Services

User and Customer Research

User research sounds obvious. Yet many products and services are still built around assumptions: what the most senior person believes customers want, what competitors are doing or what the latest trend is. However, approaches like this often lead to costly mistakes and reputational risk. Good research replaces assumptions with evidence. It's the difference between a feature no one uses and a product people return to and recommend to friends and family.

Over the years, I have worked on many different research projects. From helping Hargreaves Lansdown understand how clients make financial and investment decisions to improving customer support and contact-centre experiences. Here's what some clients have said about that work.

Service Design

From streaming subscriptions to renewing a passport, we all rely on dozens of services every day. The best feel effortless to use, even though behind the scenes many are enormously complex, spanning multiple departments, business owners, policies, regulatory checks and third-party providers that all have to work together.

However, services don't need to be complex for the people who use them. Services can, and should, be easy to find and use. That's where service design comes in. I work across the service design lifecycle, with particular interest in discovery and end-to-end evaluation. I can help with:

• Service discovery to understand user needs and shape services that are viable, accessible and easy to use.
• Designing and evaluating new service concepts before costly build.
• Mapping complex services and journeys to surface pain points and handoffs across teams and channels.
• Evaluating and improving existing services.
• Working to the GDS Service Standard across Discovery, Alpha, Beta and Live.

Presenting a service map at a service design meet-up in London

CX & UX Strategy

Set a clear direction for your services and products, and make sure your leadership team and organisation genuinely understand what that means in practice. When strategy is aligned, decisions are faster, prioritisation is clearer, and teams move confidently towards shared goals.

I can help with:

• Defining user-centred strategy grounded in user needs, technical feasibility and business goals.
• Creating alignment across teams so everyone understands what success looks like.
• Building strategic frameworks for product and service decisions.

Capability Building & Training

Bring lasting change by building your team's confidence and capability. I work alongside your leaders and teams to help embed user-centred practices and ways of working that become repeatable and resilient.

I can help with:

• Facilitating workshops and team sessions — I've facilitated over 250 workshops on a variety of topics, online and in person, including 40 design thinking workshops designed and delivered for the Office for National Statistics.
• Mentoring teams and individuals in user-centred design and research methods.
• Embedding user-centred practices across your organisation.
• Organisational development and design.

This work is grounded in understanding systems, organisational structures, incentives and how to achieve lasting change. It's informed by formal training: a Certificate in Group Facilitation and a Masterclass in Organisational Development from the Gestalt Centre London, and ICF-accredited coach training. Alongside consulting, I run FIELD, a coaching practice for leaders and teams navigating change.

“ Mia’s contribution to the creation of our service and product designs was consistently of high quality. She helped transform the approach and ways of working within a complex organisational context and took a facilitator leadership role that brought teams across different business areas together to problem-solve and agree on direction. Her proactive way of identifying what needed doing, and highlighting risks and issues, was invaluable to successful delivery.”

— Callum Foster, Senior Business Owner, Office for National Statistics, UK

Facilitating a workshop at the Government Digital Service (GDS) in London