What Is Service Design and Why Does It Work for HE?

Over the last decade, student experience and student voice have become increasingly important within universities. Higher Education (HE) is now a very competitive landscape and institutions are judged on a range of metrics, including student attainment, retention, and student satisfaction. In our digital age, word quickly gets around if the student experience is poor.

Student voice is also central to the new strategy from JISC (the UK’s digital, data, and technology agency focused on tertiary education, research, and innovation). The strategy states: ‘the success of new approaches depends on staff and students as co-designers of learning, co-creators of the curriculum and co-assessors of student development.’

All of this means that you need to make sure that your students are getting the best experience possible, both inside and outside of the classroom. But since the student experience is shaped by a complex set of services involving a diverse group of departments, actions, and processes, just how do you do this? In our view, you do it using the service design approach.

What exactly is service design?

Service design is an established approach, based on traditional design techniques, that is used to solve problems with services. It does this by first ensuring people understand what it’s like to be the users of that service, so they can then optimise the service to better meet the needs of those users. Empathy is at the heart of this approach.

Why is it useful for higher education?

The student journey is a long and complex one, beginning when they think about going to university right through to graduation and beyond. During this time, a student will use lots of different services provided by a plethora of teams within the university.

In the past, universities haven’t been structured to put students at the centre and unlike more commercial sectors, HE has been slower to consider the ‘customer experience’ holistically across the entire organisation. The danger is that this leads to silo thinking, disjointed processes, and a variable student experience.

For all these reasons, service design is an ideal approach for universities truly wanting to put students at the centre of all they do. It forces institutions to think beyond their own internal structures, or as Jean and her co-authors explained it in a Briefing Paper for JISC:

“Service design is an approach where the end-users, the students, are the main focus and the student experience is viewed holistically rather than concentrating on the individual processes which support service delivery.”

What does service design involve?

Service design has a clear and proven methodology for teams to follow. The Design Council has developed the original model, which encompasses four key stages:

• Discover – conducting research, presenting findings, and gathering insights.

• Define – exploring the student journey and pain points, developing personas, and idea creation.

• Develop – prototyping and testing.

• Deliver – implementing and monitoring.

In the Discover stage, the service design team uses a range of techniques to understand the ‘felt’ student experience, such as mystery shopping, user interviews, and the analysis of engagement data and complaints.

In the Define stage, the team is trying to further understand the key pain points for students so they can define the problem more clearly and come up with ideas to solve it. We use key techniques such as personas (to identify different types of student and their differing needs), ‘blueprinting’ (a visual representation of the key activities in the service process plus detailed sub-processes and sub-systems), ‘journey mapping’, and tools to help both generate ideas and evaluate them.

The Develop stage is then about taking those ideas and developing prototypes to test them, and the Deliver stage is focused on implementation, monitoring and continuous improvement.

You can read more about these stages and how service design can benefit students in this Wonk HE article. 

Why should you embrace service design?

In our experience, anyone working in professional services at a university can and should learn the mindset and skills of service design. In fact, it’s our view that we need as many staff as possible to learn the service design approach because redesigning services in universities needs to be a collective endeavour. That’s why we’ve created an affordable online course that teaches the basics of service design for HE professionals, called ‘Designing Change for HE’.