Service Design in Digital Transformation

Have you had the scenario where you are trying to sleep at night and you just can't, because of fireworks in your brain on a design concept? That was last night for me and I had to write this down to calm my senses.

I have been assigned the task of defining the function of design in rolling out digital transformation strategy, especially since we have been practising it in our team and haven't been able to communicate/share the process with the organisation. Now I have so many post-its on my drawing board and loopy loop diagrams, it's adding to the decor of the house!

Why is design thinking so important? Because it suggests keeping the user at the core and finding the right problem statement! Digital innovation might involve many fancy new technologies - extremely cool features, but unless these 'features' are solving a pain point that needs immediate attention, it's just a shiny trophy on a broken bookshelf.

First, we need to figure out who the 'actors' are and connect with them. When they start describing their frustrations, fears and hopes, you are in the realm of making a positive impact. Co-creation tools like MIRO help simplify collaboration remotely and act as an intuitive mind mapping tool to define and share insights. There are many workshop & collaboration tools such as Team canvas, Eco-system map, Problem statement mapping, Customer journey canvas, 'How might we' sheet, Root cause analysis diagram, Storyboarding, Crazy eights, When-How-Who-What map, Tomorrow's narrative, Business model canvas and much more. You can access various tools and shortlist according to your context HERE

It's important to describe/ define the findings from the workshops so that the stakeholders realise the outcomes and own the decisions taken in the next steps towards digital transformations. The findings can be showcased to the entire team through various visual formats:

User persona: The core user persona is at the heart of the service. If the core user rejects the new technology, the whole process of transformation becomes invalid. We need to first understand the end-user via ethnographic research, go through the feedback received by the company, understand their behaviour to recognise what would be the smoothest way to onboard them.

Actor persona: Taking a step back and looking at the entire service, you'll be able to map the personas of the various actors involved. The service providers, the third party agents, partners, internal actors, support and other stakeholders. We need to also list their hopes and fears to understand the level of digitization that can be driven. Knowing the stakeholder mindset can also give you insights into behavioural economics.

Journey map: This represents the story of various mapped personas as they go through the service/ product discovery, exploration, purchase and feedback. It can also highlight the pain-point observed in the present journey and provide potential points for improvement.

Service Blueprint: In a blueprint, the service is laid out with its multiple layers: the user journey, the front end interactions with the relevant actors, the service providers beyond the line of visibility misc. This also is a good tool to map the 'AS-IS' process of the service, and clearly identify gaps within the system. We have also expanded this blueprint to create a layer of technology map, close to the actors. It helps us learn what is working and what needs improvement.

Pain point tracker: After the hours of interviews, discussions and workshops with different actors, you must have accumulated a mountain of problem statements. To make sense of the mess, it's important to create a pain-point tracker and rate it to prioritize your solutions. This rating is best done in a collaborative atmosphere so that the opinions are not biased and the right problems are addressed in the MVP.

Creating these assets helps us demystify the business process and plan for process optimization. The next steps would be to go back to our whiteboard and map concepts to solve high priority problems, generate new revenue areas and improve customer engagement. You can refer to the concept/tech inventory to plug and play systems that can form quickly solutions. Mapping competitor landscape, exploring new technology partners to create a wholesome contemporary product that is sustainable is also critical. This exercise derives assets like To-Be Process blueprint with Technology touchpoints, Business operating model, End to end architecture, Sales and marketing strategy overview, Communication-support and deployment roadmap, Timeline, Budget and pricing comparison.

Parallelly a heavy design exercise is started to create information architecture/site-map, concept wireframes, interactive rapid prototypes with multimodal experiences. These serve well in providing a tangible understanding to the stakeholders of what could be. This proof of concept creates a sense of hope, safety and excitement to see the brand reflect in well-designed screens.

Now the stakeholder has all the assets required to make a well-informed decision for levelling up their business. This decision then forms a path for phase-wise strategy, UX design, development and implementation.