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What are the service typologies that service designers need to be aware of?
Here are six types from the business model angle.
During my time at the Royal College of Art, I’ve been inspired by the ‘design studies’ approach. These design studies are like case studies in business schools, and offer a conversational space focused on design practices and strategies. The aim is to inspire new ways of thinking about design direction and creating competitive advantages. With the design studies format in mind, I’ll be writing a series of mini-essays about my observations on services and customer behaviours. If you’re a design thinker like myself, or have a strategic role in shaping your product development or marketing positioning, I hope the articles might provoke and inspire thoughts of your own.
At the end of the day, we all think differently.
The service typologies
I have been thinking for some time about the different types of services. If you are a service designer, , like me, a business founder, or a strategist, this could be interesting to you. This article examines the typology of services from a business model perspective and its relation to design.
Disclaimer: There are different ways to categorise services, i.e. public vs private, by industry, B2B vs B2C, organisational design, transactional vs experiential, etc. For example, innovation management scholar Bruce Tether looks at the types of service from an innovation characteristic perspective, where he argues different organisational design results in different innovation challenges in services. (I will find another time to write about this if anyone is interested). This article aims to explore typology questions from the business model perspective. I hope this will give a new angle when we are designing such a service. If you have looked at the types of service in other interesting ways, feel free to comment on the below too.
Why it is important:
The business model for service design is like the equivalent of OS to UI and UX: an operating system like MacOS or Windows can be very hard to change its core code (aka the foundational logic of how a system operates), despite its multiple iterations on the user…
