Chapter 2. What Is Service Design?
What Service Design Isn’t
Even in closely related fields, there is confusion about what service design should and can do. So here are a few things which service design certainly is not:1
It is not simply aesthetics or “putting lipstick on a pig”
The aesthetics of a service are not unimportant, but they are not the primary focus of service design. Service designers are much more concerned with whether a service works, whether it fulfills a need and creates value, than with the details of what it looks or sounds like. The aesthetics can be a part of those questions, but only a part.
Similarly, service design does not only address superficial, “cosmetic” aspects of services—the frontend, or the usability. In fact, service design looks not just at how a service is experienced, but also how it is delivered and even whether it should exist. It almost always goes far beyond the visible, to challenge and reshape everything from operations to the business model.
It is not simply “customer service”
“Customer service”—the cliché in stock photos is a toothsome model with a headset—could be the subject of a service design project. We could look at how hotline specialists fulfill customer needs, how they fit into the structures of their organization, what technology they use to help customers, and how they create value for the organization. But we would also ask ourselves how the company’s offering might be better delivered to make their task unnecessary or unrecognizable. Service designers do not (only) solve customer problems; they design value propositions, processes, and business models.
It is not simply “service recovery”
Service design does not only come into play when things go wrong. It is not an “after sales” cost center or optional extra. Service design addresses the entire customer or employee journey, from becoming aware of a need all the way to becoming a regular customer or leaving the service relationship. It asks what service should be offered, how it should be experienced, and yes, even what happens when things go wrong. But it is fundamentally concerned with creating services that people value, not just repairing mistakes.
It is not simply a workshop
Service design is often seen—and sold—in workshop formats of one or two days. It’s seen as an “add-on” to a project, to add some “creativity” or make things more “customer-centered.” And while many service design activities take place in workshop contexts (and while sprints can be useful), service design does not fit onto sticky notes. At its core, it’s a holistic approach driving customer-centric projects from inception to implementation (and beyond) over weeks, months, or years. It’s not a workshop, but a mindset, a (work) process, a toolset, a shared language, and a management approach.
Defining Service Design
But what does “service design” mean? It is something about customer experience, and innovation, and collaboration—but does it include everything related to those concepts, or is it just part of those worlds? Is every activity concerned with creating, planning, fixing, and shaping services part of “service design”? Do service designers even agree on what they do?
Some people like to start with a definition, so in mid-2016 we asked 150 service designers to share and vote on their favorites. Here are the most popular, in rough order of publication:
Service design helps to innovate (create new) or improve (existing) services to make them more useful, usable, desirable for clients and efficient as well as effective for organizations. It is a new holistic, multidisciplinary, integrative field.
Stefan Moritz2
Service design is the application of established design process and skills to the development of services. It is a creative and practical way to improve existing services and innovate new ones.
live|work3
Service design is all about making the service you deliver useful, usable, efficient, effective and desirable.
UK Design Council4
Service design choreographs processes, technologies and interactions within complex systems in order to co-create value for relevant stakeholders.
Birgit Mager5
[Service design is] design for experiences that happen over time and across different touchpoints.
Simon Clatworthy, quoting servicedesign.org6
When you have 2 coffee shops right next to each other, selling the exact same coffee at the exact same price, service design is what makes you walk into the one and not the other, come back often and tell your friends about it.
31Volts7
Service design helps organizations see their services from a customer perspective. It is an approach to designing services that balances the needs of the customer with the needs of the business, aiming to create seamless and quality service experiences. Service design is rooted in design thinking, and brings a creative, human-centered process to service improvement and designing new services. Through collaborative methods that engage both customers and service delivery teams, service design helps organizations gain true, end-to-end understanding of their services, enabling holistic and meaningful improvements.
crowdsourced by Megan Erin Miller8
It is all about the mindset. Being open, empathetic, asking questions, starting with “I don’t know,” and learning by doing. You can call yourself anything you like, but if you share this mindset you are a service design thinker … or rather a service design do-er.
Different Views
Service design can be explained in many ways. In different situations, each of these can be useful—or misleading. Each one, however, is only part of the picture.
Service design as a mindset
If a mindset is a collection of attitudes that determine our responses to various situations, service design can easily be thought of as the mindset of a group of people or even an entire organization. A group with a service design mindset will talk about users first, will see “products” as the avatars of a service relationship, will respond to asserted assumptions by suggesting some research, will reject opinions and endless discussion in favor of testing prototypes, and will not consider a project finished until it is implemented and already generating insights for the next iteration. As a mindset, service design is pragmatic, co-creative, and hands-on; it looks for a balance between technological opportunity, human need, and business relevance.
