Building a Service Design Practice for a Non-Governmental Organization

As a first-in-history service designer, I built a new service design practice, including creating and teaching design courses to IT and hiring to build team capacity.

Decorative illustration of circles and rectangles showing strategy and process

I was hired as the first-in-history Principal Service Designer for a nationwide humanitarian services non-governmental organization. A core part of my role was to build the service design practice from the ground up to support our vice president and directors on enabling human centered design throughout all of our teams.

Image Credit: Undraw.co

Service Design Practice Establishment and Enablement for Organization

Create, design, and facilitate three design courses about personas, journey maps, and service blueprints
Create and assemble comprehensive toolkit of reusable service design assets including workshop instructions, slide decks, how-tos, custom templates, and educational resources
Set standards for business of design for department and product teams
Identify design role criteria, create interview guides, and hire, manage, and mentor additional designers for product team and department
Assist directors with interviewing and identifying other talent for hire including accessibility specialists and product managers

Department Collaboration with Directors

Provide consulting to department directors on incorporating service design into their products
Build trust and communication across diverse set of stakeholders and teams throughout organization
Partner with accessibility specialist to ensure product exceeds WCAG and Section 508 accessibility standards and support where necessary
Create shared research repository to collaborate with other department’s designers and stakeholders to share findings about each other’s services

Living Organizational Values Through Design

Uphold organizational values of diversity, equity, and inclusion by ensuring all design work reflects this commitment
Consider chosen imagery, persona descriptions, meeting / research representation and flexibility, workshop participant learning styles, incorporation of accessibility, alternatives to digital, communication options, multi-language support, becoming trauma-informed, self-awareness, and soliciting feedback from diverse groups of people as part of all service and UX design work
Continuously learn about organization’s diverse and vulnerable client populations through internal training courses to design relevant services for everyone
Exercise respect for donor financials by choosing the most logical, effective, and efficient approach to design work activities while maintaining highest quality standards
Represent American part of global organization and share design approaches and learnings at international society meet-ups

Each course built upon the previous one, starting with personas, continuing with journey maps, and ending with service blueprints. My course series was created for non-designers using relatable comparisons like the service design of a coffee shop. I also referenced design industry sources as part of continuing personal education.

To keep the courses engaging and fun, I included colorful imagery from the decade the design technique started, emojis, jokes, interactive real-time quizzes, and began every session with an interesting icebreaker. One of my favorite icebreakers was everyone sharing their current theme song. We ended up with a department playlist that I sent to everyone afterwards as part of the course resource materials.

I had never created, designed, and taught design courses before. This was a great experience for me. I’m very proud of the positive feedback received, especially from the department’s vice president and directors.

Personas

Personas started with Alan Cooper back in the 1980s–1990s. Images from Vecteezy and Wikipedia.

Naturally, one of the first places to start was to teach everyone about goal-directed personas as defined by Alan Cooper. We discussed the big difference between user experience personas and those used for marketing. I also provided resources and templates to continue learning.

Overview and History

Personas History
Personas Defined
Persona Format
Comparing User and Marketing Personas
Personas Focus on Goals and Challenges, Not Demographics
Outputs vs. Outcomes
Building Human Centered Services

Types of Personas

3 Types of Personas: Preliminary, Qualitative, and Statistical
Who is Considered a Persona: Primary, Secondary, Supplemental, Customer, and Served
Antipersonas
When to Create Personas
Benefits of Personas

Interactive Quiz (10 Questions)

Discussion

Getting Started

Getting Started Techniques and Thought Framing for Non-Designers
Parts of a Persona Card Artifact
Service Design Personas for a Coffee Shop
Individual and Team Activity – Build the Frequent Customer Persona

Sample Screens from Design Persona Course

Personas History

Persona Comparisons

Who is Considered a Persona?

Antipersonas

Personas Quiz

Parts of a Persona Card

Getting Started

Coffee Shop Personas (Freepik Image)

Breakout Team Activity – Team Example

Jamie, thank you for an outstanding learning session on developing personas! I loved rolling our sleeves up and getting to practice and prompting us to think about how to avoid bias in persona development.

Journey Maps

The use of journey maps began in 1998 as a storytelling tool. Images from Vecteezy and Wikipedia.

After my personas class, I dedicated the next training to journey maps as a visual storytelling tool and helpful communication artifact for teams. We discussed how journey maps enable us to visualize how a persona from the first lesson moves through a scenario to accomplish goals. I also provided resources and templates to continue learning.