Service Design for Scale—Overcoming Challenges in Large-Scale Qualitative User Research

Services must scale up to meet the varying contexts and demands of diverse consumer groups, especially for global consumers, citizen services and organisational services. To enable services for scale, the activity of service design must scale up concerned processes, tools, techniques and people. Beyond traditional design approaches, rather than depending on a handful of designers and stakeholders, we can reap benefits of a more significant number of people and designers, across regions, and considering a wide variety of issues, users and methods to inform the design of the services. In this paper, we deliberate on this conversation of scaling service design by primarily considering the phase of primary research, specifically qualitative user research. Although qualitative user research is accepted as an academic approach, it is often questioned on the grounds of validity and practicality of logistics. When considering service design for scale across very diverse user groups, data saturation may be challenging to achieve with a small number of samples. We argue that it is necessary to tackle more extensive qualitative studies if we want to scale up designing for services, with technology as an enabler. We highlight this need for conducting large-scale qualitative studies while covering theory and critique in literature and propose some of the approaches we have attempted in our service design practice.