Service design as a process
Design is a verb, so service design is often described as a process. The process is driven by the design mindset, trying to find elegant and innovative solutions through iterative cycles of research and development. Iteration—working in a series of repeating, deepening, explorative loops—is absolutely central, so practitioners aim for short cycles at the outset, with early user feedback, early prototyping, and quick-and-dirty experiments. As the process continues, the iteration may slow down but it never goes away, as prototypes iterate into pilots and pilots iterate into implementation.
Service design as a toolset
Ask anyone to imagine service design, and they will usually imagine a tool—perhaps a customer journey map hanging on the wall, or simply people pointing at sticky notes. Those templates and tools sum up service design in many people’s thoughts. Talk about tools seems to dominate talk about service design, so it’s tempting to imagine service design as a sort of toolbox, filled with fairly lightweight and approachable tools adopted from branding, marketing, UX, and elsewhere. This is not the whole story, by any means—without a process, mindset, and even common language, those tools lose much of their impact and may even make no sense. Used well, however, the tools can spark meaningful conversations; create a common understanding; make implicit knowledge, opinions, and assumptions explicit; and stimulate the development of a common language.
Everyone likes to focus on processes and toolsets because they can see, touch, and use them. But without the service design mindset, people go right back to employing the processes and tools just like they used [business process management] and other “improvement” approaches. Then they end up with the same internally focused solutions with the same awful customer experiences they have today.
Service design as a cross-disciplinary language
Service design is almost dogmatically co-creative, and many practitioners pride themselves on their ability to connect people from different silos, bringing them together around some seemingly simple tools. These tools and visualizations—sometimes called boundary objects9—can be interpreted in different ways by the different specialists working on them, allowing them to collaborate successfully without having to understand too much of each other’s worlds. They are simple enough to be easily—even empathically—understood, yet robust enough to provide a good working foundation. In this way, service design can be seen as a common language or even “the glue between all disciplines,”10 offering a shared, approachable, and neutral set of terms and activities for cross-disciplinary cooperation.
Service design as a management approach
When service design is sustainably embedded in an organization, it can be used as a management approach to both the incremental innovation of existing value propositions and radical innovation for completely new services, physical or digital products,11 or even businesses. An iterative service design process always includes collaborative work in a series of loops. In this way, service design as a management approach has some similarities to other iterative management processes.12 However, service design differs through using more human-centric KPIs, more qualitative research methods, fast and iterative prototyping methods for both experiences and business processes, and a specific approach to leadership. Its inclusion of internal stakeholders and view across the customer journey often result in changes to organizational structure and systems.13
So service design has a wide range of applications, and is a mindset, a process, a toolset, a cross-disciplinary language, a management approach—and more. But what do service designers actually do?
The Core Activities of Service Design
Service design is emphatically a “doing” discipline, based on a practical activities which engage a range of stakeholders (often in groups) in an ongoing, iterative, facilitated process. But what do they do?
Types of Activities
The activities of service design can be grouped into four main application areas: research, ideation, prototyping, and implementation (see Figure 2-1).
In service design, research is used to understand people and their behavior in relation to a service or product, whether physical or digital. Design research—both quantitative and qualitative—enables a design team to empathize with the people they design for and build up a genuine understanding of their practices and routines. This allows the team to work from a human-centered perspective throughout a project and potentially also include people they encounter during research at a later stage to ideate or prototype concepts.
Producing and selecting ideas (ideation) is a vital part of a service design project—but it is not as all-important as many people seem to think. In service design, ideas are just starting points within a bigger evolutionary process. They need to be, however, generated systematically en masse, mixed, recombined, culled, distilled, and evolved or parked. Their real value often lies not in the ideas themselves but in the outcome(s) that stem from them.
Figure 2-1. Four core activities of the service design process
In service design, prototyping is used to explore, evaluate, and communicate how people might experience or behave in future service situations. Prototyping enables the design team to identify important aspects of a new concept, explore alternative solutions, and evaluate which one might actually work in the everyday business reality.
Implementation describes the step beyond experimenting and testing, moving into production and rollout. The implementation of service design projects can involve various fields, such as change management for organizational procedures and processes, software development for apps and software, and product development or engineering for the production of physical objects, as well as architecture and construction for the creation of environments and buildings, and of course the education and training of staff and partners.
