Building service design capability through hands-on learning
How can a leading financial services firm inspire its design community to grow confidence in service design?
The Challenge
Manulife’s design enablement team was preparing its annual internal conference, a moment to inspire and connect its design practitioners at the Global HCD Summit. With most of the community grounded in UX and UI, service design was still emerging as a practice area. The team saw an opportunity: bring in an external facilitator to run an engaging session that would introduce service design concepts while building confidence to try new tools and approaches.
Our Response
We partnered with the client to design and deliver a 55-minute workshop session, making service design approachable and energizing. Drawing on our expertise and deep library of training materials, we customized a session that blended clear theory with practical application. Participants explored the basics of stakeholder mapping, journey mapping, and blueprinting, before diving into a hands-on mapping activity using an out-of-sector example.
Client:
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The Opportunity
This workshop was part of a broader journey for the client: to expand its design practice beyond UX/UI into strategy and service design. By investing in learning experiences like this, Manulife is actively building capability and creating space for its designers to stretch into new disciplines.
The session was run twice back to back to enable maximum participation from attendees. In addition to the in person session in Toronto, the workshop was livestreamed to a smaller group of attendees in Boston.
Our Approach
Our workshop design brought a mix of structure and play, maximizing the fun and value the group could get from a 55 minute session. Aligned to our belief in learning by doing, we combined a short theory introduction to ground in key concepts with a hands-on journey mapping activity. Discussion and reflection created space to share and integrate learning in the group.
Our facilitation emphasized energy, clarity and fun, ensuring the wide range of roles and levels of audience members would get something from the session. We also introduced fun, tactile touches, like a custom template with emoji stickers, to make the exercise approachable and memorable given the time constraints.
Project Outcomes
The workshop delivered exactly what the client had hoped: inspiration paired with practical skills. Participants left with a baseline understanding of service design, exposure to core tools, and renewed confidence in trying them out. We had so much fun with all the attendees, including amazing reflections and conversation from our journey mapping activity. Feedback from both Toronto and Boston was enthusiastic!
