Service Design 102: Understanding the Design Mindset

If you’re anything like me — i.e., a person who knows zilch about service design — the term “designer” conjures up images of people in trendy clothes fiddling with programs, endlessly tweaking UI this and UX that, with a coffee mug in hand at all times.

As it turns out, this couldn’t be further from the truth (except for that part about coffee, of course).

My reality came crashing down after a talk I’ve had with Helmes’ own head of design, Mikk Tasa.

During the 60-something minutes we spent talking — or instead, him talking and me nodding along — the word “UX” came up exactly once.

When Mikk said that design nowadays wasn’t about creating good UX but about making an impact, my eyebrow shot up in a quizzical glance and stayed there for the better part of an hour.

What I learned from him is two things:

• First, modern designers are psychologists three-fourths of the time; instead of couches and Rorschach inkblots, they use focus groups, surveys, and heuristic evaluations.
• Second, I don’t know what “heuristic evaluations” are.

Emotional Design: Can I Borrow a Feeling?

The work of your typical designer is centered around understanding users’ needs and eliciting specific responses. Their job isn’t that far off from Pavlov’s experiments with dogs in many ways.

(If you take offense at this comparison, you’re barking up the wrong tree.)

The responses we have to our surroundings are seldom entirely rational. There is a significant emotional component to how we experience the world.

Designers distinguish between three tiers of emotional responses:

1. Visceral, which is our first gut reaction.

2. Behavioral, which is a subconscious reaction.

3. Reflective, which is a conscious assessment.

Emotional design, therefore, is a design that anticipates and accommodates all three of these reactions.

The term “emotional design” was coined by Aarron Walter in his book Designing for Emotion. In it, he heavily borrows from Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs and marries it with user experience.

Maslow’s initial model described the necessity for having a person’s most basic demands met before they can seek out increasingly more abstract needs.

To put it simply, a hungry person finds no comfort in spiritual self-reflection. Physiology trumps everything.

Likewise, Walter’s pyramid of user needs creates a bottom-to-top hierarchy of utilities that a design needs to meet to elicit a positive emotional response.

First, we want the design to be functional. Does the product or service fulfill its primary objective?

This is the foundational question that makes or breaks the product before it’s had its chance to shine. A mug can look nice and feel good in the hand, but if it cannot hold water, the product is dead on arrival.

Next, the design needs to be reliable. Can we trust the product to keep working?

This is where many man-hours are spent as products go through rigorous tests. If we were to continue with the mug analogy, we need to be sure that it will not break suddenly when we drink from it.

Then, the design needs to be usable. Can a person figure out the product with minimal guidance?

This is where, for example, childproof caps both excel and fail: their specifically obtuse design keeps drugs out of children’s reach, but it takes the adults a few tries to open them, too.

Only when the design is functional, reliable, and usable can it become pleasurable. This is where a design goes beyond the simple utility and finally develops a personality.

Now, personality is inherently flawed as it doesn’t speak equally to everyone, but it’s what makes products memorable, even if at a small cost.

The prevailing belief is that designers — i.e., painters of pretty pictures as per most people’s understanding — only come into play at this last stage. However, the consideration for the first three design qualities is far greater.

On a day-to-day basis, designers deal with raw data more often than they do with vector graphics editor Figma.

Triple Diamond: Turning Uncut Gems into Jewels

Another common misconception is that inspiration is something that catches us with our metaphorical pants down.

It is not.

True creativity is not bogged down by a methodical approach and rarely waits for the muse. Quite the opposite, creative professionals are best described as “keen analytical minds” rather than “head-in-the-clouds dreamers.”

One British independent charity called Design Council conducted a study of vastly different companies — the list included Microsoft, Starbucks, and even LEGO. The Council found that, regardless of the company’s industry, people working there seek creative solutions in essentially the same way.

The name for this framework differed in each company, but the underlying concept was the same: there are four distinct phases to solving a design problem.

