Spotlight On Kevin Yuen: Spotless’ New Service Design Director

Excitingly, Service Design is becoming a more commonly recognised business tactic and we are increasingly receiving service design briefs from clients who are not only interested in the product details, but in looking at their business from a more holistic viewpoint.  Stand tall, see all….if you will.  So we needed to do the same and galvanise our Service Design approach within our own business – meta, but necessary.  We are practicing what we preach here at Spotless.

With that, we have expanded our team to welcome Kevin Yuen as our Service Design Director.  He’s here to bring his wealth of experience to our own business, in response to this demand, so that we can better serve our clients with theirs.

We workshopped our own business back in May and we knew Kevin would play a major role in our ambitions and plans once he joined. There was lots of talk of ‘wheeling him out’ during our session….so now he is here, let the wheeling begin!

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Welcome Kevin!

Kevin has been working in the area of Service Design and User Experience over the past 15 years – helping a number of blue chip organisations launch new services and remodel existing services.  His role largely revolves around discussing strategic opportunities with senior stakeholders, and then pivoting to work with design teams to explore, create and iterate new service design concepts.  He has been recognised for his experience strategy expertise in methodology reviews from Forrester, and awards from BIMA and Recommended Agencies Register.

Kevin’s background is Sociology and Marketing, having studied a double degree in Arts and Commerce at the University of Melbourne, and his interest in behavioural science began there.‍

He started his career at KPMG Consulting, participating in their international programme.  In this time he was assisting companies address the challenges of the emerging digital marketplace – helping clients such as BBC, Sky and Virgin Megastores to find new opportunities, launch new businesses and change their business processes and systems. In the Dotcom era, he was a team leader for the  KPMG K-Incubator programme – undertaking strategic planning for new internet start-ups. Some of those early projects include the launch of the first digital radio network in the UK for Classic FM, and helping re-engineer the BBC Digital Archive processes (a precursor to the iPlayer).

Kevin joined Detica in 2005, joining when the design team was just 10 people.  He helped develop the digital design and build capability into a Top Ten digital agency in the UK, winning and delivering milestone projects for Vodafone, Transport for London and Channel 4.  In this period, he introduced Design Thinking approaches to develop Service Design and Experience Strategy methodologies used for key services launches. His eCommerce methodology was recognised by Forrester as Market Leading, and a subsequent review of Digital Agencies, rated the overall design methodologies in the Forrester “Leading Wave”.

In recent years, Kevin has been developing new design management approaches to embrace hybrid digital and physical service ecologies, and set up squad based design teams and Atomic Design Systems.  Recent projects have included customer engagement models crossing over Retail environments and integrated apps; Internet of Things connected systems; and data-driven healthcare.

Kevin’s role at Spotless is to lead our Service Design capability.  He will be responsible for the evolution of our design methodologies, overseeing the scoping and delivery of client work, and applying quality assurance to all our design work.

“I get involved in overseeing how Service Design can help organisations become more human! I have an inbuilt optimism that we can make the world better by considering the human experience much more fundamentally, in the way we create environments and processes. Practically, that means I am often trying to get to the essence of the opportunity. I like to sketch out the opportunity space on single pages: For example, here is the ‘user universe’ and here is the ‘interaction landscape’ that the organisation has the opportunity to create.”