Service design & RHP
Last week I became RHP’s Service Design Manager… so what is service design and why is it important to RHP?
Service design is all about people. Designing services that are easy for people to use and meet their needs.
People like Alan and his wife, RHP customers since 1995, who we spoke to as part of the Rent Account Project. And people like Charlotte who we spoke to for the Your Work Your Way Project.
(In this blog I’ll be focusing on the first stage of the double diamond method — the discover phase. For a great overview, of the other stages, the Design Council have put together this guide)
Alan and Charlotte are users of our services and it’s important we’re clear on what their needs are before we launch into developing solutions. This can be understanding more about them as people and their lifestyle, their problem and frustrations with the service, and their ideas to make it better.
At RHP we typically have three types of users of our services:
- Customers (tenants, leaseholders, shared owners, prospective customers)
- Employees (anyone who delivers services to customers or internal customers)
- Partners (this could be Mears — or other contractors/partners/agencies we work with)
Service design aims to understand the needs of each user, designing services so that everyone can use them easily. If the service falls down or doesn’t work for one of the users, it’s likely it won’t work effectively for any of them.
The Double Diamond Method
Service design often follows a process called the double diamond method. There’s four phases to the method:
- Discover
- Define
- Develop
- Deliver
These are shown below (image from the Design Council). It’s important there’s a clear challenge set at the start. In this blog I’m going to focus on the discover phase and how it applies to some projects at RHP. I’ll cover the other phases in future blogs.
The Discover Phase — it’s not easy immersing yourself in the problem
The discover phase does exactly what is says on the tin — discovering what the problem is, rather than simply assuming what the problem is.
Earlier this year, we did a review of RHP’s innovation projects over the last few years. You can find the document here.
In summary, we concluded that while we are an ambitious, forward thinking organisation and have a brilliant reputation in and out of the sector for innovation, there were times we could have spent a bit more time in the discovery phase on our innovation projects.
If we do this, we can really and truly understand the problem we’re trying to solve, and the people it impacts. This work in the discover phase lays the foundations for all the others phases in the double diamond method. You’ll often refer back to this insight throughout the project.
The discover phase can be hard. Sometimes we just want to move forward with a project and it’s difficult to sit in the discovery phase and give it time. But by doing this, we can be sure we understand our users, how the problem relates to them and the wider context the problem sits within that might affect the solution.
I see my role as Service Design Manager as providing employees, managers and our senior leaders with as much insight as I can through the discover phase. This means really spending time with our services users.
So, how do you discover more about a problem?
(Good question, glad you asked….)
The best way is by spending time with the experts — the people that use the services you want to improve.
While they might not always know how to fix, improve or innovate the service — they will let you know where it’s not working, give you a different perspective on the problem and make the problem real to you.
It’s amazing the insight and inspiration people have trapped inside their heads.
Once you understand the problem, you’re equipped to define it (second phase) and begin to develop solutions (phase 3). BUT let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Interviews using a discussion guide prepared in advance is the best way to get insight from our users.
We did that with Alan and Charlotte, arranging a 45–60 minute session at a time that works for them, with two people conducting the interview with the user. One to ask the questions and one to take notes. The note taker allows the person asking the questions to focus exclusively on the user — making sure they follow up on FLASHES the user might show:
Feelings
Logic
Alternative viewpoints
Solutions
Hierarchy of importance
Exposing contradictions
Spoken word
Here’s an example discussion guide we used for the rent account project. The guide is just that, a guide. It’s important to really listen to the user and go where the conversation takes you.
Once the interview is finished, direct quotes are pulled out of the interview notes and used as clues to define exactly what the problem is. I’ll go more into what happens next in the Define phase blog.
Other than user interviews, there’s also loads of other places to get insight, including a range of different resources that are all fairly accessible:
- Is there another housing association we can speak to about the problem? How did they fix it?
- Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn can also give great immediate responses. You can do a quick poll to test/sense check insight with customers/peers.
- At the moment there’s lots of webinars happening — again learning how other have come at a problem can give you a different perspective.
- In our sector, organisations like HACT, the NHF or the HQN write reports about all sorts of issues affecting housing. I recently found this report by HACT on smart homes incredibly useful.
- Finally, is there a related world you can think of? Is there someone who may have a similar problem? For example, when I was working on the Buidliing Better project RHP are involved with — we spoke to an affordable housing provider in Alaska who provides homes to Inuits in remote locations. Because of the bad roads, they can’t have lots of construction traffic — so they use flat pack & modular homes. Once the homes are onsite, they’re actually built quicker than in the UK! What could RHP use as a related world?
Some of the above might seem obvious, and to some extent it is. But when it’s packaged up with direct insight from users, it becomes a really powerful way of explaining the extent of a problem, the complexities involved with it and tell a story.
The Discovery Phase at RHP
We’ve started a few projects that are in the discovery phase at the moment.
Your Work Your Way (8WR employees): Rich B and I are currently interviewing employees about how they’ve found the changes since lockdown began and what their needs are for the future of work. We’ve interviewed 20+ employees so far and will be analysing the insight this week. We’ll also be looking at how YWYW can work for caretakers and scheme managers.
Rent Account Project: Working with Katja, we’ve been talking to customers about their experience of making payments to us. The feedback will be packaged up and opportunities areas put forward to develop further.
Future Homes Project: With Matt and Katie, we’ll be using user insight to discover how we can improve the customer experience and make sure they’re safer in their homes by better monitoring the performance of their homes. This will involve speaking to customers, employees and Mears about their experience.
Finance Project: I’ll be talking to Bron this week about how we can use some of the techniques I’ve described here in Finance.
What’s next?
Thanks for making it to the end of my first blog! In future blogs I’ll be talking about the other double diamond phases, giving further updates on projects I’m working on and talking about Leading Lights — our employee service design training programme.