I'm Nuria Sánchez, a senior strategic service designer with more than 20 years of experience. My own business, retail, leading the Fair Trade area of an NGO… Service design gave a name and a structure to the way I think. I work on complex services in any sector, from banking to healthcare and the public sector, and I join teams or support specific projects.
See the casesLet's talk →Real projects, anonymised. In each one I explain what I decided, why, and what changed.
The challenge was to understand where patients' waiting came from. The research showed that much of it was generated by the hospital's internal processes, and two of the concepts we co-created were put into practice.
Read the full case “The wait was being generated inside the hospital”A bank wanted to help people save for their first home with a dedicated account. Once people saw it in full, its benefits fell short, and the research led the team to stop and rethink the product.
Read the full case “The research that reshaped the product”In a public sector project, the stakeholders shared a purpose: getting useful, specialised training to workers. Differences in interests and political positions made agreements and joint work between organisations difficult. We needed to understand those frictions and prepare a process in which they could build solutions together.
Read the full case “When conflict is part of the system”The bank wanted to grow in loans of more than five years, with little room to compete on price. The research showed how much it mattered to feel secure about taking on that commitment: understanding the terms, knowing the repayments fitted and being able to validate the decision when doubts arose.
Read the full case “Uncertainty weighed more than price”The team had defined what their customer service assistant should be like. Now they needed to know what people perceived when they heard it, and whether that personality matched what they expected from the service and the brand.
Read the full case “Friendliness doesn't make up for repeating the problem”Do any of these situations sound familiar? Click to see what I can do and which case shows it.
I can find out why an experience isn't working and where it's worth intervening.
See the oncology day hospital caseI can put an idea in front of the right people and find out what works, what doesn't and what we should change before building further and investing more effort.
See the first-home caseI can design the test you need to find out what people perceive and what you should prioritise.
See the voice assistant caseI can turn research, data and scattered knowledge into strategic decisions and priorities.
See the long-term loans caseFour principles that guide my work.
Before researching anything, I clarify what needs deciding, for whom, and whether we're facing the right question or just the most comfortable one.
I cross-reference information, opinions and constraints until the whole makes sense.
I link what people need with what the organisation can sustain, so the recommendations can actually be carried out.
My work ends when there's something clear to act on.
For me, facilitation is the structural piece of strategic service design: the one that makes conversations fertile and helps the group decide with the information on the table, weighing up perspectives and thinking about the consequences.
With very different groups (children, young people, adults and people over 65), in person, online and hybrid, from workshops of a few hours and hackathons to programmes lasting several weeks, and for all kinds of organisations: social organisations, multinationals, SMEs, entrepreneurs, public administrations, universities and business schools.
When there's a lot of information, many opinions and no clear direction, I design a process to bring order and help the group find its way forward.
I design sessions with purpose, structure and rhythm so the team leaves with decisions made.
When views, interests or positions clash, I design the conditions for them to build a shared vision without the tension blocking the process.
I help teams review their own ways of working and turn them into concrete actions, with real commitment.
I design programmes that train behaviours as well as content, so what's learned is applied the very next day.
I facilitate participatory processes with communities, young people, businesses and institutions.
Running order of one of my sessions: “How might we manage our time better?”, design thinking applied to a team's culture, in two and a half hours online
Nuria is an outstanding facilitator; her Design Thinking sessions take you into deep exploration.
Her approach is deeply human: she conveys concepts with calm and warmth, in a way that really reaches the learners.
Her training style, very close to process facilitation, encourages group learning and individual development.
Testimonials translated from Spanish.
Restoration left me with a way of looking: understanding the layers before intervening, and respecting what's already there.
Looking back, I realise I've always tried to understand the world by connecting pieces. Long before I came across design thinking, strategic service design or facilitation, I was already observing how the different parts of a situation fit together. When those disciplines arrived, I recognised in them my own way of thinking. Design was where all those parts of me finally made sense.
Today we can process huge amounts of information in minutes.
Building knowledge needs time to mature.
Understanding a problem comes from connecting interviews, conversations with the business and what was left unsaid.
That's where I want to keep contributing: in teams working on complex services that need to decide what's worth doing and how deep to go. This is how I do it:
Because efficiency without effectiveness can turn out to be very costly.
