The ultimate introduction to service design
Service design can be a really useful lens to see all of your professional and personal experiences with a more disciplined and nuanced perspective, and improve your empathy and effectiveness.
What makes people choose one coffee shop over another when both offer the exact same coffee for the same price? And what makes them come back, again and again?
Well there are a lot of factors of course, but the thoughtful and deliberate design of the service is a massively foundational pillar.
Even if you have no intention of being a service designer and believe your work isn’t related in any way to the discipline of service design, I encourage you to understand what it is anyway. Think of service design as a really useful lens that will help you see all of your professional and personal experiences with a more disciplined and nuanced perspective. Being able to put this lens on, whether in the context of a work project, my coaching and consulting practices, or even in my personal relationships, has helped me immensely to be more empathetic and more agile in how I show up.
Before diving into my introduction, here’s an excellent short video by the global design and innovation agency Fjord, explaining why putting people at the heart of the experience, embracing co-creation, and taking a holistic approach is so important - and what Service Design is all about.
What is service design?
Service Design is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on how your business, and your services in particular, interact with your customers at all touch-points, and the specific methodologies that uncover what your customer is thinking and feeling at each interaction point.
Service design in practice involves the planning and organizing of people, processes and other parts of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service and the people involved with that service system.
Optimising your service design often starts with drawing out a sophisticated service map and customer journey, but brings some complex expertise into the mix (e.g. social psychology, anthropology, interaction design), to inform decision making that ultimately impacts your bottom line.
Professors Michael Erlhoff and Birgit Mager at Köln International School of Design (KISD) first introduced service design as an academic discipline in 1991, and in 2004 the Service Design Network was launched by Köln International School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, Linköpings Universitet, Politecnico di Milano and Domus Academy. Sometime in between, service design consultancies began emerging around the world.
Service design principles and methodology
“This is Service Design Thinking” by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider, one of the first textbooks published on service design, outlines five key principles to keep in mind when re-thinking a service:
User-Centered: People are at the center of the service design.
Co-Creative: Service design should involve other people, especially those who are part of a system or a service.
Sequencing: Services should be visualized by sequences, or key moments in a customer’s journey.
Evidencing: Customers need to be aware of elements of a service. Evidencing creates loyalty and helps customers understand the entire service experience.
Holistic: A holistic design takes into account the entire experience of a service. Context matters.
Stickdorn and Schneider renewed “user-centered” to “human-centered” in a later book to emphasise that the service design practice should keep in mind all humans that are involved and impacted in the service system.
There isn’t actually a very strict, standardised methodology of service design. It would be more appropriate to say that there are methods, tools and best practices, along with the five principles, that make up the work that a service designer does.
The good thing about this, in my opinion, is that the quality of a service designer should be demonstrated by their work and results, rather than merely formal training or credentials.
The risk is that, similar to other fields of practice like coaching, it opens up a wide door for anyone to walk through and start calling themselves a service designer to ride the hype train, even if they aren’t very good.
You might also be wondering at this point:
“Wait a minute, I’ve heard about design thinking and it has a pretty specific process!”
Well, Design Thinking does have a more structured process, particularly that taught by the Stanford School of Design, and many service design initiatives and service designers do use it, but those terms are not interchangeable (even though there are more similarities than differences).
Design Thinking is a structured, hands-on approach to solve complex problems and innovate new solutions. Whilst I’ve done a lot of service design work in my career, I more so teach about design thinking in my workshops.
Design Thinking, in my experience, is much more universally applicable by non-designers and can be adapted into a lot of different working scenarios to solve problems and co-create innovative solutions. I usually also teach Human-Centred Design in the same workshops and for similar reasons, but HCD can be an even simpler process to work with, depending on the context.
Benefits of service design
That said, there are a number of very clear benefits of service design that are universally acknowledged, and can be applied to all organisations.
Service design compels organisations to think of customers (and others involved with the service) using empathy and research, rather than relying on expert assumptions, giving a truer representation of market demands.
Service design encourages a more thorough understanding of the customer’s and user’s problems, which can lead to much more creative and innovative solutions than designing a service in a closed boardroom.
Service design forces cross-functional collaboration, breaking down organisational silos in a meaningful, productive way, improving the overall organisational culture by default.
