Engine Service Design & their process of designing

Our process

Each client project has a slightly different service focus, for example, improving the quality of the customer experience by working with front line staff, re-designing the customer journey, developing a service vision or innovating new customer propositions.

Projects unfold in three general phases. Identify, Build and Measure. The phases break down a little further - we’ve outlined this below in the diagram and stage breakdown.

Engine design process

Orientate and Discover

After Planning, the first phases for us are Orientate and Discover. Orientation is about getting to know the organisation we’re working with, understanding their business model and the nature of the market in which they operate. We get to ask all sorts of naive questions of very senior managers. We set up and run workshops using a variety of techniques to orientate ourselves and to allow a project team to begin to share their views about the context that has been identified.

During Discover we use a number of techniques to understand how things are working from the perspective of those who use the organisation’s services - and those that provide them.

These first two steps make up the Identify phase and provide us with an understanding of what success might look like as well as list of key issues and challenges we’ll be looking to address.

Generate

Next there’s the start of the Build phase with a systematic Generation step in which we conceptualise and explore visually many responses to the challenge. This happens at Engine, with our clients and often with their customers through the design of workshops that allow people to design their own services (a great route to customer insight as well as to out-of-the-blue service innovation).

Synthesise and Model

Prototyping is critical in reducing risk and getting the best results and this applies equally whether designing strategy, propositions or the touchpoints of a customer experience. So the next phase in Build is to model and test our ideas. As we’re designers and not management consultants this is a very visual and creative phase in which we can bring new propositions or strategic futures to life in ways that allow them to be refined collaboratively with our client team or with customers.

Ideas or propositions are refined and evaluated iteratively which happens in different ways depending on the client and the sector. For example, we worked directly with analysts at Norwich Union to ensure that the ideas we generated for insurance services were more than just blue sky but meet the commercial requirements of the insurer. A point is reached at which we agree that we’ve got what we need. This is sometimes as far as our client needs to go before pitching a new proposition into their organisation.

Specify

We work with many clients to specify services in detail. As a multidisciplinary team we’re as comfortable specifying physical service environments - as we’ve done with Virgin Atlantic at Heathrow - as we are specifying financial or on-line services. Services are specified through a number of representations beyond written market concept documents. Our expertise is in describing the near-future experiences of a service and in detailing their content and functionality through scenarios maps, mock-ups, story-boards and so on.

Measure (with empathy)

Being able to measure efficiency and effectiveness - but also desirability, usefulness and usability of services is critical to getting the feedback needed to support on-going improvement. This step connects the start of the process with the end. In other words, to establish what customers and providers value, to design services that create this value and to be able to measure the ability to create it and inform further improvement.

Produce

Working with our clients as they move towards service production means the designing and development of the touchpoints of that service. We design websites, service interiors, products and communications. We also support the training of front-line workers with the design of workshops and tools to help staff evaluate the experiences that they are delivering to customers.

Transfer and transformation

One big advantage of our approach cited in client testimonials over and over again is that often as a result of our work with them they are able to adopt new ways of working. Design-led methodologies are very accessible and therefore respond to an organisation’s objective to work more creatively and collaboratively. We’re strong on both creativity and process.