This is the Nielsen Norman Group UX Podcast. Transcribed and edited from July 25, 2023. Therese B. Fessenden & Thomas Wilson sat down to have a delightful conversation about Service Design. Live on Apple, Google and Spotify.

Therese: UX is a broad term. Yes, it means user experience. Use Experiences aren’t limited to digital designs. The best ones are a careful orchestration of many kinds of interactions. Physical, digital, interpersonal. To honor range of experiences and different types of design work in our field, we’ll be sharing interviews we’ve had with members of our UX Masters Certified Members of our NNG Community who are applying these principals in their work in different ways.

Today we’re featuring a type of design that’s less focused on visual appearances, and more focused on untangling really gnarly complex problems. Service Design. To do that, we’ll be sharing an interview we had with UX Master Certified Thomas Wilson. Thomas is a Senior Principal Service Designer at United Healthcare, who’s spent the last thirteen years in the Service Design space. In this episode we discuss what Service Design is, how Thomas got into this field, and what makes the work so challenging but also so rewarding. So, without further delay, here’s Thomas.

Therese:  So, Thomas, it’s good to have you here. I’m excited to have you tell us a little bit about your work and especially around Service Design, which is a field that’s growing rapidly as far as, like, a field that is adjacent to, slash related to UX so I’m excited to kind of dissect that relationship a little bit and learn a bit about you. So, before we get into, how you got here, I would love to sort of dissect what Service Design is because I think we have a number of folks who may have heard of this term but don’t really know what Service Design is and maybe want to know a bit more. How would you define it?

Thomas: That’s a great question. And if you ask twenty different people, they’d probably give you twenty different answers. If you ask people who are in the European countries, especially like Scandinavian and Nordic countries, they would definitely give you a different answer than folks in the United States because we’re kind of functioning at different levels and Service Design is less mature over here than it is there. But my definition would be that Service Design is the research and analysis and design of those choreography of interactive touchpoints that customers have within a system or service. It’s all about solving problems and trying to create positive outcomes for customers, employees and the organization. It spans everything from Systems Design, Business Design, Venture Design, Organizational Design, CX, EX and as you previously mentioned, UX. And any aspect or iteration of innovation, and designing new products and services. Really, it’s all about customers, right? It’s about customers and business and merging those needs.

My personal philosophy is the only type of persona or archetype that really matters is a real one. And the only type of service experience that matters are the ones that consumers, customers and employees are actually having. So, we map those things out to better understand those pain points so we can provide a more preferred solution for the future. We’re in a service economy right now. Everything is a service, including software. That’s where SaaS comes from, ‘software as a service’.

Therese: Yeah, I kind of laughed a little bit when you mentioned that, depending on who you ask, you might get twenty different definitions, because I feel like there’s a constant debate on LinkedIn for example, where some people will be like “Well, Service Design is, like, more all encapsulating than UX is” and then UX’ers are like “Well UX captures services” and there’s always like this one-upping of whose domain is more responsible. I always kind of laugh a bit at this. Not because I don’t think it’s appropriate or accurate, cuz I think both of these kinds of schools of thought have some level of truth to them. But, what you mentioned, the sort of orchestration of all of these moving pieces which includes employees, which includes all of these maybe third-party partners and systems and making it something that works as like an ecosystem. And that delivers an experience to customers. And I definitely can see that, at least that’s how I see these as co-existing. Like neither is more important. They’re both essential ingredients to delivering a good service.

So how did you discover this? Have you always been in Service Design or has, have you sort of gotten into this space from an adjacent field?

Thomas: No. So, it’s funny that you ask because I started off many years ago being a visual designer and a writer and, you know, kind of doing that art director/creative director track, you know what I mean? I don’t want to age myself, but in the early 90’s I started off doing that. When I started going to school, there wasn’t a lot of availability to understand human factors and I’d certainly never heard of Service Design at that point but, not even UX, it just wasn’t even a common thing in the early 1990s. And so I started off in the nascent years of the web, because I moved from Miami where I was doing retail where I worked for Burdines and Bloomingdales, which is now Macy’s, and I was airbrushing tattoos and piercings off of models on Christmas Eve, making ads, photoshoots, etc. I came back to Houston and there was none of that kind of work. I was doing that work on Apple Mac IICIs, Sunn SPARC stations and CAMEX, and Unix systems.