I use AI at many stages of my work, always with the same idea: I use it to process; the thinking is mine.
AI reads words, but it can't read what lies behind them. Nor was it there: it didn't see the gestures or the silences in the interviews, in the conversations with the business or in the ones I have with the team, which give meaning to everything else. I carry that context, and that's why I shape every conclusion and answer for it.
I grew up in the centre of Madrid, and today my home is a village in Extremadura. I live between both worlds, and I need both.
I've harvested olives, grown a vegetable garden, raised hens, baked traditional sweets with the village women and even driven a tractor. When needed, I help in the fields with irrigation, like any other farmhand.
At home, two dogs rescued from the street are waiting for me and, right now, a third one I'm fostering.
That search for balance runs through everything I am: connection and disconnection, movement and stillness, company and solitude, discovering and consolidating. It's also how I understand health: as a whole, where body, mind and relationships are cared for together. I've run mountain and obstacle races, and I've learned that stopping is part of the journey too.
My training tells the same story: from classical ballet and woodcarving to window dressing, from retail and corporate social responsibility to service co-design, facilitation and behavioural science. Each discipline has added a different way of looking. I even trained as a dog groomer to do the contextual research for Qué Guapos, my own business: I learned the trade and analysed the service from the inside.
With her, every project moves forward. They work and start from an intelligent, well-thought-out strategy that ensures every step makes sense.
Her interpersonal skills, listening, empathy and curiosity, the qualities of a good designer, make Nuria a highly valued collaborator.
When she hits an obstacle, she doesn't freeze: she stops, reflects and looks for solutions.
Testimonials translated from Spanish.
Tell me what you need and we'll see if I'm a good fit. I work remotely and on site.
The challenge was to understand an experience marked by uncertainty, hard-to-predict timings, little space and a heavy emotional load, and to turn it into services that were both desirable and viable.
Identifying the moments in the experience where we needed to intervene, making visible that many of them originated in the hospital's internal workings, and designing, with its teams, the service responses for the part that fell within the project.
Where the wait was being made
Patients booked at the same time and consultations starting late because of meetings or emergencies.
Each mismatch built up all the way to the day hospital.
The patient experiences the wait before treatment without seeing where it comes from.
I worked with another service designer and we did everything between the two of us:
We were looking for improvement moments in the patient experience and found that many of them originated outside it. Each of these mismatches lengthened the wait before treatment:
Patients received in the front the end result of a chain of back-office decisions they couldn't see.
Of the whole project, this is the part that interested me most: by mapping that chain we separated causes from symptoms and showed the hospital where part of the experience we wanted to improve originated.
With the diagnosis on the table, the hospital decided to address the internal processes itself and steered our work towards the front: what patients live and see at the day hospital. Knowing where the cause lay helped us design for what the service could actually change in the experience, without promising what depended on the internal organisation.
We turned the findings into design challenges and prepared the co-creation with quality, medical and nursing staff. Prototypes were developed in those sessions. From them we shaped 7 service concepts, each with its description, the value it brought to patients and a customer journey.
We took the concepts to oncology patients at the day hospital, drawn on paper and explained out loud. People gave feedback on each proposal, and that feedback helped choose which concepts to put into practice.
2 of 7concepts were put into practice at the day hospital.
A bank wanted to help people save for their first home with a dedicated account. Once people saw it in full, its benefits fell short, and the research led the team to stop and rethink the product.
Segmenting first-time buyers by housing market pressure, purchase timeframe and financial literacy, and defining for each profile what role the bank should play (facilitator, catalyst or optimiser), what in the proposition connected with them and what was missing.
How the product evolved over the study
A relevant need, but an insufficient response.
Based on the findings and recommendations from the first test.
What each person valued: saving, access to housing, experience and tools.
Start a relationship with young customers while they save and accompany them through to taking out a mortgage.
Buy their first home in a context of uncertainty about how much to save, what they could buy and what financing they would get.
Before continuing with the product, the research had to:
My responsibility was to:
I worked with the team in charge of savings and with an in-house colleague in each phase. They handled communication with other people in the bank and built the presentations from the analysis. We presented the findings to the business and continued the conversations from their questions.
Each phase took three weeks. In the second:
People valued the bank taking an interest in access to housing. However, once they saw the full product, their interest dropped:
The study led the team to halt the project and rethink the offer.
