From silos to services: innovation lessons from service design
at UX Brighton 2023
Type
talk
Large organisations were never designed for successful service delivery — they are built around internal functions. Kate argues for a service-led approach that changes how everyone designs, delivers, collaborates and decides, starting by seeing services, performance and improvement value differently, with practical examples you can use immediately.
People
Kate Tarling
Methods
Service DesignService design examines how people, tools and organisational processes work together to deliver an experience. Map the customer-facing steps alongside the staff activities, policies and systems that support them, often using a service blueprint. Bring the relevant teams together to identify broken handoffs, duplicated work and conflicting responsibilities, then coordinate changes across the service. Use it when problems span departments or channels and cannot be resolved through interface changes alone. Include employee experience because internal constraints shape what customers receive.
Journey MappingJourney mapping brings research about people’s experiences into a shared visual account of stages, actions, thoughts and feelings. It is useful when a service spans multiple steps, teams, places or touchpoints and you need to see where those parts fail to connect. Collect accounts from several users before mapping. Arrange their experiences over time, identify common stages and highlight problems and dependencies. Work with the team so the map informs decisions. Preserve meaningful differences between journeys rather than forcing every participant into a single path; revise the map as further research changes your understanding.