Service design: designing the complete experience of your service
Launching a service, or do you have one that keeps stalling?
Our job is first to understand users, their needs, their abilities and their limits across all kinds of products and services. It's then to turn that knowledge into journeys, mockups and prototypes that make your service more efficient, engaging and usable. We think about it as a whole, from first contact all the way through, without forgetting the backstage: the staff who operate the service are its hidden side.
When a service is lived in fragments
You have a service, and you're wondering about its performance in terms of the experience your users actually have, in its real environment. It often looks like one of these situations:
- Understanding why people call or come in when a website already exists.
- Working out why users still get stuck in the same place despite a redesigned interface.
- Stopping users from repeating their story because teams pass the buck.
- Designing a service that works for everyone, including the least comfortable users.
The takeaway
This service interacts with other tools and other services, and your users have built workarounds to get around their frustrations and reach their goals. Redoing a screen isn't enough: it's the organisation itself that has to question how it works and the audiences it serves, all along the service it delivers. Service design looks at that whole journey, where the problem actually sits.
How we go about it
Understand users and staff
We start from individual interviews, held in front of the service, following a guide prepared to smooth out interpretation bias and let people speak freely. We don't only listen to citizens: the staff who operate the service are its hidden side, and their needs and expectations are part of the design.
Follow the journey, frontstage and backstage
We break the journey into its key moments, from first contact all the way through, and look at what plays out at each step. Through this work, it's the organisation itself that questions how it runs and the audiences it serves all along the service it delivers.
Co-build and deliver something to decide with
Nothing happens without your teams: the workshops involve the stakeholders, and business knowledge feeds into the design. We pull it all together into a service blueprint and prioritised recommendations. The detail of the method is in our definition of service design.
Where we work most
Public services and access to rights
Putting yourself at the service of the community means building tools that, one way or another, will serve citizens. We don't focus only on them: the staff who operate the service are its hidden side, and their needs and expectations are part of the design.
Regions and local authorities
Working with institutional clients has taught us to better grasp their specifics, the dynamics of decision-making, the constraints tied to the history of projects and technical solutions, and how teams work internally.
Tourism and mobility
For a reception space, what matters is visitors' ability to find their information, whatever the crowd. We work on the layout, the placement of digital tools, the signage and how visitors interact with the space. With SNCF Voyageurs in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, we also designed the last mile of the train journey. Co-designing with four pilot territories, we brought out four last-mile mobility-service prototypes, one of which was implemented in the months that followed.
Services we've designed
SNCF and territories: rethinking the last mile in sustainable mobility
And after the train, how do we get home?Frequently asked questions
Designing a service as a whole: understanding users, their needs and their limits across all kinds of products and services, then turning that knowledge into journeys and prototypes that make the service more efficient and engaging.
UX design mostly works on one interface. Service design steps back over the whole service: we don't only listen to end users, the staff who operate the service are its hidden side, and their needs and expectations are part of the design.
We start from interviews held in front of the service, following a guide prepared to smooth out bias. We break the journey into its key moments, involve your teams in workshops, and pull it all together into a service blueprint and recommendations.
Yes: putting ourselves at the service of the community and building tools that serve citizens is part of our very purpose. We bring in the reality of the field, on the user side as well as the staff side, for a service that works for every audience.