The holistic perspectives involved in service design means that risk and change are ideally considered from the beginning of the design process, and can be managed throughout the design and across the organisation.
Service design helps prioritise different requirements in a balanced, evidence-based way, rather than making guesses about what is more important to focus on.
I’m sure there are plenty more too!
Challenges of service design
There are a number of challenges that service designers face, but the biggest challenges usually emerge from within the organisation trying to design or improve the service in question. Here are a few that I’ve noticed and experienced in my own career when I’ve been involved with service design:
Other stakeholders get impatient and want to jump the gun on going to market.
As an emerging field, there’s still a bit of ambiguity about the value of service design and service designers.
The intangibility of services can make it harder to measure the success of a service design.
Since service design involves looking at the service’s and customer’s interaction points throughout the organisation, it involves willing participation in the process by all departments, which isn’t always easy to get.
An overarching culture focused on quantitative results can lead to pushing service designers to focus on outputs rather than outcomes, deteriorating the quality of the design work.
Service design tools, deliverables and outcomes
The service design toolkit has dozens of tools and artefacts that come in handy throughout the service design process. A popular way this process is broken up is three stages, and each stage has some priority deliverables and outcomes.
Discovery is the initial part of the process, which involves the most research. In discovery, you work to really understand the experiences and pain-points of the customers and users, before jumping to conclusions about what the solutions need to be. This is similar to the “Inspiration” stage of Human-Centred Design.
Working closely with the “humans”, using tools such as ethnographic research, interviews and behavioural modelling, deliverables such as customer journey maps, avatars, and use case hypotheses are invaluable to move to the next stage.
Design is the stage where all the ‘discovery’ is synthesised into design ideas – similar to the “Ideation” stage of Human-Centred Design. It involves using tools and methods such as strategic brainstorming, storyboarding, and facilitated co-creation sessions, and producing deliverables such as experience maps, user interface sketches, and even prototypes, before moving on to the next stage.
Develop is where the rubber really hits the road and once a unanimous decision is made on the service solution to be made, development begins. In a service design environment and culture though, this is an iterative process involving live prototyping, testing, and ongoing assessment.
The synthesis between design and develop is where a project plan is made more concrete, usually based on a service blueprint, and the way this stage is established and managed has a huge bearing on how innovative and useful the ultimate solution will be.
Another popular way that the service design process is segmented is: research, ideation, prototyping, and implementation.
A really fantastic resource to learn more about service design tools is servicedesigntools.org, which offers an open collection of tools and tutorials to help deal with complex design challenges, and they use this 4 stage segmentation of the process.
What makes a good service designer
Given that Service Design is a multi-disciplinary practice that involves a lot of different tasks across an extended period of time, a service designer needs to have a strong handle on a variety of tasks and activities. Being a good service designer can therefore be a pretty subjective and difficult to quantify achievement, but it can help to think about the broad activity groupings involved in service design work.
Researching and learning about the business, customers, clients, stakeholders, market contexts, and the existing product and service environment is foundational work in service design. The faster a service designer can research and learn all these different facets, and to the depth which they can understand them, is a big measure of how effective a service designer is.
Strategy analysis and advisory may seem like something reserved for management and strategy consultants, but a service designer that can help analyse and advise the strategic implications, opportunities, risks and benefits throughout the service design process is invaluable.
Concept ideation and development always sounds easier than it actually is. It’s just brainstorming a bunch of ideas, right!? Trust me, coming up with relevant, creative and useful ideas on mass and quickly is not everyone’s cup of tea.
And when you have to facilitate ideation, synthesis, and development of innovative solutions from a group of cross-functional people who think in many different ways, it presents all sorts of challenges. The ability to do this effectively and efficiently is truly the mark of a good service designer.
Synthesis in and of itself is a skill that grows with experience and practice. Being able to combine multiple ideas, and selecting and distilling the most valuable ideas from a large pool of ideas, is something if done poorly will waste a lot of time and resources in the long run. If it’s done well, it doesn’t just save a lot of time, but also fosters a lot of harmony, creativity, and innovation amongst the team.
Communication in service design is a lot more complex than perhaps in any other discipline, because you’re literally responsible for bringing people who speak and think in very different professional languages together and helping them understand the broader context, each other, and the customers/users better.