The redesign started from the findings and recommendations of the first test, and the new version came back to me for evaluation.
A decisive moment in the analysis was understanding that opening the account made sense because of how it brought people closer to buying and to financing. If part of the benefit depended on signing a future mortgage, people needed to know its conditions to weigh the commitment.
I organised the offer into three dimensions:
With this structure I could link the recommendations to the audiences the business could prioritise. For example:
From those cross-cuts, my colleague and I defined three profiles and, for each one, what role the bank should play: facilitator, catalyst or optimiser. As it stood, the offer mainly connected with one; the other two showed where to grow.
Three profiles, three roles for the bank
Connects today
“It supports me and helps me prepare financially to buy a home.”
Where the opportunity lies
“It supports me and helps me start building my plan for a home.”
“It helps me make the most of my ability to buy a home.”
The opportunity lay in adapting the features to the needs of the chosen audience and making the whole journey coherent.
My work went up to the presentation of the second phase; development and launch continued within the bank.
I'd go deeper into the connection between the findings and brand strategy: how to align the territory, the promise and the experience the service ultimately delivers.
The team had defined what their customer service assistant should be like. Now they needed to know what people perceived when they heard it, and whether that personality matched what they expected from the service and the brand.
Turning a set of personality traits into a test that could evaluate them, and translating what we learned into specific guidelines for designing customer service.
What weighed most in how the assistant was perceived
Depended on the person and the situation.
Brought recognition and trust.
The foundation: friendliness didn't make up for having to repeat the problem.
The team had defined the assistant's traits, its level of personification and priority service situations. My brief was to evaluate that work:
The channel evaluated was the IVR, the voice system that answers when someone calls customer service. The test focused on the personality perceived when listening to conversations. Participants did not interact with the system during this test.
I started from a personality definition created by another team. I analysed the documentation and agreed with its authors what they expected to learn from the test.
We prepared recordings simulating conversations between customers and the assistant in the selected use cases. Some colleagues helped record them.
To make observation easier, I suggested imagining we were overhearing a conversation and describing the people in it through what they said and how they said it. The test had two stages:
Starting with the open description captured their own words before introducing the evaluation options. Individual note-taking also helped capture impressions before the group discussion.
With the analysis I pinned down the weight of the dimensions the team had defined for the assistant:
Friendliness didn't make up for a conversation that forced people to repeat their problem without moving forward.
My contribution was to evaluate those dimensions and ground their priority in participants' perceptions.
The findings helped the team specify which behaviours had to be covered when implementing the new IVR.
After the person explained their problem, the assistant rephrased what it had understood and asked whether it was correct before continuing. This responded to a recurring frustration: feeling the system didn't understand the query and made you repeat it.
As the flows were redesigned and implemented, I took part in tests with customers to check how they worked. The study translated into design priorities and concrete assistant behaviours.
The bank wanted to grow in loans of more than five years, with little room to compete on price. The research showed how much it mattered to feel secure about taking on that commitment: understanding the terms, knowing the repayments fitted and being able to validate the decision when doubts arose.
Connecting behavioural patterns with growth opportunities, and helping teams decide how to improve the experience of taking out a loan.
The tension the research made visible
Specialised human support to decide with confidence.
Reducing calls to customer service.
I joined the bank with the project already under way: in the first few days we were launching recruitment and preparing the interviews. I got to grips with the business context, studied the competition and absorbed the available information as the project moved forward, and shaped the brief in meetings with the business.
We carried out 20 in-depth interviews with:
We included the bank's customers and non-customers, as well as cases of car financing at the dealership. The sample allowed us to explore different relationships with debt. The interviews covered life context, how the need arose, the application journey, what they considered when choosing, perception of banks and unmet expectations.
The depth of the conversations helped us understand decisions within each person's circumstances.
I organised the analysis by objective, working with people's own words, synthesis and the tensions between their stories. I gradually identified differences in the need for support, the expected speed and the degree of understanding and validation they needed to decide.
I tried several ways of organising those patterns until I found the two axes that explained the differences in behaviour: previous experience with loans and the need for control. With them:
Two axes, four archetypes
Need for control
Previous experience with loans
The need for control could change depending on the moment and situation of the same person.
