Gaining empathy and understanding those who use, deliver or engage with your service is one of the most important steps of good service design.
You need to make the time and space for this engagement to happen at every stage of the project. By talking to people, you can uncover what is working and what isn’t working, but also allows you to gain a deep understanding of everyone who engages with your service, their needs, goals, fears and aspirations. There are different methods of engaging with users that consider the time, resources and goals for the engagement. The approach you choose will influence the number of people you talk to and the number of questions you can ask.
The key to better service design is gaining empathy, which starts with a good conversation.
These resources will help you start that dialogue.
As part of your empathy work you can create design artefacts that capture and communicate what you are learning. These are foundational to the decisions you make and are living documents. This means that they continually evolve with you as you learn and gain more insights. You could start with
How to engage with people
Gaining empathy and understanding those who use, deliver or engage with your service is one of the most important steps of good service design.
You need to make the time and space for this engagement to happen at every stage of the project. By talking to people, you can uncover what is working and what isn’t working, but also allows you to gain a deep understanding of everyone who engages with your service, their needs, goals, fears and aspirations. There are different methods of engaging with users that consider the time, resources and goals for the engagement. The approach you choose will influence the number of people you talk to and the number of questions you can ask.
The key to better service design is gaining empathy, which starts with a good conversation.
These resources will help you start that dialogue.
Interviews
Co-Creation Workshopping
Focus Groups
As part of your empathy work you can create design artefacts that capture and communicate what you are learning. These are foundational to the decisions you make and are living documents. This means that they continually evolve with you as you learn and gain more insights. You could start with
Personas
Journey Maps
Sometimes we need to go to the public and provide a space to facilitate conversations, one good method of doing this is.
Data Boards