What exactly is service design? This guide tells you everything you need to know about this holistic design approach to the user experience.
Are you looking to craft exceptional end-to-end service experiences for your users? If so, you’re in the right place.
In this article, we delve into the world of service design, a practice dedicated to designing holistic experiences that delight customers and boost company outcomes. We’ll be offering clear definitions and explanations of service design itself, outlining the core principles of the discipline, and running through the six steps every service design team takes to ensure the best overall customer experience with a brand, from their very first interaction.
We’ll also be outlining the key benefits that incorporating this practice into your design process can bring about for your users and your business. By the end, you’ll have a deep understanding of the transformative power of this important design approach and how to apply it in your workflow.
Contents:
- What is service design?
- Difference between UX design and service design
- The five principles of service design
- What is the service design process?
- Benefits of service design
- Conclusion
Ready to learn all there is to know about service design? If so, let’s jump straight in!
What is service design?
Service design seeks to craft a cohesive user experience across an entire service to meet user needs and improve the quality of user-service interactions. The practice requires a deep understanding of the entire service ecosystem, from people, technology, and infrastructure, to communication, material components, and physical environments. This holistic approach incorporates factors from many different sources and disciplines such as UX design, interaction design, customer experience management, product development, and marketing, to deliver seamless, integrated, and intuitive user-service interactions that deliver significant value to end users and meet the goals of the business.
What’s the difference between UX design and service design?
The main difference between UX design and service design is that while UX design is primarily concerned with enhancing the usability and intuitiveness of individual digital products and interfaces, service design takes in the whole picture, considering the needs of users within the context of an entire service ecosystem. This requires the service designer to consider user preferences, goals and needs at every touchpoint in the user journey and every occasion where the user interacts with the service or brand, whether that be digitally or physically.
The end goal, therefore, in service design is to create a seamless and intuitive end-to-end service experience, considering all environments, individuals, and processes involved in performing the service and how they can be optimized or improved. UX design plays a large part in this, but is just one consideration–the user’s interaction with the digital interface–of a greater whole.
What are the five principles of service design?
Let’s dive into the core principles of service design.
1. User-centric
The user-centric principle of service design refers to designing user-focused experiences around the needs and preferences of users and consumers, ensuring satisfaction across all service interactions. Through extensive research, empathy, and observation, the service designer seeks to build up a picture of what users want and expect from a service and uses the collected data and insights to inform the creation of an experience that provides real value. As service design is concerned with the user’s entire experience with a service, from their initial impressions through to purchase and beyond, the user-centric principle should be applied to all stages of the design process to ensure a consistent and positive overall experience.
2. Co-creative
The co-creative principle of service design suggests that designers should aim for a collaborative approach with all stakeholders involved in decision-making. Stakeholders should be invited to take part in idea generation, concept development, and solution refinement to enable the design team to garner valuable insights, foster engagement, and co-develop solutions that meet the needs and expectations of users while also meeting the goals of the business. Fundamentally, this principle reinforces the idea that the best service designs come about through collective involvement that incorporates a wide range of knowledge, ideas, and skills from the widest range of participants.
3. Sequencing
Sequencing in service design refers to the timeline of a project, the order of user interactions, and the flow of activities with these elements designed in in a way to optimize the overall user experience. Typically, a service designer will break down a customer journey into individual touchpoints and interactions with the service that are then categorized as the pre-service period, the actual service period, and the post-service period. The sequencing principle asks the designer to see these interaction points as a series of related actions that need to be logical, intuitive, and conducive to achieving the user’s desired outcome. This is because the order of events can have a significant impact on the user experience overall as well as how successful the service being offered is.
4. Evidencing
Evidencing in service design encourages a design team to gather evidence and visual aids such as pictures, illustrations, photographs, graphs, and charts as a means of supporting, informing, and validating decision-making throughout the design process. This can be done in numerous ways, but popular methods include visualizing performance metrics and collecting user feedback to help the team remember valuable pieces of data and bring their ideas to life. In addition to supporting decision-making, evidence can help the design team stay focused on the problem they are trying to solve and identify areas of improvement.
5. Holistic
The holistic principle seeks to remind UX designers that rather than honing in on individual, separate components, the entire ecosystem of a service needs to be optimized and fully connected in order to provide the most positive user experience. Designers should therefore
think about how every component of the service connects to the rest of the service, the range of perspectives in which the service might be viewed, and every user touchpoint along the way. This approach encourages designers to craft integrated, seamless experiences that address user and business needs at every stage in the service’s offering.
What is the service design process?
What does service design look like in practice? Here are the six steps a service design team will take to ensure a positive end-to-end experience for users.
1. Define vision and goals
Defining the vision and goals that the company wants to deliver is a foundational step in the service design process. To start, the service designer and design team dig into the company’s values and mission statement to get a sense of what’s important to the brand and business, before drilling down into the very essence of the service being offered, its purpose, and its desired outcomes. The challenge for the design team is taking an overarching company vision, its guiding principles, and ideas, and aligning these core elements with tangible goals that meet the needs of the business and the user. By defining clear objectives of what the team hopes to achieve at this initial stage, they are better prepared to effectively navigate the service design and can ensure that each decision made going forward is aimed at fulfilling the service that has been envisioned.
