service design

Matthew had a great conversation with Marc Fonteijn from the Service Design Show on how we work with organisations new to service design, here at User Studio.

On 15 September 2020, we interviewed Lou Downe, the former Design Director for the UK Government and the author of the book “Good Services”. Lou has been named one of the 100 most influential people in digital government, highlighting their pioneering integration of service design within the UK government. Lou’s prominent position and experience have enabled them to form firm beliefs about what makes a good service for end-users.

This is our first 10-point edition of what we consider to be the Essentials of a Service Design project. In other words, the 10 fundamentals that should not be ignored in the vast majority of projects if they are to be successful. If you bring a project to us, these are the 10 principles for which you will always see us rise up as one man or woman because we are convinced (and passionate) about their importance to your project.

Acting for a more human future obviously means thinking about people. This also means thinking about our environment, Planet Earth. Caroline, our eco-design expert looks back on our (many!) experiences with eco-responsible and eco-intelligent design. So that we have better understanding of the processes at work in integrating environmental considerations into our projects, and so that we can draw inspiration and make better use of them. For the common good.

Dear readers, please be reassured, this is not about revealing the identity of the ‘roi’ [‘king’, in French] of design. As everyone knows, the king of design is... Who is it anyway? No, here we’re talking about R.O.I., that is, Return on Investment, a term we also use in good French!

The design of products or services contains nothing new; they are all well-designed in one way or another. But design provides fundamentally different results from traditional methods. The “designed” product or service is designed to be tailored to the specific issues of the men and women who use it, and of the organisation that provides it.