The models made it possible to link the findings to experience decisions: what to explain, where to offer support and which frictions could hold progress back. In some cases a check gave reassurance; in others, when there was urgency, it interrupted the process.
For the people interviewed, a loan of more than five years was seen as a significant commitment. Because of its length and the amount received, it demanded responsibility and created security needs reminiscent of taking out a mortgage.
Price mattered, and so did knowing they had properly understood what they were taking on.
The research put the focus on uncertainty: fear of getting it wrong, doubts about the total cost or difficulty judging whether the instalment and term fitted.
Human support could help people choose or validate a decision. Those with less experience needed more explanation and support. Others needed to resolve a specific question to continue. The recommendation was to adapt support to behaviour and to the moment in the journey.
The car financing cases showed the weight of context. At the dealership, financing was offered alongside the purchase, with a person available and an immediate solution. Leaving that experience to check another bank added effort at a moment of urgency.
The loans team received the need for specialised human support with reservations because of its cost. In addition, another strategic priority of the bank was to reduce calls to customer service. The research made visible the conflict between that priority and the support some people needed to decide.
The conversation led to distinguishing between needs. Where support had to be human, it had to be kept. For more experienced people, the question opened up of how to offer, through the digital experience, help that played a similar role in explaining and validating.
My contribution was to substantiate the needs and opportunities, and relate them to the business constraints.
My work went up to the report that served as the basis for that cross-team work; the simulator was designed in a later phase.
To present the findings, we adapted the report to the bank's style. We simplified the detail and strengthened an action-oriented executive read. The work consisted of prioritising the messages and making their business implications visible.
I saw that synthesis as part of the work of translating research into the decision context: the team needed to identify where to intervene and for what purpose. The executive read brought the learnings into the conversations between teams.
In a public sector project, the stakeholders shared a purpose: getting useful, specialised training to workers. Differences in interests and political positions made agreements and joint work between organisations difficult. We needed to understand those frictions and prepare a process in which they could build solutions together.
Connecting what we learned in the research with a collaboration process that helped stakeholders with different positions turn ideas into concrete proposals and feel part of the solutions.
The co-creation journey I designed for the first challenge
Stakeholder map
Same goal, different priorities and points of view on how to achieve it.
Five in-depth interviews and a focus group to understand stakeholders' motivations, their relationships and the difficulties of the process. We built a diagnostic journey linking the phases of the process with the stakeholders, their needs and the possible effects on the people who would receive the training.
We researched the work of the sector committees, the organisations' technical assistance teams and the body's technical unit. The diagnosis identified communication difficulties, bureaucratic burdens and differences in resources that affected how quickly they could work.
The journey helped make visible how administrative and coordination decisions could shape the training on offer.
The research showed that the stakeholders agreed on meeting the training needs of workers and companies. They defended different priorities and points of view on how to do it. In this public-sector context, political and ideological differences between the parties added confrontation to the conversations and made it hard to build agreements.
The teams brought together people from the different parties involved. The intention was for them to build the proposals together and feel ownership of the solutions. That shared authorship aimed to encourage commitment to putting them into practice.
As well as the tools, we prepared the mindset with which the process would be applied. Before starting, we worked on golden rules that made collaboration behaviours concrete: “build on others' ideas”, “avoid phrases that close down options”, “don't fall in love with your own idea” and “one conversation at a time”.
We appointed guardians of the rules within the teams. Each person took responsibility for reminding the group of one or more rules when needed. Looking after the dynamic thus also became the participants' task, with the facilitator's support.
The aim was to be able to work with the frictions and use what they revealed about the group.
The rules offered a shared language to point out behaviours and get back to work without making every disagreement personal.
The findings were not equally comfortable for every party. When we started sharing some results, we met resistance that also affected our relationship with certain participants. As an external team, our responsibility was to make the frictions visible with rigour and sensitivity, while staying independent from the interests at play.
That same responsibility extended to the design of the sessions:
The deliverables gathered the proposals, the feedback and their iterations. They also recommended starting with feasible changes, testing them and measuring the results. The observable result of our work was turning the parties' perspectives into concrete materials the organisation could use to decide and move forward.
Our work went up to delivery; which proposals to implement was in the organisation's hands.