Interview with Ruko Kuga, Service Designer at InMotion Ventures

We had a chat with Ruko Kuga to talk about her role as a Service Designer at InMotion, the common outputs and outcomes and her current favourite form of mobility. She also discussed startups need to be mindful of to succeed. Enjoy 🌸

Ruko Kuga

1. Could you tell me about what you do at InMotion as a Service Designer?

In a nutshell, my role is talking to people, finding problems or opportunities and helping different teams to solve them.

Service design can be quite different from UX in the sense that, depending on where you work — e.g. industry, environment, — the scope of work can be quite different.

My current role as Service Designer is probably quite unique to our incubator environment. InMotion Ventures is an urban mobility incubator and venture capital firm.

We have two arms:

• One is an incubator where we create mobility businesses for Today

• The other is venture capital that invests into other businesses that are more future focused.

I’m on the team focused on Today — the incubator.

The team is made up of people with various skill sets including service design, growth, data science, tech, finance and others. We work on different projects from conception to execution.

When the venture is a concept, the service designer would work on the early proposition development, from doing design research, defining the audience and proposition for the customer and working with the finance team on the business model.

The service designer would also help with the service delivery alongside the venture team. For instance, we launched a chauffeur business last year and the majority of the work is operations. Therefore, we worked with the Operations team closely during this phase.

So when the project has actually launched or when it becomes a business I collaborate with people within the venture to optimise the service experience. When you launch a venture and start to deliver a service, it can be chaotic. For example, the operations team needs to figure out how to deliver the service in the most operationally efficient way and sometimes the customer experience gets forgotten. That is where service design can help. I would assess the current state to help make changes to the processes to improve the service experience.

Another way would be to conduct design research or user research to inform on the business, product or marketing strategy going forward. When required, I would help deliver the strategy too alongside the team.

In a nutshell, my role is talking to people, finding problems or opportunities and helping different teams to solve them.

2. What are the outcomes of service design at InMotion?

One of the more common ones is service blueprint.

I’ll first talk about outputs. There are different kinds of outputs. One of the more common ones is the service blueprint. So that would be capturing how the whole customer experience works end to end. Another example is prototypes.

We would create wireframes or prototype concepts to test. This might be user testing concept boards, prototypes or doing lead generation activities in order to see if people would be interested in the proposition.

In terms of outcomes, because service design tends to be collaborative, it is difficult to measure the impact of it on its own. The activities and outputs of service design often help others to deliver a better service experience.

However, one of the outcomes might be about creating a framework around how teams work and how user insights are actioned. Some teams might already have a framework, for instance, product teams tend to have a framework in which they action insights. If you’re working with an operations team, they might be less used to working with build-measure-learn feedback loop.

Helping each team to act and deliver a better service experience based on user insights is an important factor of service design. In that sense, service designers tend to go a step deeper into delivery, more than user researchers would do.

3. From speaking with friends who work in R&D/innovation centres at big companies, have told me that it’s important to maintain some distance and creative freedom from your parent organisation. What is the relationship between InMotion and Jaguar Land Rover?

I’ve worked in other innovation labs — different types. I would say that the way InMotion has been set up allows for freedom, being a subsidiary as opposed to being a department within Jaguar Land Rover.

We have a lot more creative freedom to create and test things. For instance, when I worked at another company, just getting Facebook Ads set up was a nightmare because you have to liaise with compliance and work with the existing marketing department who are busy with their day jobs.

InMotion is completely separate. We get strategic directions from the parent company, but we do have more freedom here in a way.

4. What is your favourite form of mobility?

I’ve taken up cycling recently, so I try to cycle to most places or walk.

I haven’t actually taken the tube since March. I used to take the tube every day before.

Another thing I’ve become quite acutely aware of is air pollution. For instance, we all know that the tube is very polluted. It’s under the ground, very old tunnels, there’s lots of particulate matter. I feel like it’s better to be around in your neighbourhood, going to local parks or restaurants instead of travelling into central London. My lifestyle and my perspective has changed and so has my mobility preferences.

5. What do you think are the important elements for the ventures to be successful?

So, in summary, the three things are the market, value proposition that scales, and team + culture + leadership.

There are a few different factors.

The first thing is the market e.g. mobility. Some external factors to the market cannot be predicted e.g. Covid 19. Many people thought that people wouldn’t use bike sharing but now everyone’s using JUMP and Lime bikes and it’s very difficult to buy a bike at the moment because everyone is trying to buy a bike. The market is so important when you’re trying to be successful, as a startup. Nobody has control over this, so you have to be somewhat lucky or well-timed.

The second thing is the value proposition — having a very clear value proposition that is viable and scalable. At the beginning, it might be very manual and you might only be able to do 10 percent of what you really want to do. However, as long as you are solving a core need for a target segment and thinking about scaling to reach thousands or millions of customers you’re on track. You also need to be thinking about scaling your business from day one.

The third one would be Team or Culture. With the impact of Covid-19, it’s really important to have a culture of trust among team members. To be able to trust each other, collaborate with each other in order to deliver a great experience.

I think leadership does come into play as well, because if there’s a great vision and great working environment, I think most people would be willing to give their 110%. In a Startup environment, especially around launch, it’s actually really important that everyone gives their 110%. Obviously you can relax a little bit at different points but for launch, it is very important that the whole team is focused.

So, in summary, the three things are the market, value proposition that scales, and team + culture + leadership.

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Interviewed by Misato Ehara

Edited by Misato Ehara and Ruko Kuga

Illustrations by Misato Ehara

Transcribed with Trint

Edited with Google docs

Published on 7 Sep 2020

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Interviewee:Ruko Kuga is a Service Designer and Strategist currently at InMotion Ventures helping to launch and optimise urban mobility startups. She has worked on projects in mobility, smart cities and financial services sectors. In the last couple of years, she began working with startups. She holds an MA in Service Design from the Royal College of Art.

Interviewer: Misato Ehara is the founder of The UX Review, a former design Strategist at Gensler. Currently completing a Masters in Curating Contemporary Design. Open to UX research roles starting in October 2020.