A good service designer will be able to not only communicate ideas in various styles and “languages”, but also make abstract concepts more concrete, complex concepts simple, and the implicit explicit.
Delivery is often assumed to be in the hands of project managers, product owners, scrum masters, and the like. However, a good service designer will have a clear understanding of what delivery could look like for various design ideas to make informed contributions to the planning and execution of the solutions.
A willingness to jump in and help with delivery and development management, rather than wanting to walk away once discovery and design is completed, makes for a much more well-rounded service designer, which will support and strengthen all parts of the service design process.
Because service design is still a relatively emerging and evolving discipline, standards of good service design are not as simple to find with quick desktop research. What I can tell you is that a service designer is NOT a UX designer and is certainly not a graphic designer or a visual designer of any particular sort. Those are complementary skills that a service designer may have in their back pocket, but their overall skill and knowledge set is much broader.
If you’re curious to learn more about the role of a service designer specifically, a great resource to check out is this blog post by Megan Erin Miller over at Practical Service Design.
Service design examples
It can be a bit tricky sorting through the noise online of case studies and examples of service design to get a more concrete understanding of what service design looks like in action. I’ve sorted through some great sources to present just a couple of my favourite examples of service design.
Whilst I’m not sure anyone at Empower Projects specifically thinks of themselves as service designers, by my own count (I’m on their Advisory Board) they are definitely doing service design very well. Besides having great intentions (and successful projects) to help communities in Malawi and Sri Lanka help themselves, their approach is extremely inclusive, human-centred, holistic, and co-creative, along with keeping sustainability and self-sufficiency of the “users” in mind.
A wonderful example of this is the Kasungu project, which aimed to improve the wellbeing of staff and students at Mitula Primary School (450 students) and Dwalala Primary School (700 students) by enabling communities to co-design solutions to a range of development challenges, starting with a foundation of capacity building in permaculture.
You can read more about the project here.
The “Lift the Lid” project stemmed from Alzheimer’s Society in the UK hiring Good Innovation, a service design agency that works with NFPs, to deal with the challenging taboo and neglect around the topic of people living in care homes with dementia having sexual and intimate relationships.
The outcome of the project was Lift the Lid – a workshop in a box with all the tools needed for care homes to better support their residents with dementia when it comes to sex and intimacy. Lift the Lid won the Service Design Network’s Design Award in 2019.
You can read more about the award winning project here.
What service design means for your organisation
The one big takeaway for me as a methodology-agnostic consultant is that service design has a lot of overlaps with several other disciplines and practices, but like all those others, can’t be taken advantage of in an organisation without also uplifting the capability and cultural paradigm throughout the organisation, right from the top.
Hiring a service designer, service design consultant, or some other similar role to suddenly start improving or innovating services can end up being a dangerous investment. If you aren’t truly committed to adopting all the principles of service design, and accept that it’s a responsibility to be shared by all functions across the business, you’ll struggle to reap the benefits of service design in a sustainable way.
If you’re a smaller organisation thinking about “having a go” at “this service design thing” (or design thinking, human-centred design, co-design, or whatever your preferred approach is), I support your intentions and say go for it. That said, there are some risks to watch out for, most notably that you trick yourself into believing that you’re doing it well, since “it isn’t about following a very strict methodology anyway”.
In actual fact there is definitely an inefficient and ineffective way of going about it, that not only wastes time and money, but can lead to missed opportunities and oversighted problems down the line. Investing in a consultant to facilitate a solid foundation for your team from which to springboard into the process can be invaluable in avoiding any false starts, and can set you up for success from the get go.
In any case, regardless of your approach and what kind of help you have along the way, service design implores you to think about services in a much more human-centred way, and any thoughtful step towards this is going to make your organisation and teams more productive and start fostering a culture that welcomes and inspires greater innovation.
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Hey man. I want to thank you for this post. I was a service designer and experience designer once I had my company. We used to do that for several clients and I miss that complexity. When I closed my shop down, I became a product designer and UX designer but focused on Design systems. I was looking to revive my efforts on service design and your article not only re-ignited my passion for it but made me understand the implicit things I miss about it.
Design systems have a stake on the service and the culture but I miss the organizational shift and the focus on holistic strategies that it brings.
I really appreciate the blog, thank you for it. Even if it has been a while. It's very helpful.