Interlinks: Service design and organisational psychology

I have had this post in draft for the last year or so, as I tried to articulate the unique skill set that psychologists can bring to the design discipline that is beyond ‘user research’ activities. I haven’t finished working it all out, but there’s no point for it to sit in my draft, I wasn’t going to get any further any way… so time to share my view to the wider audience and would love to hear your thoughts on this too.

First, some background on how I got into user experience.

The Chaos Theory of Careers

My whole career in user experience, user research, service design- however, you want to call it happened by chance.

I remember one of my psychology lecturers used to say that life is not linear and things happen by chance- where you end up in your career is hardly the one you started with, because we live in a complex and dynamic system and a small change could have a big impact. (You can watch Dr Jim Bright’s explanation on Chaos Theory here)

So here’s my own chaos theory…

In my undergraduate days I studied psychology hoping to become a clinical psychologist, but by my third year at university it was apparent to me that’s not what I wanted. The idea of having all these emotions attached to me was too much, I couldn’t simply walk around and put down my ‘white coat’.

Instead I really enjoyed social psychology- studying behaviours in a group or society. My favourite examples are:

• How come a group of people agree to an incorrect answer and ignore the correct one (group think and conformity)?
• Why didn’t observers who witnessed a fatal stabbing call the police and let that person die (the by stander effect)?
• How can university students who dressed up as prison guards ended up beating other university students who dressed up as prisoners (Stanford prison experiment)?

All these theories fascinated me, and I decided that I can work out all the intricacies of human behaviours for organisations. I could help companies perform better by aligning their structure and their employees. So for my masters degree (& my psychologist training), I focussed on organisational psychology and my research thesis was on change management.

Then the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 hit me hard, even though I had a job lined up at one of the big management consultancies before graduation that opportunity disappeared. It was in those months of not knowing what I wanted to do led me to user-centred design. I joined a small consulting company who hired mostly psychologists to carry out user-centred research and design. Initially, I was skeptical- I was only doing freelance work for them until I could work out my next move- but over the next few months I really enjoyed the work and saw how my skills could be used. My training as a psychologist really helped me. I was using my interviewing/counselling skills for usability testing, and I was able to pull the research findings together relatively easily, the way we’ve been trained to solve problems led to breaking down client’s requirements and setting up experiments to design solutions.

Since then I’ve worked for big companies like Vodafone Australia and Canonical (Ubuntu OS), and for the last 4 years been working with the UK Government to deliver digital services that are easy for citizens and the internal staff (they are users too!) to use. The positive impact a good digital service could have on someone’s life is amazing. It has been a privileged!

What do service design and organisational psychology have in common?

What organisational psychologists do is to look at how a company and its employees are performing from a people perspective. Some problems that organisational psychologists can solve involve:

• Supporting change management process and identifying barriers to change
• (re)Designing organisation structure and teams to ensure they work well towards a goal
• Building leadership capacity
• Improving the health and well-being of employees
• Researching into employees’ behaviours and attitudes

Do they sound familiar? To me, they are different aspects service designers must consider in delivering (large-scale) change. At the heart of psychology it is the people and the context which matter— as you might be looking at changing an existing ‘thing’ or introducing a new ‘thing’ in an organisation.

In service design, we care about the people who end up using the products or services we design. And like organisational psychology the context is important — it might be in a hospital, in your homes or at your office.

And both organisational psychology and service design is about delivering change for the people and organisation.

From what I observe at work, service designers some time focus a lot on ‘theories’ or ‘concepts’ of a new service and handing over the ‘blueprint’ to the business, and seeing this as the end point of their job. To me, a successful design of a service is about the implementation of the service to ensure it is running as smoothly as possible to the original concept. We must realise that there are often constraints, and a great designer can adapt to those constraints during implementation.

Few things that help me to deliver better services

• Have a honest conversation with your users when you do research. I find that I learn a lot more from our users when I open up with our ideas and I get to understand more of their contexts and why they would use the service. I am not afraid of giving a little away of what we’re thinking to get a lot of insights in return.
• You need the staff to be on your side. To do that I found that sometimes you need to understand why they are skeptical or resistant to the change. Why is this happening? Is this lack of communications from the organisation? Is it the fear of losing their jobs? Knowing what the factors are will help you work out how to make it work for you. For example, do you need a communication strategy? Do you need a chance for the staff to see what you’ve been doing and the design rationale? Can you get them involved in your research and design process?
• Give people time to process the change. Sometimes you’ve done all that you can, and just give them time to process the information and adapt
• Work with teams who also do change. Service design is a relatively new discipline for a lot of organisations, but chances are there are other teams that look after a ‘change process’ in a big organisation before you arrived. Find out who they are and they can really help give you good insights into the organisation vision and what has happened before. You will be able to work on a good service together to make sure whatever the business is thinking includes the users insights from you.

I’m starting to think about how change management theories can help service designers. More on that next time.

That’s all for now :)

I founded Melon Experience Design to help clients gain better research insights from their users and make a social impact, get in touch if you would like to work with us