You see opportunities pop up all around. But you know that to seize them implies challenging how things are done now… Don’t despair. That’s a common trait to all our clients! And precisely why we like you, activists.
Not going to promise it’ll be easier. But we can help you go further and deeper. We’ll take you from thinking to doing. We’ll help you identify value and make it operational, across channels and silos. That’s service design!
Sounds a little abstract? Check a few learnings we reaped from our experience in service innovation projects in the past few years. You’ll figure out what you can achieve with service design in context.
Small steps, quick wins
Making face-to-face like social media
With more and more people served via social media, how could the puzzled citizen service team at Sant Quirze del Vallès Council get in line?
We helped them redesign their own service by prototyping a new office space and their main interactions with citizens.
Apart from a new job and new service concepts, the project had a side effect on the team: a will to question their work and improve it on and on.
Fewer risks and early results are clear gains of small-scope projects —but you can count on deep impact, too. And then it’s easier to set out more projects!
The new assisted self-service area promotes a smooth transition into digital service for insecure citizens 
A new job was prototyped to welcome citizens and to check their paperwork before waiting
Service stations were adapted to both staff and citizens needs in terms of comfort and privacy through real-scale prototyping
Analyzing the citizen & the staff interaction throughout a service encounter with a simple user journey raised awareness to the main pain points and needs, as well as to what activities need to be played in the space
The office layout proposed by architects was understood and redesigned with desktop prototypes
A tiny service blueprint inside a cabinet allows the team to rethink their actions as a regular basis despite being in the front-stageFocus on value, make it operable
The service beyond the app
Barcelona Council is developing a brand new app to ease loneliness among elderly citizens by connecting them to relatives, as an intrapreneurship project.
Right before scaling —in the midst of developers, health researchers and social workers—, they asked us to design ‘the service’, meaning how to deliver the digital technology to the old people.
Of course, our work ended questioning that very definition of service!
When designing a service, we focus on value for users. We make sure to keep this also when we coordinate people, materials and procedures by always relating them to the experience they provide.
Focus on value
A brief research with elderly lead to a major shift on the service concept. They were digital savvy, needed to make new friends and wanted to meet face-to-face.
The service was redefined around keeping old bonds and making new ones in the neighborhood, both online and offline.
Make it operable
But the concept is just the beginning. We defined in full detail the profiles of service providers, the behaviors of digital and print channels and the procedures needed to make the service happen.
Plan ahead & engage
Innovation opportunities in patient experience
Sant Joan de Déu, a children’s hospital known for innovation and empathic care, set up the first Patient Experience department in Spain to systematically rethink its care model.
We collaborated in one of their foundational works: a comprehensive study with patients of different conditions and families of diverse cultures, as well as hospital staff.
Taking a broader approach was key to building a long term-vision with projects for the next few years. Involving staff as much as possible developed a shared understanding and a goodwill for change.
Deep insights
Fieldwork included interviews, observations and mobile ethnography. All data was synthesized into detailed —and valuable— user journey maps. As put by a head of diabetes, ‘It is the first time we see the patient’s care process as a whole’.
Opportunities to prototypes
Hospital staff contributed to identify opportunity areas across patient segments and services; such as, managing fear or making children feel normal —as opposed to sick— while in hospital.
They also ideated and prototyped potential projects for each opportunity. Those were then checked with patients and families in guerrilla tests around the hospital.
Long-term vision
Some projects are already being carried out by Patient Experience. For example, context sensitive ways for delivering bad news or a resource center for families.
But beyond individual projects, patient experience has become one of the foundations of the new strategic plan of the hospital.
Shared strategy
Hacking the hotel ecosystem
How could equipment makers work steadily with hoteliers? Decoding the hotel ecosystem and collaborating has boosted their strategies. Services and products will follow.
We sensed the dynamics and opportunities in the ecosystem by interviewing key players in hotel design, construction and management.
And we urged them to work with other manufacturers, facility managers, hoteliers, interior designers and architects in hacking several spaces of a real hotel. They reflected how to transfer that closer cooperation to reality with a customized board game.
Compelling strategies in complex ecosystems are not so much about how to fit in, but about how to create new value with other actors, by rethinking roles and rearranging resources.
Already questioning their projects
“The team at WQOP understood our needs right away and helped us work from an ecosystem approach. They were involved from the start and remained by our side in all stages. We’ve managed to tackle challenges we didn’t know how to solve, with profitable results for our companies. Encouraging!”
Bàrbara Urdillo, Cluster Manager
Habitat Cluster Barcelona
“When I think about Marc and Itziar I see an agency that knows how to solve problems and complex service issues considering all the stakeholders in an ecosystem, giving people an active and central role in the design process”
Inés Peláez, Design Manager
Barcelona Design Center
“In academia, when we speak about learning, we mainly mean theory. WQOP’s fresh and hands-on methods for teaching us design thinking allowed more than ten university disciplines to tackle enthusiastically a single project and to focus on a solution for setting up a community”
Alexandra Velasco
Director for International Programes and Innovation
San Francisco de Quito University
Need some questioning?
Projects, like the ones you’ve seen above, are the bulk of our work.
Don’t expect us to come with expert solutions. We’ll need your commitment to the project. That is, some time and effort. The bright side: we’ll combine the expertise of all participants.
Don’t expect us either to give you just a process and some methods while you do all the hard work. We’ll stay by your side and make sure we get the best possible results out of our combined efforts.
You just need some inspiration or new perspectives? No problem. It’s not a project. But we regularly give talks and lectures, or facilitate workshops.
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Talks & Workshops
We give a good deal of talks and workshops a year, locally and around Europe. We design the content according to participants interests and knowledge about service design.
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Training
We lecture in design schools, management schools and universities, locally and as far as in Ecuador. We also design and teach customized in-house courses.
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Ready to question your project?
You’ve already seen it. None of our projects matches the mould. We’ve never worked on any that started and ended at the right phase. So, don’t be ashamed and tell us where you’re stuck!