What is expected from a Service Designer in Discovery

During the Discovery phase, the focus is on understanding the project goals, user needs, and identifying potential design opportunities.

This phase is the most pivotal for a Service Designer and where you can make the most impact to the delivery and direction of a project, things you will be expected to be involved in, include:

• developing your understanding of business and users needs and pain points
• understanding constraints that may come in the form of policy, process, technology or delivery
• auditing existing processes, and understanding how much they can be used as-is or whether they would require significant changes.
• working with other departments such as technical and procedural, comms, contact centre, print services and online teams to understand the capability and constraints of the ask as well as assessing needs of all parties for successful delivery of the service
• if the service is transformational, start working on an as-is blueprint with recommendations for a to-be, or, if the service is new, start working on recommendations from your findings, data and research

It’s important to remember that the purpose of a discovery, for the whole team, is to test the assumptions of the service, and the outcome recommendations of the discovery may be to not go ahead with the commissioning of the service. Not all services end up in production.

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