2. Research user needs and create personas
This second step is concerned with identifying the user personas whom you are creating the service for, their needs, and their experiences in order to create a service that resonates with your intended audience. To uncover this data, as well as learn more about trends in user behavior and the market, you’ll need to conduct extensive research, exploration, analysis, and testing. Popular methods used to uncover valuable insights into users’ experiences include conducting interviews with target users, distributing surveys, completing ethnographic studies, and observing usability tests with similar services. During this stage, the service designer will need to be empathetic and open regarding the unique perspectives and hurdles of users in order to identify improvement opportunities with the current service.
3. Ideation phase
The ideation phase is when all of the insights you have gathered during your research are brought together and built upon. A design team typically uses this phase to produce a range of ideas focused on meeting the user and business needs defined in the previous stages. This is the time for innovation, challenging assumptions, pushing boundaries, and experimentation, and a moment when creativity and ‘out of the box’ thinking should be actively encouraged by service design team leaders. Rather than going into the details of suggested solutions, it's wise to keep the focus on the quantity and variety of ideas produced as this will give the team more options to work with going forward. Commonly used methods for idea generation include workshops, brainstorming sessions, mind mapping, storyboarding, and sketching.
4. Create a customer journey map
A customer journey map is a popular planning exercise adopted by designers, marketers, and product developers. Typically, it is a visual flowchart demonstrating each phase of the customer journey from when a user initially discovers a service to their ongoing experience with that service. By creating a visual document of the end-to-end experience, designers can better understand the user’s different touchpoints and interactions with the service and gain greater insights into the user’s perspective and pain points. This complete overview of the user’s experience enables the design team to identify improvement opportunities, enhance key moments of interaction, and ensure the entire journey is both seamless and cohesive from start to finish.
5. Create a service blueprint
A service blueprint is a visual representation of the service journey from both the perspective of the user as well as the provider and is created by service designers to gain a deeper understanding of how effectively a service supports users in reaching their goals. On the service blueprint, touchpoints between the user and the service are noted, as are any actions and interactions that occur in order for the service itself to be delivered. Behind-the-scenes information about underlying processes, systems, and supporting resources is identified in the service blueprint too, providing the design team with a holistic picture of both sides of the service relationship. This valuable collaboration and alignment tool helps the design team identify any pain points or inefficiencies, discover where improvements in the system might be made, and gain a deeper understanding regarding how well the service experience measures up to the team’s initial goals, the users’ needs, and the company’s vision.
6. Prototype and test
The prototyping and testing phase in the service design process is the moment when the team converts its ideas into tangible solutions and tests their effectiveness with real users. Wireframes, mock-ups, and prototypes are commonly used at this stage to enable all collaborators on the project to visualize and interact with the suggested designs. Prototypes in particular are a practical tool for gathering data, feedback, and insights from other designers, stakeholders, and users as they provide a real feel for the end product and how effectively it meets individual needs. By observing users interacting with prototypes and mock-ups, service designers can see how well their design is working; its strengths and weaknesses, and where refinements or larger changes could be made to improve the user experience. Testing is an important step in the process as it provides the space and opportunity for a design to be changed before it has been sent to the development team for implementation- by which point making changes becomes more costly and time-consuming.
Benefits of service design
Service design can bring about numerous benefits to companies and their users. These are the three main advantages that organizations can expect to see if they invest time and resources in this design process.
1. Boosts customer satisfaction and retention
Due to its holistic approach in addressing every aspect of a user’s experience, from their very first interaction with a company right up to (and even beyond) their first purchase, service design enhances user satisfaction with a brand and its products. This enhanced satisfaction leads customers to return to a company for future purchases, recommend it to others, and write positive reviews.
2. Promotes lean processes
A lean process, which sees value maximized and waste reduced within a system, is actively promoted in service design. Advantages of lean processes include the promotion of a problem-solving culture, teamwork and collaboration, a sharp focus on the customer, and flexibility, all of which help an organization to more effectively meet customer needs without any resources going to waste.
3. Helps a company stand out from the crowd
By emphasizing customer centricity, service design helps an organization differentiate from its competitors who may not meet the needs of their customers so effectively. Innovative ideas which are found through the prototyping and testing phase help a brand to offer unconventional solutions to common problems that competitors may not have experimented with, while the elimination of friction points helps provide an exceptional and stand-out service that competitors are less likely to offer.
Conclusion
In this article, we’ve run through the principles and practical application of service design as well as the key benefits this comprehensive approach can bring about for your users and business outcomes. With a focus on a seamless, end-to-end user experience, service design supports users in achieving their goals swiftly and enjoyably, encouraging them to become a repeat customer and promote a brand to others.
Here are some of our resources that will help you in your learning journey :
- Watch this session by Shiva Viswanathan, Design Head of Ogilvy Pennywise, and Naman Singh, Product Experience Designer at RED.
- Talk to a course advisor to discuss how you can transform your career with one of our courses.
- Pursue our UI UX Design courses - all courses are taught through live, interactive classes by industry experts.
- Take advantage of our scholarship and funding options to overcome any financial hurdle on the path of your career transformation.
Note: All information and/or data from external sources is believed to be accurate as of the date of publication.
