When you walk into a restaurant, you already have a particular experience in mind.
Most of the time, you expect something quick, friendly and basically efficient service, from when you walk in to when you get your food or drink, to when you walk out.
Service design is all about crafting that experience and ensuring it meets or exceeds your expectations.
Simply put, service design is a framework for understanding people’s thinking that helps improve and develop as well as design products and services that people love.
It is a type of thinking whereby people who use different products and services are at the centre of the design.
Even with the ongoing struggle to get equality for women on all fronts in the workplace, it is important to note that they are actually breaking glass ceilings every day.
At Marathon XP, I am welcomed by a team of beautiful women who talk about how empowered they are in their workspace, and how they are big and intentional about making noise around the service design profession.
Jackie Kairo, a service design director at Marathon XP, recounts how she landed in the world of service design even as the sector remains underrepresented.
Her role revolves around ensuring a framework is in place on how they operate to produce quality work, talking and interacting with clients as well as proposing projects.
“As a UoN architecture graduate, while still on campus, I was exposed to this world of service design,” Kairo said.
“I took up research jobs, which led me to establish a lot of similarities between architecture and service design. Some of them included design thinking based on different elements, balancing parameters and being able to have business and customer objectives.
“I am a person who picks what is good design and what is bad, and how I can better it. I can walk into a space and see that this could have been done in a different way, and this is good but something can be added to it to improve it.”
Kairo added that seeing the difference at the beginning or at the end of a project is what motivates her.
“What I liked about service design was the people-first approach, where we really get to understand the users, through research and in a specific context; what are their values, objectives, what do they like or dislike, how do they spend their day and even their money?” she said.
“As designers, we listen to that and then using our creativity, we come up with something unexpected that is elevated. In service design, I could apply architecture.”
MORE GIRL POWER
Kairo, however, believes that the sector is still relatively a new concept in the country.
“In Europe, you will find that there are universities that offer service design, and even experience design degrees. But in Kenya, there is no such curriculum,” she said.
“This puts us at a great disadvantage as there is a gap when it comes to tracking the number of service designers in the country, as it is a profession that is still relatively new and unexploited.”
On her part, Marathon XP programme manager Carol Mutua adds that people still do not know how service design can impact them and their experiences.
It is for this reason, she said, that they are keen on building capacity around service design and sharing knowledge.
“We are very particular in spreading the word as no colleges or universities in Kenya offer such courses. We not only do it externally but also internally as a company,” Mutua said.
“We have a weekly lunch and learning session, where someone from the design team can come and teach everyone, be it interns, and even researchers on some of the new things that are in the design space that we need to know and how can we better our services.”
Mutua said this has made it much easier to execute projects, and those who don’t know such things get a chance to learn.
“When I came in, I had no idea about anything to do with service design, but today, I am sure I can handle a project from start to end without any problems,” she said.
Mutua’s role involves getting different work leads and converting them into projects.
Thereafter, together with the team, they get into conversations with clients, get back and assign resources, and get into a planning phase between the team and the client, which subsequently leads to getting into an execution mood to meet deliverables within the set duration, budget and standards, and then delivering on the project.
“It is never that smooth because from the onset, you will get different challenges. At the end of the day, we need to align with the client and advise on the approach to take,” she said.
However, in her workspace, Mutua said she has to deal with a lot of stakeholders, developers and testers, of which the majority are males.
She said when she is with them, she doesn’t feel any type of way but is rather empowered to do what she does and be confident enough.
“The confidence elevates me to a point where I can stand in a room full of men and say what I have to say,” Mutua said.
“We all know this is a man’s world and I wouldn’t say it is easy for women but we need to get up and work hard for what we want. For this to happen, we need to want it, and one needs to know themselves.
“It doesn’t come easy, but there has to be some effort. On our end, we want to create strategic noise so that we can reach more young girls who are interested in this space."
MORE NOISE, MORE SUPPORT
Marathon XP design research lead Lynnet Kamau speaks of how their company empowers women, and that it is men who normally get the urge to match up to them.
She said her experience has been a learning curve, adding that she has received a lot of support and mentorship from the country manager and MD, who are easily accessible.
“I had to learn by doing as I was thrown into this space and I swam through to where I am. The support here is positive,” Kamau said.
“If we have a course that we really want to do, the company is always more than ready to support in whatever way they can. If you are interested in a conference that you would like to attend, they usually find a way to support you as these things are not offered in Kenya.”
She added that they are also given an opportunity to be themselves as well as employ their way of thinking without being confined to specific rules and regulations.
“The company also allows us to employ our creativity. However, we feel it is best and aligns with the company’s principles and objectives,” Kamau said.
She said the opportunities presented to her make her feel confident and powerful as a woman.
“At the workplace, we are usually a strong team of women, and the men usually feel like they need to live up to us,” Kamau said.
“For the core team, 80 per cent are women. Despite our bosses being males who have been in the industry for a vast number of years, you will find a lot of employees are women, even in leadership positions.”
Kamau said this goes beyond the typical assumption of women in the workforce being emotional, moody and difficult.
She said these are inborn but women use such aspects in a positive way.
“Women are more tactical and men tend to be more spontaneous. This is what makes us great designers and innovators because we are able to look at things holistically as opposed to objectively,” she said.
Kamau is in charge of all research activities, which, according to her, serves as the core of service design.
“By research, we get to go deep and talk to our clients and their customers. Most of the time we get to know the clients' objectives, challenges and how we can attain all this through feedback we get from their customers,” she said.
“We try to match the users' needs and the client's needs to make it one.”
Stakeholder buy-in when pitching ideas, Kamau said, is one of the challenges she experiences.
“As a company that is dominated by young people, sometimes, not everyone who is senior will be willing to listen to us if it is not the MD making a presentation,” she said.
“But we are empowered to go and make the presentations to a point where these same people are listening to us as we have proven ourselves to be experts.”
On her part, head of product design Njeri Mugure said she has learnt that design is not personal and that she shouldn’t be married to it but rather be more flexible.
In her team, she has the least experience and is the only woman, but her colleagues David and Don have been generous and patient.
“I always have to be on my toes even when we are on calls and initially, I wasn’t confident enough, but I am learning to go into meetings with senior people and being patient and avoid being worked up,” she said.
“Sometimes you speak to a customer, you might feel like losing it but I am learning the tact of offering alternative solutions.”
Mugure and her team usually take insights from the research team as most of the time, if not all the time, inform how they design a product or service.
Her role involves UX design, which is at every touch point and UI design, which is how an interface or product will look like.
Currently, they are doing product designs for digital products, such as websites and applications, and for services, where they create the experience for users (physical spaces), for example, in banks.
Mugure said they have a strategic ways committee that comes up with initiatives to onboard young people who are interested in service design.
“Some of the initiatives include hackathons, where we get to partner with other global organisations to facilitate them, and service design days, where we get to link with more designers in this field with the help of international organisations,” Mugure said.
“On November 10, we will be hosting a design day, where we are working on a project to redesign the area around Sarakasi Dome in Ngara. We are strategically making noise around service design.”
Mugure said part of the reason why she is a Marathoner is because she got curious and decided to take up online courses.
“In this era we live in, walls are coming down. The courses might not be offered locally, but certifications are important, and most of them are online. There is Coursera, Google and even the school of YouTube,” she said.
“You need to start where you are. You need to participate in your own salvation. Things might be tough now, but it is possible to transition.”
