Using Service Design To Serve the Public

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I love social progress when it is replicable, scalable, and — in the words of my presentation partner Mary Ann Badavi — within the existing infrastructure. It was one of the reasons I joined the education advocacy organization The Education Trust and worked there for over five years. They use district-, state-, and national-level data to highlight systematic inequities in public education, and highlight areas of systematic success: An entire school district that taught each kid to grade level. An entire school that taught low-income students and students of color to high academic standards, year after year.

But we were always internally grappling with how to repeat successful outcomes: How to replicate success from one state, say, Tennessee, and repeat that success in, say, West Virginia. How to repeat the success from one school district to one right next to it. We even had trouble repeating the success from one school to the next.

We ran into our own stumbling blocks on how we engaged parents. We were appalled by persistent racist and classist assumptions from district leaders and teachers that certain kids simply cannot learn. We tracked successful school principals and discovered that they too could not repeat success.

Thinking, operating, and creating positive experiences at a large scale is incredibly hard work. It drives my personal values. But while I had the skills to think systematically as the in-house graphic designer, until a few years ago I didn’t have the framework to guide thoughtful people in an inclusive conversation on designing for social change.

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But if our service design implementation is only interested in seeing Shinita as a pain point, then we are not applying service design to the scale it intends.

I was craving an opportunity to lead others in a design thinking exercise to solve a massive social problem. When I was tapped to use service design for UX Week, I was excited at the opportunity to apply it to a public good like mass transit. The opportunity to learn as we went, to get comfortable being uncomfortable, and to be more deliberate and inclusive in our decision-making.

However, I did observe that service design within the existing models of private business  (a restaurant, a website, a food market, a coffee shop, a doctor’s appointment), presents certain problems when working in public service.

We Still Create Personas for the ‘Ideal’ Customer

UXers may be familiar with creating personas when journey-mapping, which is a valuable tool. It helps designers understand individual choices by scaling down the customer to a made-up profile. But a typical persona is used for products like a fitness app or a coffee shop. And only for an “ideal” consumer:

This is Scot. He is a 28-year-old fitness fanatic. Scot’s serious about his nutrition and exercise. But he hates the fact that his FitBit, which tracks his physical activity, and his FitnessPal, which tracks his nutrition, don’t talk to each other.

This is an excerpt from Greg Larkin’s This Might Get Me Fired: A Manual for Thriving in the Corporate Entrepreneurial Underground. It’s from a section where he teaches readers how to get a product to launch within eight weeks. In this case, it was for an app. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this example. But this personas posits an almost aspirational kind of consumer: young, male, very healthy, regular access to wearables, and physical fitness is his top priority. UXers are usually not building their thought process around a persona like ‘Shinita’:

This is Shinita. She has schizophrenia, and cannot get access to her medication. She has no clothes and is only wrapped in a blanket that was donated by the shelter, which is closed during the day. She has a cell phone, that was supplied via a citywide program to give the homeless digital access, but the battery is dead. She was just kicked off the bus for spitting on the driver.

This is the complicated, inconvenient reality of service design when it goes to scale. Designers struggling to imagine servicing people beyond our ideal. This is precisely where service design is best used.

Our ‘Bird’s Eye View’ May Not Be High Enough

Service design when it is mapped out across of key touchpoints allows for a bird’s eye view of where services are working or not working well. But in our view, we may only go as high as we’re politically and socially comfortable with. In trying to wrap our arms around the most manageable solutions, we limit the scope to the most manageable answers. Thereby creating piecemeal ‘innovations’ instead of looking at the entire infrastructure. A great example is my partner Mary Ann Badavi. Before our presentation, she searched for an app that would adequately work for navigating the MUNI. Instead, she found herself confused at the range of options, few of which actually made easy for her to understand the local bus system. Even fewer that understood the experience of being served by the MUNI.

Service Design Encourages Hard Conversations, Not Easy Solutions

Maybe this is about our inherent personal biases and assumptions about users. For example, in the case of Shinita, she is a woman who is experiencing not one kind of service, but several: mental health, public safety, the reliance of nonprofit agencies. But if our service design implementation is only interested in seeing Shinita as a “pain point,” then we are not applying service design to the scale it intends.

There are ample opportunities for public-private partnerships when it comes to design thinkers to work with the public sector. But it may mean coming out of the exercise with a few realizations. Maybe the solution isn’t necessarily a new product, but a more streamlined way of providing existing services. In the case of mass transit, fewer bus lines arriving more frequently. Designers in the most traditional sense may not have all that answers, so inviting service employees into the design process needs to be a higher priority. Rather than rushing to go out and get Post-Its, let’s figure out an outreach strategy where public service employees will participate in a series of service design exercises.