My work as a Service Designer is characterized by an unrelenting focus on meaningful human experience. Though wildly different in industry and output, my experience in a Service Designer capacity has maintained this focus on human experience, and the back-end considerations required to make great ideas reality.

I joined Nike at critical moment when the Service and Experience Design team was maturing and finding its footing. Our remit was to put the Athlete (store associate) first in our decisions, knowing that they were the front lines for the company’s interaction with the world. We designed for their operational concerns and sought to make their job of serving Nike Consumers easier, while maintaining the voice of the consumer front and center.

During my time I helped build a capable discipline within the organization by establishing ways of working and foundational document libraries, and also launched a pilot service in the EMEA market.

Nike Recycling and Donation

During my time at Nike I had the distinct pleasure of launching a pilot service called Nike Recycling and Donation (aka RAD) in the EMEA market. RAD was the evolution of previous POC tests in several global markets, seeking ways to reclaim used Nike products from consumers, and turn them back into raw material that could be used to make new products. The service is an important part of Nike’s Move To Zero initiative, and a part of the brand’s waste reduction commitments for 2025.

I was a part of the core team launching the pilot, and worked with a global, cross-functional team to build the Service Blueprint and Go-To-Market guide to stand up the service. The team built the back-end operations necessary for collecting and processing donated products, and partnered with an international organization who also donated product in good condition back to local communities.

We took learnings from previous tests and created an optimized version of the service to pilot in select markets. The service was backed by an entirely new marketing campaign with branding, content and full scale strategy to coincide with the in-store pilot. RAD launched in roughly 30 doors across Europe in June 2021 to great reception.

Service Library

The Service & Experience Design team uncovered a need in the organization for consistent documentation to illustrate and communicate the current state of all existing services in Nike retail stores, and to establish a platform for building new services now and in the future.

We designed an illustrative view that captured the entirety of an experience, end-to-end, with the operational and execution concerns included. This meant that with any proof of concept, MVP or pilot, any stakeholder had a snapshot into the full experience and what it would take to bring it to life.

Through our efforts we were able to document not only the Athlete and consumer journeys, but also the pain points associated with each step. We established a system of “emotion curves” to give a quick glance-view to where a service might break down and where it was likely to be most delightful for the user(s).

Our service journeys were meticulously crafted with cross-functional teams and in associated service blueprints, included live links to their working files so that any store in any global geography could launch the service in their store.

Illustration Library

As a part of establishing our Service Library, we also built a customized illustration library to speed up the process of storyboarding for existing and net-new services. Having a modular, adaptable system allowed anyone on our team to quickly articulate concepts and communicate to stakeholders with the right level of fidelity (and cheekiness, thanks to the foundation of Open Peeps).