Meet the service designer: Ulla Jones

In this issue’s profile, Touchpoint Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes speaks with Ulla Jones, Business Designer at OP Financial Group, the biggest banking and insurance group in Finland. Her company is currently working on building an in-house design team, the first of its kind in Finland.

Jesse Grimes: The topic of the previous issue of Touchpoint was on the growth of in-house service design capabilities, and I'm aware that you've been involved in setting this up such a capability within your current employer. Can you share some of your experiences so far, and advice on those who may be going down the same path?

Ulla Jones: The challenges we face are often related to the way projects are constructed. The outcome is set before a project begins, most money is allocated to the technical solution instead of creating and testing the business case, and sometimes it happens that if the customer insight leads to an unfamiliar direction, the project is repackaged into a traditional banking or insurance case.

To fix this we try to involve ourselves as early in the project as possible so that we can help to formulate the project description to allow new discoveries and unpredictable outcomes. We also make a point never to work alone and come back with a readily-solved case. We are always part of a multidisciplinary team and involve everyone in customer research, interviews and analysis. This helps to penetrate the service-design methods further into the organisation so that they become useful and everyday tools for anyone wanting to take a customercentric approach.

When building an in-house designteam, first make sure your company is truly ready. Designers will challenge your status-quo, ask difficult questions and challenge the ‘Hippos’ (highest-paidperson’s-opinion). Is your company ready to lose hierarchy, take risks and test out new things at a continuously growing pace? If you answered yes, then by all means, go for it! But remember to have a contingency plan, so that the designers you hire will have a room to grow and develop along with your company.

In your previous jobs you`ve been involved in strategic design and service design activities, both of which need real traction within an organisation to become a success. In this issue we`re looking about how we go about selling service design. What have you learned about doing this successfully within large companies? While more and more service designers are entering the field having undergone a specific service design education, you have - like myself - found yourself practicing it, despite having degrees in other disciplines. Can you share with us your educational background, and what path you took to get to where you are today?

I’ve learned that initiating change takes a lot of time. I know it's a cliche but unfortunately there is no short cut if the leadership is not ready to take on new methods. Luckily the start-up scene has sped the things up a bit. There are small disruptive businesses mushrooming everywhere and big companies are starting to feel the effects of these niche-services eating away at their revenue. Big company executives are doing their homework and investigating what makes start-ups so successful. Suddenly iterative, agile and explorative methods are something to take seriously. So it is definitely a good time to be selling service design.

However if the industry you’re working on is not under ‘attack’, the executives usually have other pressing issues to deal with than preparing for disruption. In those cases, selling customer experience and service design can be more difficult and I would not start by proposing a big strategic re-envisioning project that doesn’t have any concrete outcome. Internal stakeholders need success stories and pilot cases to build their understanding and trust for an approach that to them may seem new and ambiguous.

I would advocate to include as many people from the company side as possible in the early research stages, especially in customer interviews and visits. The most rewarding thing is when your company’s sceptical, superresults-oriented sales-shark shares how he just made a successful sales pitch that was completely based on the consumer insights he has picked up while attending consumer interviews. When a service design project delivers benefits beyond the core goal of the project and people in the company start using the methods in their daily work and vocabulary, you have managed to create a whole bunch of potential clients.

While more and more service designers are entering the field having undergone a specific service design education, you have - like myself - found yourself practicing it, despite having degrees in other disciplines. Can you share with us your educational background, and what path you took to get to where you are today?

I am a landscape architect and consumer economist by training. Early on in architecture I was disillusioned by the profession’s general lack of interest in the users. Architecture was more about light, shadows and masses. I wanted a career that was more closely connected to people. Consumer economics is a hybrid degree combining business studies with sociology, that focuses on people’s behaviour as consumers.

When I made the leap from architecture in 2005, I got a lot of questions about what sort of career I imagined to have with these two seemingly different degrees. A year later I did a minor in International Design Business Management (IDBM) at Aalto University and I had my answer. I discovered design thinking and human-centred methodology and I was sold. Since then I have applied human-centric methods in all my work and gradually educated the people around me to see the value and benefits of this approach.

I think that a designer should have a wide perspective and an ability to look at things from multiple angles. It definitely helps if you’ve studied a few different disciplines and schools of thought, because you know for a fact that there is never just one truth. I am happy to see service design becoming an actual degree programme and more widely recognised profession, however I would still advocate that people studying to become service designers would learn widely about business and technology and human behaviour. I think the richness of service design is its multidisciplinary nature and interest in human behaviour in all its irrationality and quirks.

Ulla Jones is a Business Designer at OP Financial Group, a Finnish banking and insurance company. She works to bring customer insights and empathy to the heart of all new service development.