When you have a lot of information in front of you, what usually happens is what many call information overload 🤯. It’s a state of mind that blocks your thinking. You feel overwhelmed by the amount of data that you need to go through. You feel uncertain about what this all means.
In this case, service designers deal with this uncertainty by taking the time to summarize 🖍 all their findings in smaller more digestible summaries.
When service designers are faced with huge chunks of data, they start by organizing that data into smaller categories 📂. Then, for each category, they ask themselves: what does this category tell me?
As each category might be composed of only five to ten elements, it is way easier to arrive at a conclusion regarding its meaning. Before, you had a huge amount of information. Now, you have tiny categories with specific meanings.
When the number of categories is still too big, service designers repeat the process 🔄. They regroup their categories together to create new summaries.
By doing so, even hundreds of data points are super easy to go through ✅. And as it’s a step-by-step process, the anxiety of not knowing goes away.
Going further
This article is part of my free course "What is the Service Designer mindset?" which helps you to finally understand how service designers think and what makes them such a special group of innovators.