Having a digital mindset is about understanding some of the principles, tools and techniques used for digital projects.
It’s also about being curious about the challenges you, your colleagues or your organisation’s beneficiaries might be facing and thinking creatively about how to solve them.
Your role may not seem very ‘digital’ to you. But by understanding more about digital and some of the benefits a digital mindset can give you, you can start to think differently about some of the tasks you do within your role (whether they’re digital or not).
There’s a section in the skills framework on having a digital mindset, which is worth looking at after you’ve read through this section.
Read on to find out about digital service design. Learning more about what this is will help you start thinking about challenges slightly differently - and lead to a digital mindset in your role.
First let’s start by what we mean by digital:
“Applying the culture and technologies of the internet era to make our organisations more resilient and responsive to changing expectations, needs and behaviours of people we support.” – Tom Loosemore, Digital Transformation at scale
Digital isn’t just about the IT and the tech: digital design brings us a whole new way of approaching problem solving, creating processes and services and project management.
Service design offers you processes and ways of working to help you design effective services. These can be digital or analogue or a mix of both, which is often the case.
“When you have two coffee shops right next to each other and each sells the exact same coffee at the exact same price, service design is what makes you walk into one and not the other.”— 31Volts Service Design Studio
What is meant by services?
Services help your end users achieve a goal or solve a problem. Some examples of services at Scouts could be:
- parents who want to enrol their children to become Cubs, so you create a sign up process for them
- colleagues who want to be able to easily and quickly claim expenses, so you research and buy in an app to help them do this
- your department needs to manage capacity better as certain tasks take too long, so you design a triage system that works for you as well as your end users (these could be staff, volunteers or members of the public, depending on your work)
What does design mean?
Design points to the processes and methods you use to create your services. Digital service design has provided us with a very helpful process to ensure we create services that work for our users and for us in the most efficient way.
Some of the processes involved include:
- user research
- how to come up with good ideas
- how to test ideas quickly before investing too much time and energy so you have most chance of succeeding
It also provides a format for involving your stakeholders early and talking about your work well before it’s finished.
There is much to learn from and borrow from digital service design as a way to create products and services, as well as manage projects.
The benefits of digital service design
These are just some of the benefits of using these processes to design your services, both internal and external:
- our users and/or colleagues feel heard and involved
- we better understand our users and their context
- we create things our users need and use
- we save time and money
You might not think that digital service design is relevant to you or your role. But essentially, it’s just a way of solving problems in a structured way - and everyone has problems and challenges to solve in our day to day roles.
Digital service design processes help you to approach challenges and projects in a structured way, supporting you to:
- save time
- learn what works quickly
- cut down on frustration of processes and services not working as expected or not being used
- create something that you’ve tested and know will work for the people it was designed for
- communicate about the process
If you are new to digital service design, the best place to start is with a Design Hop.
This self-guided course will support you with a real-life challenge or project and teach you the basic processes.
The Design Hop is:
- Interactive: you’ll receive exercises to apply to your own project. You can pause while you carry these out before moving on to the next one. You don’t have to do this alone - you can work with others in your team on a shared challenge.
- Experiential: you’ll use real-life examples from your services/processes/products so that by the end you have an improved process and a plan to test a prototype.
- Self serve: go at your own pace. The course should take you about 10 hours spread over however many days you decide. This includes working on your actual project - something you had to do anyway and this course helps you do it more effectively.
For a quick, easy and entertaining way to learn about digital service design, read The Charity Worker and the Digital Service Designer.
This short story follows a charity worker’s quest to understand digital service design. She's desperate to learn but can't find anyone to teach her. A mysterious digital wizard appears and helps her discover the three secrets of digital service design. It’s a story about people, not technical stuff.