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This was originally created for internal use by our design community. It is not a complete overview of service design, but rather documentation that was used previously to support onboarding, find alignment and spark conversations about our practice and standards within the Canadian Digital Service (CDS).

Service design has the potential to improve the interaction between the people using Government of Canada services and the departments that provide them. Good service design creates a seamless, simple, and delightful experience — whereas bad service design can cause frustration and inefficiency, and potentially have a negative impact on people’s lives.

At CDS, we view service design as a mindset that can be embedded within our ways of working. Service designers are responsible for championing this mindset and helping product teams to be more user-centred. Service designers create and refine end-to-end services to help users complete their goals.

Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication, and material components of a service to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and the people who use that service.

Service designers’ work involves crafting design considerations for all the touchpoints different people might encounter while using and managing government services. This may involve the creation of — or change to — transactions, products and content, and may stretch across digital and offline channels provided by different parts of government. Service design can inform changes to an existing service or create a new service entirely.

The following are guiding principles that help us frame our work. They allow us to focus on creating cohesive and meaningful user experiences.

• Human-centered: Consider the experience of all the people affected by the service.
• Collaborative: Stakeholders of various backgrounds and functions should be actively engaged in the service design process.
• Iterative: Service design is an exploratory, adaptive and experimental approach, iterating toward implementation.
• Sequential: The service should be visualized and orchestrated as a sequence of interrelated actions.
• Real: Needs should be researched in reality, ideas prototyped in reality and intangible values evidenced as physical or digital reality.
• Holistic: Services should sustainably address the needs of all stakeholders through the entire service and across the business.

We have broken down our service design methodology into skills that fall within four quadrants:

1. Coordinate
2. Communicate
3. Create
4. Conclude

These skills overlap with various roles on our teams and it is not meant to suggest that service designers do the job of say researchers or interaction designers. It is a representation of the diverse skills that encompass service design and how these skills can be practiced by a service designer — or another role within a multidisciplinary team — to support the delivery of a service.

• Coaching: If service design is a team sport, then the service designer is responsible for coaching that team. Service design is a mindset or lens, and the goal of the service designer is to champion that mindset within their team.
• Design strategy: Service designers use design strategy to envision possible futures for the product or service, crafting ideal solutions to answer key questions on the product team.
• Business design: Service designers work closely with product managers and service owners to develop the business case behind the service or tool being worked on. They ensure that proposed solutions hit the sweet spot where viability, desirability and feasibility overlap. Business designers, to put it simply, design for viability.

• Education: facilitation, workshops, one-on-one coaching
• Prioritization: user-story mapping, value/complexity, weighted scoring
• Definition: concept canvas, ecosystem map, business model canvas

• The entire product team — includes the UX team and UX researchers
• Product manager / service owner
• Stakeholders

• Storytelling: Telling the story of the end-to-end service, the different experiences of the actors involved and how pain points can be alleviated is integral to being an effective service designer. Storytelling within a service design perspective is telling the story of the current state and how it can be informed into an ideal state.
• Visualization: Visualization is the bread and butter of service design. Being able to visualize the user journey map and service blueprints helps create alignment within our teams and provides context to external stakeholders.
• Facilitation: Facilitating co-creation sessions and workshops to collaborate on service design artifacts within product teams.

• Maps: user journey mapping, empathy mapping, mindsets
• Visual storytelling: storyboarding
• Workshops: co-creation, design jams

• Design and research
• Entire product team
• External stakeholders

• Ideation: Generating ideas, ideation provides fuel and source material for getting innovative solutions into the hands of users.
• Prototyping: Developing a draft version of a service that allows the team to explore ideas and show the intention behind the design concept to users.
• Interaction design: Designing interactive digital and physical products, environments, systems and services.

• Brainstorming activities
• Sketching, wireframes, mock-ups
• Rapid prototyping

• Research
• Content design and Interaction design
• Development

• Research: Understanding behaviors, needs and motivations of people using the service through feedback methodologies.
• Synthesis: Synthesizing feedback from research, combining areas into a whole and bringing meaning to the information.
• Systems thinking: Applying a holistic perspective that includes seeing overall structures, patterns and cycles, rather than seeing only specific events within a system.

• User research
• System mapping
• Affinity mapping

• Design and Research
• Entire product team
• External stakeholders