Aradhana Goel is a lead service designer/strategist at IDEO, and has 10 years of experience, ranging from architecture/urban design, to user experience design to service innovation strategy. As a member of the Service Innovation practice at IDEO, she provides a systemic approach to design that accounts for user experiences across multiple touchpoints over a period of time. She is an analytical thinker and her strength lies in managing issues of scale and complexity that arise when designing a service ecology. At IDEO, Aradhana has worked with medical, insurance, auto and telecommunication companies helping them innovate and develop a competitive advantage.

 

Prior to IDEO, Aradhana worked at MAYA Design- a design consultancy in Pittsburgh, where she worked with established companies and institutions like the Carnegie Library, US Postal Service and Eaton Corporation, to transform them from a traditional operation-centric approach to a customer-centric environment. For the Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh, she led a design team for more than two years to help them make deep organizational changes and adopt technological advances, for designing seamless user experiences. For the US Postal Service, she developed the Customer Experience Toolkit, a set of design and evaluation techniques that they could use to develop service innovation programs.

 

Aradhana holds a MS degree in Design Technology from MIT, and a Master of Architecture degree in Urban Design from School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi. Her first attempt at cross-pollinating architecture, urban design, and digital design worlds was evidenced in her MIT thesis 'Urban Pilot' (2001), where she explored the power of social networks and tagging to form a living city guide for mobile devices.

 

 

IDEO started its service design offer with extending their people-centric design approach (for products, software, environments etc.) to service design. It worked for a while till we were working on smaller, more tangible, direct problems. But today, clients are asking very different questions. They are not only saying “improve the service experience” but they are saying “we are losing out to our competition or the market landscape is changing, help us understand the landscape, understand our core competencies, and design new service offerings that we can deliver 3-5 years out.” These kind of broadly scoped projects, without a specific painpoint or direction, requires us to deliver a service ecology that build the foundation for future service offerings. This kind of work needs to be equally backed by design thinking, business thinking and technology thinking.