In Houston you have a lot of oil and gas, petrochemical environmental and healthcare. Those are basically the big industries there. I started working for the oil and gas industry and getting into doing schematics and diagraming and mapping for GUI devices and interfaces. Back then was called Graphical User Interfaces, GUI. And, doing that HMI work and like SCADA controls and requirements. I was working on things like nuclear reactors, and deaerators and various types of electronics, like heat exchangers and pumps and then medical. And then to more customer-facing things like websites and intranets, kiosks, inside of retail environments. Understanding those form factors, touch target sizes, and things like the average height of American males that would be working in a factory that would be touching the device that I’m making. I started learning those types of things and geeking out on them just naturally, and so I didn’t really know it was called anything, I just knew that I wasn’t as fascinated with gradients and fonts and things like that that some of my counterparts and friends were doing.

I was more interested in how things worked, so I started doing a lot of employee experience design as well. So, having your feet in both of those worlds, it really started pushing me more into that direction of understanding like brand marketing, digital, employee experiences and intranets. Being inquisitive about collecting data on those people, places, partners, props and processes and how that stuff works. And just like you mentioned a second ago, I really got immersed in wanting to understand those ecosystems. And when I started doing more software, like the early 2000’s, merging the customer experience and getting those customer requirements or user requirements with the business needs and business requirements like BRD’s and distilling those down into product needs and product requirements, that’s when it all kind of became very clear that I was doing more than just visual design, more than just UX, or UI. You know, by mapping all of these things out. That’s what I really got fascinated about and started hearing the term Service Design. It was probably the early 2000’s.

Therese: Yeah, the more I think about it, it seems like Service Design is a relatively new discipline. At least as far as what we’ve been covering, cuz we do have our Service Blueprinting class at NNG, it’s a class I share with Sarah Gibbons and a couple other folks. And we talk a little bit, it’s funny, that class has evolved. We used to talk a lot more about the history of Service Design and covering some of the very early papers that came out in The Harvard Business Review, and that was like the 80’s. Which, to some who are entering the industry that might seem like it’s an older field but it’s really not. It’s still relatively new compared to a lot of other disciplines that are adjacent to it. So, in many ways it does seem like it’s something that’s still growing. And, like you were saying, there are some areas of the world, some industries that maybe have more Service Design maturity in the sense that they’ve had more time to establish some best practices and other are just getting their feet and even realizing that this is something you can do. And it’s really kind of a fun time to be involved in a way.

Thomas:  It’s exciting but it’s also a little bit nerve wracking to some degree. But, yeah, it’s new to most of the larger organizations in the United States and, as I said, we’re still doing it a little bit weirder and not at the top of our license. So, there’s a lot of evangelizing and proselytizing to go along with that so that we can get to a place that’s a bit more respected like it is in places like Germany, Norway, Scandinavia etc. They really do respect it over there and they do it well and it’s valued.

Therese: Yeah, and I’d definitely love to kind of explore that side of things in just a moment. You kind of mentioned that right now there’s a lot of figuring things out, for lack of a better way to phrase it, in the US where we’re still figuring out what is best practice for us and how can we make this work for us. And, of course, as a result, we often learn a lot in the process, where there might be things that we realize, wow, we got that all wrong or oh, maybe we got that part right. But what do you think is the biggest misconception that people tend to have with Service Design? What are the biggest, I would say, misunderstandings?

Thomas:  That service designers should be product designers that get down in the weeds with heavy lifting or iterative UI production and ongoing product incrementalism. Or that they should be one-third of the three-legged stool analogy. Service designers should, in my opinion, and most people’s opinions, answer directly to the business first. They should answer to business or if they need to be on a team, governed by a specific area, it should probably be Customer Experience second or be on innovation or flex teams that float across the org and LOBs but answer to those folks or to business and portfolio managers or some type of design leadership.

Where it gets problematic is where it’s not understood and sometimes it’s not even respected. That makes things a little bit harder, if you’re in a large organization. That’s if it’s not put in the right place or context and if it isn’t supported. That will be difficult for service designers to operate at the top of their license and to function for the business and for the customers.

Therese:  You know what immediately comes to mind when you mention like “not respected?” And I certainly don’t want to throw all my public sector buddies under the bus but when thinking about how a lot of large organizations, federal entities or otherwise, there tends to be this sort of belief that well, they’re employees, they’re designing whatever they need to design for their teams. They’re not users, we don’t need to study them, we don’t need to do a deep dive here, they’re just going to use whatever we tell them to use, right? There’s often this lack of regard or at least lack of understanding the value of doing research with employees.

