Part III: How to Apply Service Design In Your Own UX Design Workflow
Your How-to Guide
This is Part III of my Service Design Series. If you’re interested, go back and read Part I: What is Service Design? And Why Does it Matter? and Part II: A Service Design Case Study. Here, we’ll go over the actual Service Design process and types of deliverables you could produce.
The Principles of Service Design:
- User-centered — put the user at the center of the design (always).
- Co-creative — to design for an entire ecosystem, you will need the perspectives of stakeholders from all facets of the business, as well as the users. Invite the CEO and the janitor. They all have something to tell you.
- Sequencing — Services are dynamic processes that take place over a certain period of time. That means you need to understand how the entire sequence works and what (and with whom) the interactions are throughout the process.
- Evidencing — Services are also intangible in nature. They should be visualized in terms of ‘physical elements’ that are positioned alongside the service delivery experience to add powerful value for both the client and company employees. Examples include: souvenirs, photographs, merchandise, etc.
- Holistic — Let me repeat this: Nothing exists in a vacuum. It’s important to think about the user’s conscious awareness AND the subconscious perception, such as their “5 senses interactions” (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting). All touchpoints need to be considered.
The 4-Stage Process + Deliverables of Service Design
The most important part of being an service designer is taking the time to understand the big picture, and how all the little details contribute to that entire experience.
STAGE 1: Exploration — Understand the culture and goals of the business, understand the pain points and POV of users, and understand the big picture. Here, stakeholder maps, service safaris, contextual inquiries/interviews, customer journey maps, cultural probes, expectation maps, and personas are all tools you can use to better understand, define, and map out the context, goals, and pain points of both the business and users.
STAGE 2: Creation — Explore as many mistakes as possible. Co-create with stakeholders, collaborate within interdisciplinary teams, consider the entire touchpoint sequence. Here is it absolutely crucial to lean on the perspectives from as many different minds as possible. Create holistic concepts, storyboards, service blueprints, and service prototypes.
STAGE 3: Reflection and Testing — Get your ideas in front of as many people as you can and simulate the experience you hope to bring to life! Tools for this stage include constructive interactions, desktop walkthroughs, service prototypes, cognitive walkthroughs, usability testing, and experience prototypes.
STAGE 4: Implementation — Clearly communicate your concept and engage with employees of all aspects of the business to transform the designed solution into a working service. Don’t forget to constantly evaluate the progress of the service and whether or not it accomplished the goals! Here, we can use customer lifecycle maps or business model canvases as tools to help onboard the employees and implement the services.
To all my UX Designers: This should not be completely new to you.
You should already be considering stakeholder goals and business culture. You should already be holding co-creative design sessions. You should already be collaborating with folks who think, act, and create differently than you. You should already be testing prototypes and concepts with the user. You should already be considering user motivations, blockers, and pain points. You should already be clearly outlining how to implement your design solution.
Now you need to take it to the next level and think about the entire ecosystem. Think about those systems. Think about those external processes. Think about the internal processes that need to come to life to make your solution work. Really dig deep and understand the WHY behind the problems you identify. Understand the business actors involved and what their process looks like. Understand how context influences your user.
By understanding all of that, I guarantee you that your solutions will be much more impactful. They’ll actually address the problem, instead of putting forth a nice, shiny, beautiful-looking digital band-aid.
Resources for you to learn more about Service Design:
- Part I: What’s Service Design? And Why Does it Matter?
- Part II: A Service Design Case Study!
- Service Design Tools
- ServiceDesignNetwork: Service Design Network
- Service Design Toolkit
- Practical Service Design
- Adaptive Path’s Guide to Service Blueprinting
- This is Service Design Thinking: Basics, Tools, Cases (HIGHLY recommend this one)
- Service Design: From Insight to Implementation (I haven’t personally read this, but I have heard great recommendations!)
And then there is a huge list of Service Design books here!
That’s all I’ve got, but if you also have a favorite resource for Service Design or design thinking, please let me know! I’d love to learn more!
