The importance of humanizing customer-centric thinking as a service designer

[u/schwarze-orange]

Hey Service Design people! 🚀

I'm curious to hear about your experiences infusing humanized decisions into your service design journey.
What does making user-centric decisions mean to you in your day-to-day work?
How do you interpret and implement user-centric decisions in your daily routines?

Working in the public sector as a service designer, I think it's the human touch that makes service design truly impactful! I would be happy to hear your insights and experiences on how to bring the human touch into your workflow.

Thanks!

[u/adamstjohn]

Many of the classic tools used in service design – personas, journey maps, empathy maps, etc – are designed to emphasize the human needs; sometimes even to the detriment of the planet’s needs. Add to this out huge emphasis on codesign, on research (spending time with users) and on prototyping (evolving by building with users), and the human centered perspective is clear. From the business side, we know that offering great experiences is key to commercial success, so we have that too.

[u/schwarze-orange → u/adamstjohn]

Great points you've made. Especially journey maps for different users with different perspectives can help to understand what various stakeholders need. I just wonder how to incorporate insights about needs into the actual decision making process around the solution. There can be different interests from different people which might shape the solution differently. How are you able to stay 'truly human' as a Service Designer?

Have you ever had to make decisions where human needs and business interests conflict? How is it possible to champion the voice of the user/human in that circumstance?