What is expected from a Service Designer in Discovery

During the Discovery phase, the focus is on understanding the problem your service aims to solve along with 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 the problem space and where your service would sit within it
• identify potential users and stakeholders and their needs within the service
• developing a strong understanding of user and business needs, including opportunities and pain points, and balancing these to inform design decisions
• 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
• 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, problem framing, data and research
• implementing GDS service standards from the outset

What outputs are expected from an Service Designer in Discovery

Service Designer outputs should include the design artefacts appropriate to the phase and needs of the service, for example:

• high‑level as is blueprints maps – how the service is delivered today (if it exists) showing actors, touchpoints, channels, and dependencies and opportunity areas – where change could have the biggest impact
• ecosystem or stakeholder maps – organisations, teams, suppliers, and relationships
• empathy mapping – to help the team move beyond what users do, to understand why they do it, grounding service design decisions in real user insight rather than assumptions
• policy and legislative constraints summary – what shapes or limits the service
• as-is focused user journey – identifying touch points, pain and gain points

It’s important to remember that the purpose of a discovery, for the whole team, is to frame the problem you intend to solve and to test the assumptions of the service intent, 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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