Many organizations are looking for an effective way of working that makes it easy for people with different backgrounds and responsibilities to work together meaningfully and productively—they are looking for a “silo breaker.” Because the tools of service design have been filtered through a design mentality, they are visual, fast, lightweight, and easy to grasp. They form a common language for collaboration, so cross-functional teams are happy to pick them up and get on with it. The tools can look very simplistic at first sight—they make no effort to encompass the entire complexity of a service system (there are already excellent tools for that). Instead, they filter complexity through the lens of various customer experiences. This makes the approach very powerful: even complex multichannel services become manageable for the team when they can understand them on both a practical and a human, empathic level.
Workflow
Service design adopts the workflow (and mindset) of the design process, combining an active, iterative approach with a flexible and relatively lightweight set of tools borrowed from marketing, branding, user experience, theater, and elsewhere.
It is its patchwork background that makes service design powerful. As a design discipline, it is focused on solving the right problem, by framing the problem or opportunity in the right way. So service design usually starts by investigating the needs of the user or customer. It is inquiring and inquisitive, using a range of mostly qualitative research methods to explore the “how and why” of the opportunity space. Understanding needs, instead of jumping straight to a “solution,” makes true innovation possible.
Next, service design adopts the designer’s approach of rapid experiments and prototyping to test possible solutions quickly and cheaply while generating new insights and ideas. Prototypes evolve into pilots, and then into implemented new offerings—and along the way there is always iteration (see Figure 2-2). With this strong emphasis on iterations of research, prototyping, and even implementation, service design projects have a firm foundation in reality. They are built on research and testing, not on opinion or (rapidly outdated) authority. And the iterative approach makes decision making in service design a low-stakes activity. Instead of worrying about getting it right the first time, we can evolve a range of options and rely on the structured process of prototyping and testing to test and evolve our work.
Figure 2-2. Project portfolio
Applications and Cases
Service design is not only useful to create value for the “end user” or “customer.” It addresses the entire value ecosystem, and might focus on offerings aimed at end users, employees, other businesses, internal partners, or other stakeholders. In other words, service design works for public services, B2C, B2B, and internal services.
Service design is about designing offerings, often at large scale. Service designers work with questions such as “How should a bank be in the future?” or “How should a patient experience going to the hospital?” as well as questions like “How should a customer submit an insurance claim when they were robbed on holiday?”
Service design is an intensely practical and pragmatic activity, and this makes it inherently holistic. To create valuable experiences, service designers must get to grips with the backstage14 activities and business processes that enable the frontstage success, and address the implementation of these processes. They must tackle the end-to-end experience of multiple stakeholders, not just individual moments, and must do this across multiple channels. And they must find a way to make it pay, considering the business needs of the organization and the appropriate use of technology.15
Service design’s borrowed toolset and pragmatic iterative approach use research and sensemaking tools to focus on stakeholder needs, and prototyping to test and evolve possible solutions before making large investments. Organizations can use service design to improve the services that they offer now and to develop whole new value propositions, perhaps based on new technology or new market developments. It gives organizations a way to balance their experiential, operational, and business needs in a robust but approachable manner, offering an unusually powerful common language and toolset for projects that include, empower, and mobilize a wide range of stakeholders.
In Conclusion
With these characteristics, it is no surprise that many organizations are implementing service design methods (under whatever name), and that many more are employing service design agencies. There are many libraries of successful service design projects online, such as the award winners libraries maintained by the Service Design Network and Core77. As an overview of the breadth and content, the 37 cases in #TiSDD include these (listed by main client only):
Research
E.ON (energy) with Minds and Makers: An intersectoral cooperation to prevent electricity cut-offs
Policy Lab (government) with uscreates: Work and health project
Met Office (weather service) with current.works: Met Office app
Edgewood (mental health) with Adaptive Pat: Promoting youth mental health
Vodafone (telecom) with STBY: Projects building up to more long-term and strategic value
Ideation
KLM (airline) with 31Volts: Developing ideas through co-creation with customers
Danze (bathroom fitting manufacturer) with InReality: From vision to reality in 90 days
UK Departments of Health and of Work and Pensions (public service) with Snook: Creating digital tools for mental health and employment support
Sant Joan de Déu (hospital) with We Question Our Project: Opportunities for innovation in patient experience
