Service design methods

A long, open-ended one-to-one conversation conducted in the participant’s own setting, such as their home or workplace. It lasts from 45 minutes to two or three hours. The conversation is guided by a topic and a flexible guide of prompts—not by a questionnaire.

Hear people in their own words and understand their perceptions, behaviors, values, and explicit and latent needs. It costs less than a focus group and avoids group social pressure. For example, in research about saving in Mexico, people repeatedly said, “I don’t save.” Follow-up questions revealed informal ways of putting money aside—in shirt pockets, tins, and bricks for a future home. The insight was that people save for specific projects, which led to a project-based savings product.

Use it at the start of a project to understand each person’s perspective, and at any level of research depth. Prefer the participant’s own setting: it provides visual prompts for the conversation and makes it possible to photograph things they mention.

• How does the person perceive and describe the topic?
• What do they value, and why?
• What experiences, frustrations, and hopes emerge as they tell their story?
• What do they actually do, compared with what they say they do?

• Recruit participants two to three weeks in advance. A recruiting agency can save time, and rare profiles may require help from the client.
• Research the topic, but do not overdo it. A little naivety helps prevent assumptions.
• Build the guide in two parts: general questions to open the conversation (work, routine, habits), followed by prompts about hopes, fears, and ambitions. Ask open-ended questions, never yes-or-no questions.
• Bring no more than three team members, each with a defined role (interviewer, note-taker, photographer).
• Record what the person says verbatim, not what you assume they meant. When using an interpreter, ask for direct quotations rather than a summary.
• Observe body language and surroundings; take photographs only with permission.
• Never correct the interviewee. Ask how or why they know what they are claiming.
• Bring identification, two copies of the consent form, an incentive with a receipt, and plan the route and timing in line with local culture.
• If the client observes, agree that they will remain silent.

An in-depth interview with two people who know each other well, such as partners or friends, using the same open-ended guide. It is not a focus group, which brings together seven to ten people to get a quick view of a community.

Reduce the tendency to tell a researcher what they want to hear. People who know each other are less likely to exaggerate their own behavior; one person may complete or challenge the other’s account. Two perspectives are gathered in the same amount of time.

Use in consumer research when a one-to-one interview may feel exposing or intimidating. It can also work well with children and teenagers who feel uncomfortable alone (although interviewing minors may be inappropriate in some cultures). Avoid it when the topic requires someone to say something they would not share in front of the other person.

• How do people make decisions and behave together?
• Where do their accounts differ—for example, who really knows how to set up the equipment at home?
• Is a rejection someone’s own view or a product of the relationship dynamic? A husband who loudly complains about a TV show may lead his wife to say she “doesn’t like” it.

• Recruit pairs with a genuine relationship two to three weeks in advance.
• Notice when one person speaks for the other—a common pattern in long-term couples—and make room for the second person to respond.
• With teenagers, expect that they may try to impress each other.
• Follow the in-depth interview protocol: a team of up to three, verbatim notes, consent, and an incentive.
• If the group grows beyond two participants, use a neutral setting, one facilitator and note-takers, and a strategy for bringing quieter voices into the conversation.

One-to-one interviews with business customers, suppliers, experts, or client stakeholders. They may include expert interviews, which aim to provide a systemic view of the topic.

Understand processes, interorganizational relationships, and professional perspectives. In a one-to-one setting, people may discuss their organization in ways they would not in front of colleagues or managers. Experts add context, history, recent innovations (successes and failures), and perspectives from banks, governments, or NGOs.

Use it with professionals, business customers, or stakeholders. Choose the setting to fit the research goal: the workplace for studying context and workflow, or a neutral place such as a café for discussing feelings about work. If conditions distort responses too much, it may be better to end the interview early.

• How does the workflow operate, and where are the bottlenecks?
• How do teams, suppliers, and customers relate to one another?
• What do people think but avoid saying in a group?
• What has already been tried in this sector, and what worked?

• Schedule interviews individually and early because calendars often conflict.
• Define the expertise needed and select varied perspectives to avoid hearing the same opinion repeatedly.
• Send participants an overview of the topics and the time required.
• Ask informed questions while keeping the guide flexible enough to follow unexpected leads.
• Monitor your own bias. One account describes a tense interview with oil-company lawyers about hydrogen, where rapport and relationship preparation were lacking.
• Take notes with whatever is available—pen and paper are enough—and address confidentiality in the consent form.

Spend a few hours or a day with someone in their natural environment, observing what they do. Observation can be passive (“a fly on the wall”) or active, with questions about what is happening. Two useful variations are immersion (ideally a week in the field, including staying in the community) and a guided visit, in which someone takes the team through their home or workplace over two to four hours.

See what people do, not only what they say they do. It reveals context, routines, workarounds, and latent needs that people may not notice because they are accustomed to them. For example, in a financial-education app project for low-income teenagers, the team visited their neighborhoods, check-cashing stores, and social networks. They found that money was social: it arrived on birthdays and was spent with friends. This led to a social feature in the app.

Short observations are a starting point when the team is unfamiliar with a topic. Longer ones can reveal new insights even in familiar activities. The method takes time and may be impractical when confidential information or sensitive interactions are involved, such as a sales meeting. It must take place in the real setting; otherwise, there is little to observe.

• How does the activity actually unfold, step by step?
• What rituals, objects, and spatial arrangements appear (what is on the walls, where things are stored)?
• Why does the person do things this way? (Ask with deliberate naivety.)
• How do they make decisions, socialize, work, and rest?

• Set aside time and budget in the project plan, and recruit the participant best suited to the objectives.
• Align with the client on what they hope to learn and prepare guiding questions while remaining open to the unexpected.
• For a guided visit, bring two people—one to ask questions and one to take notes. Check cultural and gender permissions before entering someone’s home, and photograph only with consent.
• Record concrete details and quotations alongside impressions; it is easy to interpret before understanding.
• Dress like the participant or wear a uniform if the organization allows it, remembering that you represent the client.

The researcher—or the client—takes on the user’s role: acting as a mystery shopper, working as a new employee, or simulating a user’s condition when they cannot experience it directly (using an ageing suit or spending a day in a wheelchair). Unlike observation, the researcher is inside the experience rather than alongside it.

Gain first-hand insight into how users feel and behave, build empathy, and raise questions the client might not ask. When the client takes part, they discover improvements themselves rather than hearing about them second-hand.

Use it when an experience is hard to describe to someone who has not lived it, or when you want to sensitize a team or client. Involvement can range from a simple mystery-shopper visit to something complex, such as getting a job at the organization. It also applies to users’ digital lives: installing and using their apps is a form of participation.

• What is it actually like to use this service or perform this role?
• Where do effort, pain, or embarrassment arise?
• What can only be noticed by doing it?

• Be willing to do things you have never done, while keeping attention on the people being studied.
• Plan carefully: you will enter other people’s spaces and workflows, and may represent the client in public.
• Choose the least intrusive way to document the experience (discreet notes rather than a camera in someone’s face) and bring what is needed to record what emerges.
• For simulations, consider tools such as the MIT AgeLab’s AGNES suit, which restricts vision, dexterity, and movement.

Participants—often members of the client team—use other services for a few hours or a day, alone or in groups, without the design team accompanying them. They receive money to pay for activities and tools for recording observations, such as a camera and notebook, sometimes with prompts. Some services should come from other sectors. One variation is analogous inspiration, where the team visits a similar setting to isolate an element of the experience.

Help the client see themselves as a user rather than a provider, broadening and reframing how they think about serving people. Services from other sectors offer distance and transferable ideas. In an analogous-inspiration project about mobile money in Ghana, the team saw that community visibility mattered and studied football fans, ride-hailing drivers, and Catholics on Ash Wednesday. They found that visible participation, public identity, and community support can encourage adoption.

Use it to redesign an existing service or create a new one. It works as an icebreaker for teams new to service design and is most useful when combined with a workshop or sketching session.

• What makes a service very good or very poor?
• Which practices from other sectors could we apply?
• What is the experience like on the other side of the counter?
• Which specific element—visibility, trust, or speed—do we want to incorporate?

• Agree on the budget with the client before organizing anything.
• Isolate what you want to understand (an activity, behavior, or emotion) and list a parallel situation where each can be observed. Vote on visits as a team and schedule them.
• Choose a mix of services, usually including very good and very poor examples.
• Make reservations and prepare a route for each participant or group, with money and a recording kit.
• Plan the debrief: each group presents what it saw and lists positive and negative points. This can be the first activity in a workshop.
• During the visit, observe what you set out to understand while staying open to other sources of inspiration.

A group session with users, structured as co-creation and used as an alternative to a focus group. It uses probe-like activities, sketching, and collages to move participants beyond verbal discussion. The central idea is to bring community members together to design with the team.

Generate many insights and ideas quickly while addressing focus-group limitations: participants may say what they think the researcher wants to hear or be influenced by the group. Activities can give a voice to people less comfortable speaking publicly. The aim is to bring participants onto the team as designers, not treat them as interviewees. For example, in a health-service project in the Congo, seven women selected from earlier interviews joined a two-day workshop, created a name and logo, and helped design the service. The team learned about social dynamics and power balance in the community—things isolated interviews had not revealed.

Use it when you need many ideas in a short time, want to test concepts or prototypes, or need to explore how a community works. It can also gather feedback on prototypes and deepen work with a subset of people already interviewed.

• What do users value, expect, and imagine for the service?
• How do they group, prioritize, and represent activities and information?
• What ideas emerge when they sketch solutions themselves?
• How do they respond to a concept or prototype?

• Recruit two to three weeks in advance, preferably pairs of friends or couples, in groups of four to sixteen. A session typically lasts one to three hours.
• Reserve a spacious, comfortable room with walls for displaying materials (or foam boards), and provide food and drinks.
• Create a realistic schedule with a backup plan. Early sessions almost always run short on time, so identify priority activities.
• Prepare the tools and enough copies; bring pens, sticky notes, tape, glue, scissors, and modeling clay. Possible activities include provocative cards, brainstorming, role-play, and rapid prototyping.
• In brainstorming, defer judgment, welcome wild ideas, build on others’ contributions (“yes, and…” rather than “but”), stay focused, take turns, think visually, and aim for quantity.
• Document the session with photographs and the materials produced. If you record video, assign someone else to film; facilitators cannot do both jobs well.

A set of activities participants complete during a session or on their own afterward, designed to generate insights with minimal researcher influence. Developed by Bill Gaver at the Royal College of Art, common formats include timelines and journey maps, diaries, Venn diagrams, brand sheets, probe cameras, photo lists, drawings, item labels, collages, card sorting, resource flows, and provocative cards. One variation asks participants to observe and document their own community, then discuss the process in an interview.

Capture what an interview alone may miss: private thoughts, routines over time, events that do not fit into a session, the perspectives of quieter participants, and topics too sensitive to discuss. Images, diagrams, and activities help people who express themselves better without words and can bridge language and literacy barriers. They also help break the ice.

Use them within interviews and workshops, or leave them with participants. They are useful when sending a researcher into the field is expensive, or when social and gender norms limit what people would tell a stranger.

• Timeline, diary, and journey map: How has the experience changed, and what does the person expect in the future? What do they do and feel over time?
• Venn diagram: How do they group behaviors, or whom do they turn to for different needs?
• Brand sheet: Which brands do they use, and how do they feel about them?
• Camera and photo list: What is their environment like, and what do they consider important?
• Drawing: How do they represent the topic, and what emotions do they associate with it? Drawing can help move beyond verbal expression.
• Item labels: What do they consider most valuable or buy impulsively, and why?
• Collage: What does a concept mean to them? In a Nigerian health-insurance project, collages about “community health” showed that people associated health with markets, fruit, exercise, and family—not doctors and clinics—reshaping the campaign.
• Card sorting: What matters most, and how does the person organize the world? In an Indian solar-lamp project, animal cards revealed comparisons with chickens and cows—assets that keep producing. This confirmed the value proposition and informed the communication language.
• Resource flow: What money and goods enter and leave a household? Research with Indian farmers showed that smaller equipment, such as sprayers, fit cash flow better than tractors.
• Provocative cards: How do people react to deliberately simple or absurd ideas? In Uganda, they revealed that banks were seen as places “for large sums” and should work alongside informal savings, not replace them.

• Review existing examples before creating a probe, and adapt it to the client’s brief. Assemble travel kits with frequently used tools and replenish them after each session.
• Give clear instructions about what to draw, photograph, or list, and make clear that participants do not need to draw well. If someone gets stuck, the researcher can draw first.
• For card sorting, mix concrete and abstract cards, use images if a participant does not read, and vary the scenarios (“if you had more money,” “if you were older”).
• For collages, use a simple, evocative prompt and local magazines with plenty of images.
• Pay attention to how finished the materials look: not so polished that participants hesitate to “ruin” them, nor so generic that they ignore them. Providing a camera of their own can increase engagement.
• Plan how materials will be returned (a stamped, addressed envelope) or use a phone, while recognizing that a phone offers less structure.
• At the end, interview participants about what they created. The material only shows what they choose to share; without a follow-up conversation, there is no chance to ask further questions.