Thomas: I would argue that it’s a lack of respect intrinsically. One of the most important things is when we understand why human-centered designers and service designers— design and the methods that we employ, it’s out of love. It’s out of love and respect for customers because we see ourselves in them and that’s really what empathy is rooted in, right? It’s a secondary notion. It’s rooted in love. So if you’re not doing this for the love of solving problems for humans, you’re probably doing it for the wrong reasons That’s one of the things that’s challenging about what you just asked, it’s just when you don’t have that buy-in or support from leadership and they don’t understand it or they don’t respect the idea that the majority of what a Service Designer does is research right?

We’re researching and then we’re mapping the things that you’re discovering and finding out and you’re getting that shared consensus. And so that notion that they should be isolated or distributed among teams or governed by PM’s. When businesses are really immature, and they do that sort of stuff, and they don’t understand the value and promise of Service Design or strategy, you know, allow us to work at the top of our license, then they’re just not getting the very best from what we’re capable of. And the real losers in that framework are the customers, unfortunately.

Therese:  Yeah, I actually love to unpack the idea of the word customer too, because in Service Design, you’ve got a lot people who could be considered customers, right?

Thomas: Yup

Therese: We’ve got end-users which, in UX…

Thomas: Employees, Advocates, influencers, 3rd party service people.

Therese: Yeah, you’ve got employees who could be end-users in some cases or you can have agents who are working in a system that customers also see and, you know, you might have two people working in the same system but seeing very different views or very different groups of information. And, in a way, we’re sort of like neglecting half or more of an experience by not designing for employees in the process and having that same kind of care and attention and empathy for co-workers or people who may not be immediately on our team but people who are inevitably working on these systems together.

Thomas: Right, right. Yeah, you have a lot of different people in that lexicon. You have service customers, service users, frontstage service employees like when you start talking about blueprinting, you have the backstage service employees, you have partner service employees, you have all those people. And understanding the difference between CX, EX, UX. They’re all just humans, right?

Therese:  Absolutely. You mentioned service blueprinting, and what comes to mind for me is actually this debate I’ve seen recently, and I would love your thoughts on it, but it has to do with the idea of Service Design is not service blueprinting and service blueprinting is certainly a tool of Service Design.

Thomas:  Oh, sure. It’s an artifact.

Therese:  So, I would love your thoughts like on how service blueprinting kind of fits into what you typically do on jobs that you’ve had as a Service Designer.

Thomas: Sure, so I think there’s a holy trifecta of a persona or archetype group, how that is visualized via their journey and that top piece of the journey, the top lens would be that persona or the archetype group and how they’re going through a specific use case or scenario. And solving a problem or how they’re going about their, whatever their job-to-be-done is or experience they’re having. That top part of the journey feeds into and is a part of the blueprint, at the top of the blueprint. And then you do, of course, all the frontstage and backstage and all of that stuff.

So, when you look at those three things, what those things are rooted in are the hero’s journey. The Hero’s Journey, and now I’m going to get a little metaphysical, and a bit numinous. Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, this is where we get these ideas from. And they got them form thousands of years of human storytelling. What we’re doing here is we’re doing one of the oldest things you can do, tell stories. We’ve dated some of these things back as far as ten thousand years but a lot of the things that we’re discovering in tombs, inside of pyramids of Giza, Mesoamerica, The Middle East, Asia and Africa and things like this; there are journeys, blueprinting, scenarios, crazy sixes, crazy eights, storyboards, personas, icons and glyphs, semiotics. All of this stuff is on the walls of the pyramids. So, we’ve been telling stories about humans, what we do here and in the afterlife, for thousands of years.

So, this notion of storytelling isn’t new and I don’t think Service Design or human-centered design is really new. I think that we’re using these artifacts to tell stories so that we can relate to one another so that we can build consensus and that’s why I mentioned previously this is rooted in love because when you have a passion for solving problems for human beings, you’re going to tell their stories with more than just a few details and touchpoints or empathy, you know what I mean?

You’re going to want to get every single detail because those are, like I said previously, those are the stories that matter; those are the journeys that matter, are the ones that people are actually having. So one of my biggest peeves when I’m training folks or teaching anything to do with Service Design or when I see these artifacts is, if it’s not a real person or at least a group of people that have very similar experiences, like an archetype bucket— I don’t like those mega-maps that have tons of stuff in them and there’s no human in it. You’re basically just saying: ‘This is how a pregnancy occurs or this is how someone goes and shops at the grocery store.’ Well, who’s that someone? Hundreds of millions of people buy groceries and have babies. Everyone doesn’t have the same experience in a scenario like that.

