Charmaine’s squiggly journey to a career in service design
Charmaine Smikle’s career journey
In this series of Q&As, we’re exploring the fascinating journeys that people take into service design, and how a varied career can help make for a better service designer.
Charmaine Smikle is a Service Designer at Social Care Wales, the regulator responsible for ensuring high-quality social care services in Wales. Based in the digital team, Charmaine is one of two service designers working on projects across the organisation.
Q: Tell us about your career journey so far and how you first encountered service design?
A: These days my job title is ‘service designer’ but my background is in information and communications roles, both here at Social Care Wales, and previously for a charity and for Welsh Government.
I started at Social Care Wales as a Publications and Information Officer back in 2007. That led to PR and digital marketing and then to a Senior Digital Officer role, overseeing the website and getting involved in lots of digital projects.
In fact, I was the first member of the new digital team. Setting up a separate team was one of the recommendations of a discovery project I’d been part of in 2021, looking at how people engage with our online services. The review also recommended creating some key roles, including service design. So when I officially moved into my service design role earlier this year, that was an intentional shift and the result of a few years of demonstrating the value of this type of role to the organisation.
Now I work across lots of different projects, helping colleagues to understand their processes, to see if we can make things more efficient and better for the user. At Social Care Wales our remit includes training, workforce development, research, data and innovation around social care, so the work we cover is quite broad.
Q: Our theory is that a squiggly line career makes for a better service designer. How is this true for you?
A: Well I originally studied Biomedical Science at King's College London with the aim of doing something in science communication. Some of the skills that helped me develop, like being able to communicate visually to help build a shared understanding, and always looking for the evidence to support the story, are actually the things I find most powerful about service design.
In fact my whole background in comms has been really helpful for my current role. Although I work in a digital team, my job isn't really about digital. It’s more about listening, researching, understanding and empathising.
Before Social Care Wales, I worked for Bawso, a charity supporting black and minoritised victims of abuse and exploitation in Wales, including women who have experienced domestic violence. My work involved joining up complicated support services for people, helping them to navigate the system and prove their eligibility, often at a very traumatic time in their lives.
I’d also worked in NHS complaints (within Welsh Government), gathering bundles of evidence to help understand exactly what had happened in each case.
Both of those roles gave me an understanding of how the system can fail people when services don’t work properly. And that really fuelled my desire to be in a role that’s about making things work better. It’s influenced how I see the role of service design: to help organisations execute policy, but in a way that is meaningful for the end user.
Q: How did you go about learning about service design?
A: My real interest in service design started when we did some training with Jo from Service Works. She delivered an Introduction to Service Design course for us. After that I did a mix of other courses online, and I have really immersed myself in that space over the last year or so. I’ve also tried to intentionally be more creative in my work, noticing people’s behaviour and using that as an evidence base.
Q: What service design work are you most proud to have been involved in? And why?
A: We’re just starting a transformation of the registration process for care workers in Wales, which is currently quite a long and convoluted process. We’re using user-centered design practices across the whole transformation programme, and it’s very exciting. The fact that we’re now approaching the work in this way is an achievement in itself.
I also worked with our campaigns team on a project I’m proud of. They wanted to improve how they recruited people to our Introduction to Social Care course. We went through a whole journey map with them, showing exactly what happens at each stage of their service. That was really useful because they hadn't realised there were so many areas of duplication and we found lots of ways to make things more efficient (saving money and time).
The work led to us looking at a different way to issue course certificates for people who work in the sector, which also led to a financial saving for the organisation. Issuing certificates used to take half a day for each course, now it takes just 50 seconds, saving around 1.5 days of staff time per month.
That project has really encouraged other people in the organisation to engage with my team because it showcased the value of service design approaches.
Q: What have you found most challenging about practising service design in a government/public sector context?
A: One of the frustrations is that it can often feel like you're asking people to go back a step, when they just want to get started. It's only because you can see there are more questions to ask, but it can be prickly at the start. So it’s important to get people to understand there’s value in that discovery phase. We’re not trying to block or undo anything, we’re trying to add to it.
We’ve worked quite hard internally to build awareness of what service design is and how it can help. We’re now running our own introduction to service design course within the organisation, delivered by people in our team. There’s been a lot of interest actually. And it’s helping people understand how and when it’s best to involve us.
Q: What advice would you give anyone just starting out or looking to develop a career in service design?
A: I’d recommend going on an introductory course like Jo’s (and I’m not just saying that because you’re interviewing me). That course really gave me an understanding of how you can apply service design thinking in any role, and got me thinking about what the next steps might be for developing it as a career.
There are also some apprenticeship schemes, including for related fields, which might be worth looking at, though they’re normally only available through your employer. We’ve just opened up an apprenticeship opportunity internally for colleagues and I know the Welsh Revenue Authority are doing something similar for user-centred design.
Q: Can you recommend something to read, watch or listen to that might interest someone interested in embarking on a career in service design?
A: Well there are lots of great books out there on service design as a starting point. But you can also find stories about service design everywhere. For example, there’s a scene in the film, The Founder (which tells the story of the development of McDonald’s), where the team are trying to design an effective kitchen for the way that they work. That’s a great example of design thinking in action.
I would also recommend reading this case study on the work behind the Wigan Deal, as it really shows the power of working with the user and deeply understanding their needs to deliver better services.
Find out more
If you’re starting out in service design, whatever your career journey to date, our Introduction to Service Design course is the perfect way to build your understanding of the fundamentals. Three 2.5-hour sessions introduce service design to people working in public and nonprofit organisations. Learn more