Stockholm Environment Institute (NGO) with Transformator and Expedition Mondial: Using customer journey mapping to understand cookstove users in Kenya
Prototyping
Airbus (aircraft manufacturer): Innovation on the shop floor
Oslo University Hospital with Designit: Reducing the waiting time for breast cancer patients
Experio Lab (health innovation) with Doberman: Enabling staff and stakeholders to prototype for continuous evolution
Australian Taxation Office with Fjord: Minimum lovable products, living prototypes, and high-fidelity sketching in code
Lufthansa (airline) with IDEO: Redesigning Lufthansa’s business class experience
Mobisol (photovoltaic energy): Using multifaceted prototyping to create and iterate business and service models
Implementation
Edelweiss (motorcycle tourism) with Gastspiel: Creating and maintaining a perfect customer experience
Genesys (customer experience platform): Transforming customer and seller experience
More than Metrics (web-based tools): Implementing service design in a software startup
City of Oslo (public service) with Livework: Sustainable, high-quality care for the elderly
Process and management
London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics (sporting event): Continual improvement of the Olympic spectator experience
Vodafone (telecom) with Designit: Retail meets service design
Itaú (banking) with Ana Couto Branding / LAJE: New brand’s tone of voice for digital channels
Facilitation and making space
Sun Life Financial (financial services) with On Off Group: Redefining customer experience in the Philippines company
[Anonymous company] (telecom) with Protopartners: Setting up and rocking the day or the room
Deutsche Telekom (telecom): Sending a message in a major corporation
WECO (co-creation platform) with CBi China Bridge: Spreading the co-creation culture in China
Embedding service design
Pedagogical University Tyrol (education): Service design in secondary schools
Arbetsförmedlingen (public service) with Transformator: Unleashing creativity in an exhausted governmental organization
TCDC (government design advocate): The emergence of service design in Thailand
Deutsche Telekom (telecom): Redesigning Deutsche Telekom
Coca-Cola Hellenic BSO (soft drinks) with DesignThinkersGroup and DesignThinkers Academy: Toward a sustainable customer-centric organization
Google (internet data) with STBY: Building up service design knowledge across projects
1 Ask Adam about the term “service design” and he will say, “I hate-hate-hate the term. It’s made up of two simple words which most people misunderstand. ‘Service,’ they think, is being nice to customers, or fixing stuff. And ‘design,’ of course, is making things look nice. So ‘service design,’ they think, must be … something which involves being nice to customers and making things look nice. So they smile, and nod, and walk away.”
2 Moritz, S. (2005). Service Design: Practical Access to an Evolving Field. Köln.
3 live|work (2010). “Service Design.” Retrieved 10 August 2010 from http://www.livework.co.uk.
4 Design Council. (2010). “What Is Service Design? Retrieved 10 August 2010.
5 See for example SDN. (2015). “Meet Birgit Mager, President of the Service Design Network.”
6 Servicedesign.org is no longer accessible, but see Clatworthy, S. (2011). “Service Innovation Through Touch-Points: Development of an Innovation Toolkit for the First Stages of New Service Development.” International Journal of Design, 5(2), 15–28.
7 See 31Volts. (nd). “Service Design.”
8 Miller, M. E. (2015). “How Many Service Designers Does It Take to Define Service Design?”
9 Read more about these in the “Boundary objects” textbox in #TiSDD Section 3.2, Personas.
10 Arne van Oosterom on design thinking, as written on the wall at the DesignThinkers premises in Amsterdam.
11 The term “products” describes anything a company offers—no matter if this is tangible or not. In academia, products are often divided into goods and services. However, products are usually bundles of services and physical/digital products. As “goods” is colloquially understood as referring to something tangible, we prefer to speak of physical/digital products. Read more on this in the textbox “Service design and service-dominant logic” in #TiSDD Section 2.1, Defining service design.
12 Compare a service design process, for example, with the iterative four-step “PDCA” (Plan–Do–Check–Adjust, or sometimes Plan–Do–Check–Act) management process. This is often used in business for project management and the continuous improvement of processes, products, or services. While both PDCA and service design processes describe an iterative sequence, PDCA focuses on improving defined KPIs that can be measured quantitatively. This means iterations only occur from loop to loop, not within a loop. A design process, however, does not restrict iterations at any moment.
13 Read more on this in #TiSDD Chapter 12, Embedding service design in organizations.
14 “Backstage” refers to processes or actions that are normally not visible to the customer, such as checking in the store room or emptying the trash. “Frontstage,” then, refers to the parts of the process that a customer can see.
15 In the epilogue of their book Marketing 4.0, “Getting to WOW!,” the authors state that “In a Marketing 4.0 world where great products and great services are commodities, the WOW factor is what differentiates a brand from its competitors.” A WOW moment is a surprising, personal, and contagious experience a customer has. “Winning companies and brands are those that do not leave WOW moments to chance. They create WOW by design.” See Kotler, P., Kartajaya, H., & Setiawan, I. (2010). Marketing 4.0: Moving from Traditional to Digital. John Wiley & Sons, pp. 168–9.