So that’s the most critical thing is, you have to tell those stories and the way that we do it is with those artifacts and many more. There’s a lot of different types of mapping, right? There’s ecosystem mapping, there’s use flow diagramming and mapping. There’s lots of different types of mapping. But those main three really give you a good picture of a specific human going through a specific thing, right? A scenario. A map without a human in it is a process map.

Therese: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you bring up this really important point, which is the idea of storytelling. It’s not really this optional skill to have in the field of design in general, right? The whole point is not to be able to say, oh, I designed something now I’m gonna tell people about it. But rather using the ability to construct a story, to understand what journey someone is actually going through. That’s where you’re going to find that enlightenment and those great ideas that actually have impact.

Thomas: Right.

Therese: And it’s funny you bring up the point of the mega-maps. The other type of map that gets on my nerves sometimes is the map that’s so general because we want to capture all of the customers that we have.

Thomas: That’s what I was just talking about! It’s that type of map. It’s not specific to a specific human going through a specific thing, it’s just this generalized thing. And frankly there’s only two reasons why people make those maps: Number one is out of ignorance and number two is because they work in an environment where they’re not being allowed to go garner research. And that goes back to what I was saying before, in one of the places it’s problematic. When you’re working in a product environment, and basically it becomes the PM’s request for a Service Designer to go map out their idea and prove its ‘value’, and basically, they’re looking at it like a form of validation. Like, “Go map this thing out to be true” and you have no research to confirm that A: It’s even a good idea or B: It would ever happen. And that’s when it gets problematic. I see that a lot.

Therese: Definitely. And also, I think there’s a lot of pressure too because, I mean, efforts, like you were saying earlier, they require research, they require a lot of information and that takes time. That naturally takes time, energy, investment, resources, and I think there’s also often this sort of fear of expending these resources on something like a map when it’s like, why would I spend it on a map when I can just put it toward a product or to developing something.

Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

Therese: And that can be a real issue, right? Because we might actually be setting ourselves to do a lot of busy design work as opposed to targeted design work, right?

Thomas:  Right. It’s very wasteful. It’s wasteful and it’s actually far more financially irresponsible and involved to do it poorly than it is to do it right and invest a little bit of time on the front end. We could actually do an entire podcast on Product First, waste and the viability and importance of research and Service Design and UX design on the front end of a project, but you’d probably need a couple of hours. We would need to take breaks. If you have any type of Six Sigma LEAN background, the most intelligent thing you can do to reduce waste and create smart process is UX Research and Service Design. Full stop. You shouldn’t be creating any form of UI without researchers and designers telling you what to create.

Therese: Yeah. [laughs] I’m sure others listening will agree with that statement.

Thomas: Yes.

Therese: But, yeah, I bring that up because, on the one hand, you need the value and the respect for the discipline in order to be able to do the work right. And, at the same time, doing the work right can often earn the respect and the value acknowledgement that can sometimes arise. Once people have seen the value. So, it can kind of be a catch 22 and kind of frustrating at times.

Thomas: Oh, believe me. Ha

Therese: So, I’m curious then. What has been most helpful to you as you’ve grown in your career. What has really helped you kind of take your work to the next level?

Thomas: Oh, that’s a great question. You know what? And it’s an easy one, too. Reading. I read a lot and I follow a vast variety of smart people just like you, Don Norman , Jakob Nielsen . I follow a vast variety of smart people, like members of the Service Design Network (SDN), so I read a lot of peers and people that came before me. I also follow and read people like Erika Hall, who’s one of my favorite researchers and strategists. I’m sure you know who she is. Adam StJohn Lawrence and Marc Stickdorn, both very smart guys. Of course, they’ve written very well-known and famous books. Tony Ulwick, Bob Moesta, both those guys JTBD guys.

And I follow some intelligent product management folks too. So I don’t just stick to service designers and  researchers, I follow everyone and I really like some product management folks like; John Cutler. I’ve also been fortunate enough to make some virtual friends and share information with people like Megan Miller. There’s a fellow Austinite named Douglas Ferguson and some behavioral design folks like BJ Fogg, PhD and Robert Meza , yeah. So, I really like following those people, reading what they have to say, and I just think that it helps absorb what other people have been through, how they map experiences, how they solve problems and think. It helps identify with challenges that are surfacing in their work and lives and if I’m seeing them in mine too it just helps me to know that I’m not alone or crazy, you know what I mean?

