With Christmas approaching and family reunions just around the corner, it’s time for the typical family questions: Have you found a girl/boyfriend? When are you getting married? Are you thinking of having a baby? …or is the second on the way? But when you work in the design field, you get an additional one: what exactly do you do again?
We think of ourselves as a subtle mix between a researcher, advisor and facilitator. We help businesses and organizations start discussions, ask the right questions, and put the right people together and talk so that we can listen to their pains and problems.
Once you’ve set the scope and defined the problem, it’s about making products and services more human, putting people at the centre of the approach, and creating more value for the user. In the end, it’s a matter of empathy.
So to put it in simple terms, we create experiences that people enjoy. We study users, their goals, desires, behaviours and pains. We look at how these products address their problems: do they make their life easier, do they help save time, are they cheaper than the existing offer on the market, are they more tailored to specific users’ needs?
We then test them through pilots, focus groups or surveys to make sure they solve or satisfy a problem or need, and bring value. The value is the reason why users turn to one company over another. Value can reside in the customer service, it’s not only about the product. That’s why we also help companies optimize how they deliver a user experience. This helps in understanding the underlying resources and processes — seen and unseen to the user — to make sure the customer is fully satisfied.
When the company is ready to launch their new product or service, we create the right narratives so that they’re adopted by their target users. If the experience is designed right with the right words, you’ll be spending less effort in marketing, as your product will be co-designed and adapted to your clients’ needs from the start.
When we design these value propositions, services or business models, we use tools that help visualize problems and solutions more easily. This is key to consider the different perspectives needed to solve problems experienced in cities and to engage with the different stakeholders in the right way… and we have packed them all in our Sprintbox, we’ll speak about that soon too!
You can apply service design to basically anything, but we focus on mobility, energy and local communities. Why only these three? Because our workshops are a lot more effective when we know the sector – meaning that we have the technical knowledge and market expertise. This is where we provide the most value to our clients: we select the right methods, give the right inputs on the market and technical solutions, and reach out with the right words.
And that’s it 😊 We hope it’s a bit clearer now. You can always ask us again, we’re always up for a chat.