Inclusive Service Design — for edge-case and mainstream users
2018 is the year Universal Design reached the Service Design profession.
Two weeks ago, a historic event took place. For the first time, a definition of a universally designed service was proposed and presented to the industry:
“A service is universally designed when the user journey is usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible and without the need for adaptation or specialized design, by selecting preferred touchpoints.â€
In a following workshop, an inclusive service design methodology was tested, providing a basic approach for how to use and validate the definition.
This post will briefly explain the definition, and present “how-to†methods for ensuring universal service design for the future!
1. The Definition
Service designers typically focus on developing holistic and pleasant experiences in a user’s ‘journey’ through a service, in order to reach an end-goal. In order to claim a service is universally designed, a service provider must simply make sure that all potential users can use at least one touchpoint at each stage of the user journey.
The current economy and government, emphasize on service delivery; from healthcare access, to visiting a museum. Currently, no one has the responsibility to ensure universal design for public cross-channel services.
Ensuring everyone can use public services, is a socioeconomic issue, a democratic right-based issue, and an ethical quality of life-issue.
Service designers can take on this task. We propose adding the definition to accessibility legislation; moving beyond the sole focus on accessibility of digital touchpoints, and towards real-life usability of services. In fact, we hypothesize that a non-digital user journey track is often needed.
2. The Methods
The methodological approach is very simple:
- Touchpoints must be assessed for all users.
- User journeys must be usable for all users.
On their ‘journey’, we want users to experience easy-to-use touchpoints. This means designing both digital and physical (analogue) interactions, experienced through time and in different phases, contexts and places. Using a Touchpoint Assessment Matrix, we can iteratively evaluate touchpoints.
Workshop participants used different ways to ‘score’ the touchpoints — some on a scale, some with textual descriptions to re-design touchpoints, and others simply ticked ok/not ok.
We used expert inspection and empathetic design techniques to assess whether existing touchpoints were usable. If not, new touchpoints were designed.
User Journey Mapping came next. The user journey mapping simply cross-tabulates the service phases and touchpoints.
For each identified edge-case user, we used ourselves as ‘proxy’ users to check that we could ‘journey’ trough the service.
Note that expert inspections are limited in their usefulness. In real-life, we would incorporate inclusive design to get insights from actual users; contacting edge-case user organizations to better understand pain-points, identify edge-case user groups, and involve edge-case end-users in testing.
The “how-to†methods we created worked well, and was applauded by the workshop participants.
3. The Future
Through inclusive service design techniques, service designers can gain the insight needed to determine which channels are necessary, unnecessary, wonderful, or in need of improvement — both for edge-case as well as mainstream users. Through this knowledge, service designers can take on the responsibility of ensuring universal design of services.
