Service Design Training with Experience Haus — Week 3
Documenting my experiences on this 12 week course which takes place 2 nights a week.
I recently left my role as Associate Director at Social Finance via voluntary redundancy. As part of this change I decided that I would look to use my skills in a service design role.
We have just completed Week 3. You’ll see the curriculum for the course below:
This week things started getting a little more exciting. After pulling together the discussion guide for our client last week, we got to meet the client on Monday and ask some of our questions to flesh out the brief.
At the first part of the session we went through all of our questions and prioritised the key areas together in FigJam
It was genuinely so lovely to speak with Nisha, who runs Green Tomato in Leicester. Green Tomato are a carbon neutral green grocer who sell via their converted milk float.
Nisha had been planning somethign like this quite deeply before 2020 but then when Covid hit, she took the leap, converted the milk float and got going selling high quality fruit and veg in her local area.
One of the reasons I love doing research is because of how often you come across people just pulling the stops out to do something incredible, and Nisha is just like that, she saw an opportunity and she has really strong principles around quality and sustainability. She’s also an experimenter, which is so nice, she’s tried lots of things along the way, learned loads about what works and what doesn’t or gone where it feels like there is need.
One of my favourite things about the interview was a question that the team had sent in advance which she answered. What three words would you use to describe Green Tomato?
“Mine: fresh, sustainable, goodness. But my husband answered differently, he said: quality, community, service. That’s what we are all about as well.”
It’s a reminder to me that sometimes some of the simplest questions can really help to shine a light.
The kind of exam question we have is around online gifts and how the company could expand into that. We’ve at the very early stages of investigating and gathering stuff around this and sensemaking. It’s fun.
One thing I’ve been reflecting on is that Daniel, our trainer, has encouraged us to do our own research and to incorporate visuals and prompts in this. I’m really appreciating this as I think this is something that has been missing in my research practice in my most recent role. There’s this kind of approach to research which is that it’s desk research, we read and digest that and we do qual and quant research based around this, but this hasn’t incorporated imagery, videos or ideas that help to bring ideas to life. I want to do more of this.
I really love the imagery above because it’s so clear and simple and it also tells me something about the organisation. It shows me that there is real thought to how to make something clear for customers, that this is an organisation who have done ‘the hard work to make things simple’. I also have Ellen Lupton’s recent UX Podcast episode — very much feeling the rule of threes here!
On Wednesday we started with an overview of research. It was good and there were some visuals I was quite keen on…
I think this one shows some of the complexity of the research process which is sometimes a little missed when we (I mean I) think about things from a methodology perspective. It’s a little more complicated but it’s a good reminder I think.
I also liked this diagram on traingulation and the prompts about that triangulation means for different aspects of the work, to reduce bias, or to substantiate findings. These things are te kinds of things that feel so obvious to me that I would have ever articulated them so simply — haha!
After the session we did synthesis on interview with Nisha, we spent some time reviewing the notes and adding thoughts about things we were still unclear about, where we thought there might be opportunities to learn more. This was a good opportunity for us all to talk it through and bounce ideas off one another.
Daniel acknowledged for the group how this part often feels a bit chaotic or like there are too many unknowns. I really like this part because it feels like there are lots of possibilities and I’m excited to see how we take the work forward.
Next week we will be building a research plan which will be good. I’m enjoying being in the cohort. So, more next week!
I recently left my role as Associate Director at Social Finance via voluntary redundancy. As part of this change I decided that I would look to use my skills in a service design role. While I have a raft of experience and seniority, I wanted to use some of my upcoming free time to undertake additional training with a focus on certain practical elements and support to create a portfolio so that I can brush up my existing skills and build my confidence.
I’ve already started blogging about my experience along the way, you’ll find my previous post here:
You’ll also find my website here:
