User Research and Service Design plans, are they that different?

On my side of things, there is no significant difference. All starts with the same process.

First, the team needs to be very clear on the goals. This is where many teams and organizations miss the mark. Teams dive straight into the methods and tools and say, “We need to talk to users to map our service user journey” or “We must get in-depth feedback on a particular service.”

If this sounds familiar, stop, and first get a shared understanding on:

• What are the goals for mapping out the user journey?
• What business and organization goals intersect our mapping exercise?
• How do we know if we’re successful, and how do we measure it?

If we are clear about this, we know what success looks like and how we want to change the world for the better. This can be a game-changer for our User Research or Service Design plans.

From here on, we have a foundational base on:

• What do we need to know to do what?
• Where are the gaps in our knowledge?
• If we are honest with ourselves… what are our assumptions, and how we can challenge them.

Whether we are doing UX Research, Service Design, or starting a business, that’s the same undertaking.

In my view, it’s the same process and what happens is people get into methodology arguments because they haven’t done the work to get that shared clarity, or it’s easier not to challenge the status quo.

Those are the moments where you get those long debates on what methods are better. It depends on what you are trying to achieve.

Once we have that clarity and know where the gaps in the information are, all research initiatives are de-risked, and it’s much easier to make successfully shared decisions.

We need to choose our approach and plan based on what constraints we have and what we need to know.  That’s identical for any research stakeholder alignment.