Service Design Training with Experience Haus — Week 5
Documenting my experiences on this 12 week course
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 5. You’ll see the curriculum for the course below. We are being agile about where we are with this, so we are still completing activities as part of week 4.
Monday was a bank holiday which meant that the course ran Wednesday and Thursday this week. I actually liked this because I felt increased momentum.
Most of the work this week has also been relatively self-directed, working in small teams rather than as the whole cohort. I’ve enjoyed actually getting things done and it feels like we have a good basis to start research now.
We had homework to start developing a research plan based on the questions we had been working on last werek, so I set up a Google sheet for this and started thinking through how to address each. In Wednesday’s session Darek and I went over this again and just tightened it up with anything else we had been thinking of, anything that was missing or any rewording, and discussed the types of research needed to understand the questions. Darek had put down some more ideas in Figma, so it took a little time to cross reference and merge these. The other group (Imran and Caitlin) did the same and then we came back togeth er to discuss.
Ultimately our (Darek and I’s) plan ended up looking something like this:
Ultimately we had a few things which we felt could be answered with a survey, and the other team were working on a survey, so we asked them to blend these into their work. We decided to start pulling together a discussion guide based on general consumers gift buying habits.
While I think we have a good discussion guide under our belts, I’m a little less certain about the focus in on gift giving.
I know, that ultimately I am a very ‘zoomed out’ person, so with research like this my approach is to be very expansive. In this instance, we have a client who want to understand if they can deliver a fruit box gift giving service nationally. Their reason for doing this is because they want to become profitable (so that they can do more excellent community work and maybe purchase a much better electric vehicle for their rounds). So when I hear that I hear profitability, and fruit and veg selling. I kind of see the gifting as a red herring because it feels like it’s one of many options on the table. Instead, I start thinking about what all the routes to profitability might be, which is why I was thinking about local government commissioning, or companies use of fruit in offices or at events, partnerships and ways of expanding, and I really appreciated Darek bringing a whole load of research to the table about farming in the UK and particularly about farmers Mental Health (TLDR: precarious and not good respectively).
Caitlin also did some great research about people’s buying habits using YouGov:
We had a discussion in the session on Wednesday which essentially went along the lines of “the client has asked for us to research gift baskets, so we need to do that research whether we think it is the right approach or not” and my immediate reaction was “no we don’t” but that kind of reaction gave me pause because I wondered where it came from and why I felt so strongly about it.
I’m not sure why this is, I wonder if it’s the culmination of lots of client work which means I’ve got a radar for what to include and what to remove, or maybe it’s a kind of reverence for the expansive early stages of discovery, I like being able to see many paths early on before getting granular on a particular thing. I think I would be trying to identify as many aspects of the work and having small scale conversations with people who know more abotu those subjects than me before honing down. So it feels a little like even if we might be doing the research to knock gifting off as an option I would personally prefer to do that later.
Because of pace, perspectives and approaches, I’ve felt like the artefacts we have been producing are less ‘complete’ than I would like if I was running this as a project. There’s less ongoing certainty around the finished-ness of our planning or the questions we want to answer, or for the user groups we want to target, for example which means we are a little prone to fuzziness around why we are doing what we are doing. I’m here for living documents, but I know in client projects I also find I need ‘points of certainty’ that we can use to direct us as we move forward.
Either way, this is a course and not a real world project, and there is limited time and we need to get on with it to gain signals, so I’m keen to move forward and learning real stuff from people, so it’s not the worst idea for us to move forward, I’m just reflecting on how I would be doing this differently if it was a project I was actually working on, and trying to evaluate where I’m right, where I’m learning and where I might do things differently.
On Thursday we spent time finishing the discussion guide while the other team finished the survey, and we spent time thinking about what channels we could use to promote the survey or recruit people for interviews.
The survey is now out in the world, so people will start responding to it. I was hoping I might be able to do an interview but it looks like that might not work now. I think we need to think more carefully about demographics as Green Tomato’s customers are very diverse and this will have a big effect on how we conceptualise the market, for the survey this feels less worrysome, but for the interviews I’m keen to make sure we consider this appropriately. Anyway, I am babbling a bit.
I have, however, reached out to a BCorp based in Leicester to understand more about that. I guess this is one of those short conversations I talked about above. I want to understand a little more about that group as a possible market. Fingers crossed that person will get back to me.
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I’m really looking forward to getting some insights out next week. Onwards.
