Service Design Book
Henoch Holverson
In user experience design multiple components must be designed: visuals, features and commands, copywriting, information architecture, and more. Not only must each component be designed correctly, but they also must be integrated to create a total user experience. Service design follows the same basic idea. There are several components, each one should be designed correctly, and all of them should be integrated.
Returning to the restaurant example, people would be farmers growing the produce, restaurant managers, chefs, hosts, and servers. Props would include (amongst others): the kitchen, ingredients, POS software, and uniforms. Processes would include: employees clocking in, servers entering orders, cleaning dishes, and storing food.
Service components are broken down into frontstage and backstage, depending on whether the customers see them or not. Think of a theater performance. The audience sees everything in front of the curtain: the actors, costumes, orchestra, and set. However, behind the curtain there is a whole ecosystem: the director, stage hands, lighting coordinators, and set designers.
This is still true today, but the responsibility does not fall on only operations and management, as it did twenty years ago. Practicing service design is the responsibility of the organization as a whole.
Service design is the activity of planning and arranging people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality, and the interaction between the service provider and its users. Service design may function as a way to inform changes to an existing service or create a new service entirely.[1]
The purpose of service design methodologies is to establish the most effective practices for designing services, according to both the needs of users and the competencies and capabilities of service providers. If a successful method of service design is adapted then the service will be user-friendly and relevant to the users, while being sustainable and competitive for the service provider. For this purpose, service design uses methods and tools derived from different disciplines, ranging from ethnography[2][3][4][5] to information and management science[6] to interaction design.[7][8]
Service design concepts and ideas are typically portrayed visually, using different representation techniques according to the culture, skill and level of understanding of the stakeholders involved in the service processes (Krucken and Meroni, 2006).[9] With the advent of emerging technologies from the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the significance of Service Design has increased, as it is believed to facilitate a more feasible productization of these new technologies into the market.[10]
Service design practice is the specification and construction of processes which deliver valuable capacities for action to a particular user. Service design practice can be both tangible and intangible, and can involve artifacts or other elements such as communication, environment and behaviour.[11] Several of the authors of service design theory including Pierre Eiglier,[12] Richard Normann,[13] Nicola Morelli,[14] propose that services come to existence at the same moment they are both provided and used. In contrast, products are created and "exist" before being purchased and used.[14] While a designer can prescribe the exact configuration of a product, they cannot prescribe in the same way the result of the interaction between users and service providers,[7] nor can they prescribe the form and characteristics of any emotional value produced by the service.
Consequently, service design is an activity that, among other things, suggests behavioural patterns or "scripts" for the actors interacting in the service. Understanding how these patterns interweave and support each other are important aspects of the character of design and service.[15] This allows greater user freedom, and better provider adaptability to the users' needs.
Service design involves creating a service concept that defines the customer's experience, as well as the physical, human, and technological resources required to deliver the service. Service design focuses on the experience, including customer interactions, service delivery, and support processes.[17]
Early contributions to service design were made by G. Lynn Shostack, a bank and marketing manager and consultant,[18] in the form of written articles and books.[19][20] The activity of designing a service was considered to be part of the domain of marketing and management disciplines in the early years.[19] For instance, in 1982 Shostack proposed the integration of the design of material components (products) and immaterial components (services).[19] This design process, according to Shostack, can be documented and codified using a "service blueprint" to map the sequence of events in a service and its essential functions in an objective and explicit manner.[19] A service blueprint is an extension of a user journey map, and this document specifies all the interactions a user has with an organisation throughout their user lifecycle.[21]
Servicescape is a model developed by B.H. Booms and Mary Jo Bitner to focus upon the impact of the physical environment in which a service process takes place[22] and to explain the actions of people within the service environment, with a view to designing environments which accomplish organisational goals in terms of achieving desired responses.
In 1991, service design was first introduced as a design discipline by professors Michael Erlhoff and Brigit Mager at Kln International School of Design (KISD).[23] In 2004, the Service Design Network was launched by Kln International School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, Linkpings Universitet, Politecnico di Milano and Domus Academy in order to create an international network for service design academics and professionals.[24]
In 2001, Livework, the first service design and innovation consultancy, opened for business in London.[25] In 2003, Engine, initially founded in 2000 in London as an ideation company, positioned themselves as a service design consultancy.[26]
The 2018 book, This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World, by Adam Lawrence, Jakob Schneider, Marc Stickdorn, and Markus Edgar Hormess, proposes six service design principles:[27]
Thinking in a holistic way is the cornerstone of service design. Holistic thinking needs to consider both intangible and tangible service, and ensure that every moment the user interacts with the service, such moments known as touchpoints, is considered and optimised. Holistic thinking also needs to understand that users have multiple logics to complete an experience process. Thus, a service designer should think about each aspect from different perspectives to ensure that no needs are left unattended-to.
Together with the most traditional methods used for product design, service design requires methods and tools to control new elements of the design process, such as the time and the interaction between actors. An overview of the methodologies for designing services is proposed by Nicola Morelli in 2006,[6] who proposes three main directions:
Design tools aim at producing a blueprint of the service, which describes the nature and characteristics of the interaction in the service. Design tools include service scenarios (which describe the interaction) and use cases (which illustrate the detail of time sequences in a service encounter). Both techniques are already used in software and systems engineering to capture the functional requirements of a system. However, when used in service design, they have been adequately adapted to include more information concerning material and immaterial components of a service, as well as time sequences and physical flows.[6] Crowdsourced information has been shown to be highly beneficial in providing such information for service design purposes, particularly when the information has either a very low or very high monetary value.[30] Other techniques, such as IDEF0, just in time and total quality management are used to produce functional models of the service system and to control its processes. However, it is important to note that such tools may prove too rigid to describe services in which users are supposed to have an active role, because of the high level of uncertainty related to the user's behaviour.
Because of the need for communication between inner mechanisms of services and actors (such as final users), representation techniques are critical in service design. For this reason, storyboards are often used to illustrate the interaction of the front office.[31] Other representation techniques have been used to illustrate the system of interactions or a "platform" in a service (Manzini, Collina et al. 2004). Recently, video sketching (Jegou 2009, Keitsch et al. 2010) and prototypes (Blomkvist 2014) have also been used to produce quick and effective tools to stimulate users' participation in the development of the service and their involvement in the value production process.
Public sector service design is associated with civic technology, open government, e-government, and can constitute either government-led or citizen-led initiatives. The public sector is the part of the economy composed of public services and public enterprises. Public services include public goods and governmental services such as the military, police, infrastructure (public roads, bridges, tunnels, water supply, sewers, electrical grids, telecommunications, etc.), public transit, public education, along with health care and those working for the government itself, such as elected officials. Due to new investments in hospitals, schools, cultural institutions and security infrastructures in the last few years, the public sector has expanded in many countries. The number of jobs in public services has also grown; such growth can be associated with the large and rapid social change that is in itself a trigger for fresh design. In this context, some governments are considering service design as a means to bring about better-designed public services.[33]
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