Therese: Yeah.

Thomas: Because we’re all struggling with some of the same things, right? So, it helps when you see someone who’s more established or makes a hell of a lot more money than you or is very well know and they’re saying the same things that you’re saying and seeing. That’s really my secret sauce is reading. Read and follow smart people. Read a lot. Consume information.

Therese: Yeah, and I think you bring up a really important point too. It’s not just reading. I mean yes, reading fellow researchers work, I feel like, is really helpful because, first of all, they’re doing research with lots of different types of employees, customers, etc. Like, they have a lot of perspectives just on that, from that alone. They also can share a lot about their methods, about what’s worked for them, what they found maybe not-so-helpful. Especially when it comes to, you know, theory versus practice. Cuz, obviously there are things that might be amazing to do in theory, but when it comes to actual resource constraints or time constraints that you have then, well yeah, maybe there are certain things that have go by the wayside in order to actually get work done, right? So that certainly can be really beneficial, but I think there’s also some value, too, in just reading about the perspectives of others. Like you’re saying, right? Getting into the minds of others and understanding these different lifestyles or different ways of living and the more you can get familiar with alternate ways of living other than yours or alternate perspectives other than yours, it might be deeply uncomfortable in the moment but it will give you so much more to think about as you’re creating some of these deliverables and as you’re creating some of these designs and suggesting changes to processes and stuff.

Thomas: Right, right.

Therese: Yeah, so what would you say is the thing that you love most? But if you had to point to like a couple things that really make this a field that you enjoy being part of, what are those things?

Thomas: Yeah, that’s a really great question, too. I love that moment when you have this holistic view of an ecosystem, and you can see all of its working and connected parts and tissue because you’ve mapped and diagramed well. You’ve been able to understand what those dependencies and relationships are. You can see those patterns and pain-point, moments that matter and the breakdowns in service. And when you’re in a mature environment and people respect and value design and service design, it can be a great unifier across business units, divisions, lines of business, and different stakeholders. The underlying theme of it is to build consensus — know what I mean? To understand where to play, what to design, what to build. If you really want to understand the passion of most service designers, myself included, that it’s about systems design and ecosystems and if you look at a brain, and understand the brain/body analogy and your brain is kind of like a business, right? You’ve got that frontal lobe which is kind of like thinking, speaking, memory stuff. And that can be your C-Suite and your perinatal lobe: your language, your touch, your feel; that would be your experience or UX, right? And the occipital lobe and the cerebellum: your balance, coordination, vision, perception, all that stuff; that can be more like product or and your temporal lobe: your hearing, learning, feelings. That’s kind of like your CX or marketing, right?

When you look at the different parts of the brain, they’re just like different aspects of the business. But, when you start talking about what it is that we provide to our customers it’s more like a nervous system. And so, when you understand how a nervous system diagram kind of looks like, imagine you have a 5G, cable or satellite or WiFi connection, right? And that is all connected to services physical and not, like computers, mobile devices, anything with an IPV6 connection, those are like nerve endings, right? All of those touch points for a customer to experience offerings and services. And everything we do is about that knowledge management of data that we’re collecting from those end points so we can provide a better service and better products for our customers. Then, when we collect that data and we bring it back to the brain, it has to be centralized and it has to be accurate and scrubbed, right? And it has to inform some type of personalization and service.

Therese: Yeah, and I think it kind of harkens back to what you mentioned earlier which is nothing against visual design. Visual design is crucial. It’s the way that we communicate, the way that people see our designs and the way that we can manipulate attention toward what we need people to look at. So, I think there really is a sort of fascinating aspect to really dissecting these ecosystems of products, people, props, right? All of these different systems and processes, right? There’s a lot to untangle in these ecosystems, in these networks of support. And often, if you like really difficult problems, like if you’re someone who walks up to a broken vacuum cleaner, and you’re like “I need to take this apart” as opposed to “I’d rather just throw the thing out and buy a new one”, right? I mean, obviously there might be a point where you’re trying to take this apart, you kind of lose your mind, but it’s in that investigative process, in that un-piecing and re-piecing together; if you enjoy that sort of thing, Service Design is absolutely a field that allows you to do that and to live in this space of ambiguity and questions and also of learning, right? So, I can definitely see excitement in that and the passion in that.

