Service Design Master

Julia Alberga is working as an UX consultant and researcher in Amsterdam, where she founded Alberga Consultancy in 2017 and Radical Research in 2021. Before she started her own company, she worked as a service designer and researcher at the Rabobank for three years, gaining knowledge on inhouse service design and how to implement improved processes over time. She deepened her education in UX and service design and learned why stakeholders management and co-creation with the user ánd the team is so important in order to really make a change. 

After being the service design lead for the business sector of the Rabobank and doing major usability research on the newly developed homepage in 2015, she started facilitating Design Sprints for the Rabobank saw the potential of this method and the difference it made to accelerate with your teammember and, more importantly, to look through the eyes of the user. She was hooked on facilitating ánd on co-creating and realised she wanted to make a greater impact, by using this experience within different work fields. She therefore started freelancing in 2017, carrying out over 40 Design Sprints to this date, to help companies understand their customers and creating a service that revolves around them. 

Gradually over the years, the focus shifted to working mainly for the public sector, since she noticed all the missed opportunities as a citizen herself, going through several life events. But also as a service design professional she was triggered during the projects she already did for several governmental parties. And so, she made it a personal mission to improve public services in such a way that the processes evolve around the citizens and not the other way around. 

Since 2018 she mainly works for clients such as the Sociale Verzekeringsbank, Gemeente Den Haag, Het Rode Kruis, Ministery of Defense, Justitiële informatiedienst, de Politie and the United Nations to name a few. In 2021 she expanded with founding Radical Research and an additional freelance team to carry out more research, since the core of her work was to understand the needs of the user. Therefore, gaining insights in the behaviour of these users is the basis of everything the two companies do and intertwined with all of their projects. In their own UX lab at the Herengracht in Amsterdam, they can host focusgroups, do interviews and simulations and are able to test with prototypes to get feedback on newly developed features. With research as their main expertise, they are now able to cater the entire service design cycle, from field research to customer journey mapping, brainstorm sessions and/or Design Sprints, prototyping and gaining feedback from users. 

Besides doing tailored research and service design projects Julia Alberga also gives workshops and seminars on those subjects, helping others to adopt the human centered design mindset, by giving them facilitating and co-creation tools. With doing that she hopes that companies, especially those within the public sector, are being inspired and motivated to take it to the next step and continue the change that she created during the projects that she is involved in.