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Service Design
Human-Centred Service Design
Great services begin with a simple premise: design around people, not organisations. People do not experience services in isolation. They experience them as part of their everyday lives—during moments of change, uncertainty, opportunity and need. Human-Centred Service Design helps organisations understand these experiences, uncover what matters most to the people they serve, and design services that are meaningful, seamless and trusted.
Organisations today are expected to deliver services that are not only efficient, but also trusted, inclusive and responsive to the evolving needs of customers and citizens. Yet many service improvements continue to focus on internal processes rather than the people they are intended to serve, resulting in fragmented experiences, reduced trust and missed opportunities to create meaningful impact.
This programme equips participants with a practical, human-centred approach to understanding customer needs, diagnosing service experiences and designing trusted services that consistently deliver on their organisation's customer promise. Through the ThinkPlace Service Design methodology, participants will learn how to move beyond assumptions, uncover what truly matters to customers, and translate insights into service improvements that are both desirable for people and feasible for organisations.
By the end of the programme, participants will have the knowledge, tools and confidence to redesign services that strengthen trust, improve customer experiences and support organisational transformation.
Upcoming sessions
4 -5 August, 2026
9:30am – 5:30pm SGT
SGD 1,280 per participant (excluding 9% GST)
Venue: In-person, Singapore, location TBA
(Each run will proceed with a minimum class size of 10 participants)
Who is this programme for and what will you learn
This programme is suitable for professionals responsible for designing, delivering or improving customer and/or citizen experiences across the public and private sectors, including:
Service Owners, Product Managers and Business Improvement Teams responsible for improving service delivery, operational performance and customer satisfaction.
Digital Transformation and Technology Teams designing digital services that balance technology with human needs.
Frontline Managers and Operational Leaders responsible for shaping customer interactions and improving service quality.
Anyone involved in understanding customers, citizens or users and who wishes to apply human-centred approaches to improve services and build trust.
Learning Outcomes
Apply human-centred service design principles to understand customer needs and life moments.
Diagnose current service experiences using the ThinkPlace Service Design Audit™.
Identify opportunities to strengthen trust and improve customer experiences.
Design an end-to-end Trusted Service Experience aligned to the organisation's customer promise.
Develop a Future-State Service Blueprint that aligns people, processes, policies and technology to deliver the desired customer experience.
Day 1
Segment 1: What Does It Mean to Be Human-Centred?
Participants explore the principles of Human-Centred Service Design and why understanding people's lives is fundamental to designing better services. They will learn how organisations often design around internal processes, while customers and citizens experience services within the context of their own life moments. The session also clarifies the relationship between Human-Centred Design, Customer Experience (CX), Service Design and UX/UI, and introduces trust as an important outcome of good service design.
Segment 2: Understanding Customer Journeys Through Moments of Life
Participants will explore how a person's broader life context—including their goals, challenges, emotions and circumstances—influences how they experience a service. Rather than seeing customers only as "users" of a service, participants will learn to understand them as people navigating important life moments.
Activity: Customer Profile & Moments of Life Canvas
Segment 3: Mapping the Existing Customer Journey
Having understood the customer, participants now examine how they interact with the organisation throughout their journey. They will map the end-to-end service experience, identify touchpoints across channels, and understand how each interaction contributes to the overall experience.
Activity: Map end-to-end customer journeys, channels and touchpoints.
Segment 4: Identifying Insights and Pain Points
Having mapped the current customer journey, participants will learn how to systematically diagnose the quality of a service experience using the ThinkPlace Service Design Audit™. Rather than jumping directly into solutions, participants will evaluate each key touchpoint through four diagnostic lenses—People, Trust, Service Delivery, and Digital & AI Enablement—to identify where the service is performing well and where opportunities for improvement exist.
Day 2
Segment 1: Identifying design opportunities
Participants revisit their Experience Heat Map and interpret the findings to uncover the underlying causes of service challenges. Rather than jumping to solutions, they learn to synthesise observations into meaningful insights and identify opportunities for redesign.
Activity: Identify unmet customer needs and systemic barriers by framing opportunity areas using "How Might We..." questions.
Segment 2: Designing the trusted experience
Participants will learn how to design an end-to-end trusted service experience using the ThinkPlace Trusted Service Experience Framework, that consistently delivers on their organisation's customer promise. Moving beyond individual touchpoints, they will explore the seven stages of the customer journey—from the moment a customer enters a life event through to becoming an advocate—and understand how trust is intentionally built across every interaction.
Segment 3: Designing the Service System
Great customer experiences are enabled by equally well-designed organisational systems. Participants learn that redesigning customer journeys requires corresponding changes to people, processes, policies, technology and governance. Participants will develop a service blueprint that translates the desired customer experience into operational reality.
Segment 4: Prioritising for implementation
Participants conclude the programme by prioritising service improvements and identifying practical actions that move the organisation towards its desired customer experience. Participants explore how to balance quick wins with longer-term transformation while maintaining alignment with their customer promise.
Programme outline
Meet your trainer
Regional Director, ThinkPlace Singapore and Asia
Dr. Debbie Ng
Dr. Debbie Ng, PhD, is a distinguished design leader with over 18 years of experience driving transformative change across complex public and social challenges through human-centred design. As Regional Director of ThinkPlace Singapore and Asia, she collaborates with organisations across sectors to shape innovative, sustainable futures, leveraging design as a powerful force for social good. Debbie is a pioneer of the design thinking initiative in Singapore in 2007, and continued to serve under various capacities in the Public Service Division of the Prime Minister's Office, SPRING Singapore and Singapore Polytechnic.
Debbie excels in navigating intricate, multi-dimensional problems where solutions are ambiguous, applying her expertise in design leadership, complex systems thinking, ethnography, co-design, and service design.
Fueled by a deep commitment to empowering others, Debbie dedicates herself to building internal change and transformation teams and coaching leaders to be empathetic, creative and adaptive leaders.