1. Discover: understand the issue.

2. Define: filter through and elaborate on the data you found.

3. Develop: find potential solutions.

4. Deliver: test out solutions at a small scale, and improve those that work.

The two diamonds that became this model’s namesakes — Double Diamond — represent a process of exploring a design issue on a wide scale first, then narrowing it down and taking focused action.

The Double Diamond is a framework that can be applied to almost any industry where problem-solving is required, not just product design.

For those of you who, like me, were not aware of DD, there’s no need to write any of this down. The Double Diamond is an already outdated, if still effective, model.

That’s the thing about designers: they have a pathological need to innovate something, even if it’s the very thing that helps them innovate in the first place.

As such, for at least a couple of years, there have been calls to start implementing the Triple Diamond instead.

If the first diamond focuses on the why and the second diamond on the what, the third diamond is all about the how.

While the Double Diamond stops at a prototype, the Triple Diamond invites designers to iterate on their solutions. The internal validation with the team and stakeholders is substituted with external validation with customers.

It is effectively a stage of discovery where designers learn a lot about the product, its strengths, and potential weaknesses. They fill in more details through usability tests and stay flexible to allow for change.

Turning Design Thinking into Design Doing

Sorry if this heading sounds like a caveman’s approximation of English.

The Design Thinking we’re talking about here is a comprehensive problem-solving framework.

Design Thinking is observational. It involves analysis and research — and lots of it. A common slogan associated with Design Thinking is, “plan for complexities to design for simplicity.”

As the name suggests, Design Doing is the practical application of Design Thinking. Or in other words, it is Design Thinking with a bias for action.

Design Doing is experiential and involves a lot of playing by ear. Its most significant takeaway is that you can learn more from prototyping, especially failed prototyping, than from conducting half a dozen surveys.

The creative confidence needed not to be afraid of discarding prototypes is what IBM, a big proponent of Design Thinking, summarizes with the “design early, design right” motto.

IBM believes that you will face fewer consequences the sooner you understand when a design doesn’t work. The flexibility for change is not a constant and decreases over time as more code is written.

Therefore, the costs and the effort incurred by having to redesign from scratch grow exponentially with each new project phase. They are negligible at the design phase but scale up as you approach release.

Design Doing allows mitigating risks throughout the development life cycle.

On Internal and External Design Teams

Since we’ve busted some myths already, it’s time to talk about the big one.

The idea we often encounter and rarely contest is that a business needs to be self-reliant, like a country besieged by enemies.

The first thing many startups do once they proceed to Series A funding is to get their own sales, marketing, product development, and design teams.

We all know the wisdom behind the “jack-of-all-trades” term, yet its meaning escapes us when discussing self-sufficient companies.

What’s the alternative, then? Is an external design team a more efficient way of handling service design?

These were my questions, as I, too, remained skeptical. But Mikk explained to me that by virtue of being hired outsiders, an external design team has the pull that an internal team can often only dream of.

It is clear early on whether the company at large is receptive to change. New processes are something one cannot force upon the entire organization.

All you can do is help them adapt to it and lead by example.

“About 99 percent of design projects are communication projects,” Mikk said.

There’s constant clarifying and explaining the input between different teams to achieve common goals.

The old “the artist vs. the engineer” dilemma doesn’t have to rear its ugly head when both operate from a design, user-oriented mindset.

This sounds incredible, but it takes a lot of effort to get there in reality. The road to it is paved with asking lots of questions — something designers have a bias for.

There is a saturation point after which asking too many questions can be harmful, but most design researchers never reach this point.

It helps to have an outsider’s perspective. Rather than simply complete their design tasks, the Helmes team seeks to “shape the organization from the inside.

As we’ve already covered, Design Thinking and Design Doing are, first and foremost, problem-solving frameworks. They work just as well for engineers as they do for designers.

The work of an external design team parallels the change in a designer’s role as a whole. While it used to deal exclusively with tangible products, now it’s more complex. Philosophical, even.

The goal of design partners is to be missionaries of a new design mindset.