We’ve all heard the banter: putting the customer at the heart of everything we do, user-centric, patient-centred. How come then people still end up with poor experiences? Well it could be that people continue to guess how people want their services delivered and messages sent based on what has worked well in the past. Co-design or user-centred design is a relatively simple four-stage process that develops a rich understanding of how people want to engage a service, even if they are a ‘reluctant customer’.

I recently stayed in a rather chintzy hotel on the south coast. It had all the appearances of a well-designed boutique British hotel, but its rather young, inexperienced staff just let the whole thing down. I am making assumptions (the mother of, well, you know what), but I think it would be fair to say that I have a clearer idea of what service they should have been supplying then they ever did. They lacked a certain understanding of how people frame their own worlds. That cheery suggestion about getting down to breakfast early so that we don’t miss out sounded like a warning that they like to get the restaurant cleared for lunch, but actually turned out to be because they don’t replenish the ‘help yourself’ provisions.

I mention this little tale because those delivering a service often don’t experience it. The opposite tale is of a restaurant slightly off the now well-beaten tracks in London’s oh-so-trendy Shoreditch. Because all the staff eat the same food as the customers, they all know what it tastes like, which wines it goes with, what’s really good seasonally and how filling it is. It’s one of the main reasons that I keep going back.

Co-design is difficult. No least for the design industry. The Design Council has dozens of definitions on its website. My favourite is ‘the process of designing with people that will use or deliver a product or service’. The most important word in that sentence is people. People are users, their families or carers, people that deliver services or manage them, the marketing folk and the designers. Everyone is an expert in their own way. People develop coping strategies around making things that are badly designed to work for them. People say things are fine, when clearly they are not.

The four stages to make this happen are relatively simple. You shouldn’t miss one out because each informs the next.

Discovery. Watching people use a product or service. Talk to them about their experiences. Ask them for their ideas. Look at what others are doing. Assess the experience of other providers, if they exist.

Design. Use stimulus to think about design. Great facilitation will help people start to think about things in different ways. Use parallel experiences to ‘borrow from’. The classic example here is hotel services being looked at by hospitals to improve in-patient experiences.

Prototype. If you can, pilot the idea, but you don’t have to go to that expense. You can trial it using models, or plans and drawings, or wireframes. Finesse your ideas from user group feedback. Test with a wider group.

Measure and evolve. Compare service delivery with previous experiences. Assess user satisfaction, changes in behaviour, brand perceptions. Use this insight to continuously improve and evolve the service.