Thomas: It’s funny that you bring that analogy up because, trust me when I tell you, everyone who’s in Service Design or UX: our significant others absolutely hate us because of what we do. Because you can’t go through a check-out, you can’t walk through a line, you can’t experience a service, you can’t run your credit card through a POS system, you can’t just go to a carwash without critiquing the hell out of it by

Therese: [laughs]

Thomas: saying “Oh, the button’s on the wrong place. Oh, this affordance would be better if it were down here, it would be better if it was this color.” You know, my wife hates that stuff. Like, we’ll be just trying to check out and buy food and I’m like, “Well, look honey, let me show you.” And she’s like “I know, I know it sucks, give me a break. Let’s go.” You know what I mean? You see it everywhere.

Therese: Yeah, you do. And on the one hand it’s fun because it gives you ideas for like, huh, this reminds me of a work problem, this reminds me of something else I’m working on and maybe this can be an analogy that I can now use to think through these problems. So, I guess on that note, obviously there are some people who are seasoned service designers who might relate to a lot we’re talking about, but there might also be some folks who are thinking maybe this is where I want to take my career.

Thomas: I would reiterate, read and consume a lot of information. There’s a lot of things out there, that aren’t very expensive. You can get on Udemy for virtually nothing and learn. You can take classes at NNG. You can take classes at IDEO. You can do all sorts of stuff for continuing education. There’s also interactiondesign.org. A great place to learn that’s very inexpensive. But just know that other people have come before you and there’s a lot to glean from that. And smart people really love to share their wisdom. They’re not trying to make a million dollars off you or hustle you. Really smart people want to share.

Yes, they might have classes that cost money and it might be considerable cost. But there’s also a lot of free videos out there. Just being serious, NNG, IDEO, YouTube channels. There’s tons of stuff. You can Google just about anything. And on the NNG site, it doesn’t matter if it’s about personas, blueprints, how to research. You can find it. So, you’d be surprised how many people are sharing this information. If you’re just starting out and you have the time and you have the money, and you’re young, and you can move around, go to a college like #SCAD . You know, Savannah College of Art and Design has really come a long way. Especially in the last 10-15 years, as far as their offerings. 20 years ago SCAD was known for cinematography. And now it’s really a great service design, UX design, product design school. So, if you can afford to do that, go do that.

But I would caution gently, but stay away from this business if you’re attracted to 6 figure salaries. If you think that’s what it’s about. If you’ve seen stock photography of people playing with stickies. It’s not about playing around in FigJam with cupcake, unicorn and lollipop emojis. A lot of people are coming into this business for the wrong reason. I want to caution you. It’s a mostly thankless job. And more often than not, you’re going to be fighting for people you’ll never really know. Unless you get the opportunity to research them or do ethnographic interviews. You’re going to be solving problems for them and finding pains and gaps. You’re going to be in meetings, war rooms and in message threads where you’re fighting for them and representing them with people that have different agendas than your customers have.

So, if you don’t understand the politics behind this work. If you don’t understand that it’s really about deep investigation and curiosity and it’s about learning and constant negotiation, you’re going to get your feelings hurt. The main thing is what we mentioned previously. It’s that storytelling for solving human pain points within systems. And it’s not about money, glory, or accolades. We really do this for the love of humans.

Therese: Yeah. I think that’s a really fantastic way to wrap up the episode. Because I don’t think I can top that. Really, if you like complex problems and you love learning about people, this is a great field for you. And like Thomas said, a shameless plug for our YouTube videos. Even if you don’t want to come to one of our classes, though I’ll certainly be happy to see you there. But we do have YouTube videos. We have free articles. Feel free to check out our free stuff because it’s a great place to get started if you’re not ready to dive in with both feet. So Thomas, if anyone wants to follow you and your work, where could you point people to?

You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m usually talking smack about Service Design, UX, CX or EX Design and Research. https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasianwilson/

Thomas’ related certifications:

Service Design Master Trainer — SDN International

Masters – UX Research & Management — Nielsen Norman Group NNG

LEAN 6-Sigma Greenbelt — Lean Competency System

Leadership & Management — Harvard Business School

Episode can be heard here on Spotify:

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nngroup/episodes/31–Service-Design-101-feat–Thomas-Wilson–UXMC–Senior-Principal-Service-Designer–Strategist-e280m