production

• Set pre-production

ART OF ARSENAL

We designed and built this online application for Arsenal FC that allows users to create and share their own Arsenal artwork. The website increases Arsenal’s digital membership by encouraging users to sign up to the service after they have created their personalised image.

nhsa go smart 

Go Smart is one of NHSA’s signature initiatives and serves as a national model for integrating physical activity across all areas of early learning in Head Start programs. It is one way NHSA delivers on its strategic mission to improve the health and development of young children aged birth to 5 and engage their families.

Our challenge was to take the NHSA's offline materials and create an online platform where parents, teachers and children could access activities. The platform needed to be easily updated by users and provide logged in states where one could save and retrieve personalised content.

We built a fun and easy to use CMS populated with illustrations from Peskimo (of Alphablocks fame).

Subra NFT platform

Tate annual RPT

Klombo bank

ARES Platform

FIN!