What is People Centred Design?
Studio Notes | Short Reads
by Sean Casey, Service Designer
Our goal is to help you design and deliver better services, with the experiences of the people who use and deliver your service at the centre of the design process. But what does a “people centred” design process look like?
Design Research – Getting in Context!
When starting a project, we begin by reviewing what you already know about your service. We examine existing data and any prior research that has been done, allowing us to properly get a sense of the context of your service.
Armed with this understanding, we can then conduct in-depth discovery and design research, engaging with your teams, customers and other service stakeholders through interviews or workshops. It’s this in-depth research that shines a light on what matters most to your customers and your teams – the people within your service.
After we have completed our research, we can then turn the knowledge we have gained into newly identified challenges & opportunities which we will address with your teams in co-design.
Co-design
It is vital to us that when designing a service, we work closely with your teams to design together. It is important to bring together multiple perspectives from within your service, as these provide greater potential for innovative, and vitally, workable ideas.
During our co-design process, we present your team with challenges that are rooted in real-life evidence of your customers’ experience. Energised by this insight and a real connection to your customers, teams contribute their ideas, and gain new sense of ownership of the future of the service. If appropriate, we may even bring customers into this process… the more minds the better!
Prototyping
Ideas generated in co-design need to be captured carefully in order to maximise value for the service. A service blueprint captures in detail how the future service will operate, and is a starting point for transformation, guiding teams towards the future.
As the new service is implemented, we emphasise the importance of prototyping and continued learning. Prototyping means starting small – testing, learning, making changes, and refining the transformed service before scaling. We encourage your teams to update the blueprint and track learnings as people experience your service for real, so that the experience can keep getting better.
Throughout this entire design process, our final goal is to cultivate a mindset of design within your team. When your team are equipped to think with a design mindset, it ensures innovation within your service can continue long after we’ve left.
If that sounds like it might work for you, don’t hesitate to reach out. We can meet with your team and provide a free “lunch & learn” talk filled with vibrant examples.