Going from UX to service design; the stark honest truth no one will tell you

The real story of what you need to hear if you’re going to succeed in this transition. Service design is not UX.

Dear UX designer,

You’ve decided to make a leap towards service design. I’m proud of you. I admire and support your decision.

After all, it’s what I did.

It hasn’t been easy. It hasn’t been fast. I look over my shoulder every day wondering how service design fits in the world I live in, and when I’ll be pulled aside and told, “Look, we don’t really understand what you do. I am not even sure you do. It sounds really awesome, and we love the feeling we get when you describe it, but I think it’s best if we part ways. It’s not us, it’s you.”

This isn’t a rant or admonishment. This is a story that no one told me, a sit down I never had, a letter nobody wrote. A reaction to things I took as a priori that turned out to be a lot more difficult and scary than I thought.

I was not prepared for the transition, and neither will you be. If that statement instantly brought up feelings of “Pffft, not me, I’ll be prepared, I’m different, you’re wrong, Erik! I’m not afraid.”

That sentiment just means you need this information more than those who already presume that this is going to be a hard, scary, and non-trivial transition.

I’ve learned a few things over the last four years about what it means to transition to a digital service designer role from being a traditional UX designer. Yes, some of what I’ve learned came from books, the internet, conferences… but the real learning came from the battlefield.

It’s time to spill my guts and share the real-talk that no one else will tell you. This article is going to be a monster; for those who read it, I commend you. For those who skim, see you back here in a year.

So please, step into my office; have a seat.

The start of a service design migration

Service design seems like a new discipline in the digital world of design; a world dominated by UX. Without a doubt, its present surge in the US, especially in “tech,” is a result of a westward migration of knowledge from Europe and select agencies pushing it to their clients as the newest value proposition.

Service design is the norm in European nations, and there are plenty of places that embrace it and staff it well that are not tech companies. They are service companies. Healthcare, education, government, transportation. Service designers who have never touched a wireframe in their life.

Now you, you’ve been “Designing for experiences” for years. You’ve been thinking end-to-end, looking at holistic product design. Perhaps you read an article, or saw a speaker or two at a conference that inspired you to look into service design. Something that feels both new, and old. After all, how could we not think about the entire user experience; the totality of a human journey through a scenario.

Why be stuck just to the screen when there is so much more that happens before, in-between, and after those interface and interaction designs?

Yet, go poll 100 “UX” designers. What percentage of their time is spent outside of product design? What percentage of their time is spent on higher altitude system design that aligns with a broader customer strategy? Not a lot.

The same, but totally different

From the outside, it looks like a lift and shift of skills. We are designing for human experiences, how different can it be? Everyone who makes anything is designing for human experiences.

Whether you say you “design for experience,” or just relent and say “experience designer,” it’s all making things for people to experience. But, there’s one thing I want you to consider:

We learned that UX is not UI. Now, it is time for us to collectively consider: Service Design is not UX.

Thinking that being involved in designing for experiences is merely going to be a sidestep from one lane to the other is a flawed and dangerous assumption. Picture this in your mind: you’re working as a welder in a garage, on dry ground, welding things that are used on dry ground. That’s where you are with UX, welding like a champion.

Now, picture welding again, only this time 300 meters under the ocean surface. Did you even know you could weld underwater? You can, and the principles are the same; superheat metals with fire or electricity so they can be joined during a melted, malleable state, and then let them harden back into a solidly joined piece.

Ready to walk out of the garage and put on a diving suit? Do you know how to dive? Are you SCUBA certified? Are you trained at the depth you need to go? Do you know what sorts of techniques needs to be used for the things you’re welding? The kinds of people you’ll need to rely on to succeed — boat captains, surface crew, other divers?

Probably not. This is a topic that comes up again, and again, and again, every day. We get emails sent directly to us from people looking for help on how to transition. Questions come up in the service design community we started on Slack (Megan Erin Miller and I) every day, again, and again, and again.

It’s an important topic, and light needs to be shined on it. Not from a design agency’s blog post, not from an academic institution, not from people who have never worked as wireframe and .jpg slicing machines.

It needs to be said from someone who made the leap, and the crash-landing is still fresh in their minds. Someone not speaking from a pedestal, but from the muddy, flooded trenches.

Now, if you’re ready.

UX skills aren’t as transferrable as you think.

Working in UX is focused very much on the thing which is produced — what we call the “touchpoint” in service design. The thing is tangible. There are lots of schools, books, conferences, classes that cover this kind of design… you can’t throw a wadded up sticky-note without hitting a UX resource.

Go look at the top UX schools (online or offline) or popular UX websites, and you’ll find very little on service design.

Service design in tech simply is not there.

What to brace yourself for.

• Soft skills will be easier to transfer; like empathy, design thinking, prototyping, research synthesis — but those aren’t differentiators. They are basic common sense and business acumen for any designer. If you lack these soft skills, you’re functionally unemployable already.
• Hard skills are difficult to transfer. Service design isn’t screen focused. Sketch, Axure, HTML, these aren’t the main tools anymore. A lot of the time, they aren’t involved at all. .
• The projects are going to be different and unfamiliar. There is an ambiguity that doesn’t exist in UX. You might have had something tangible to ship before, but service design doesn’t operate at that altitude. What you ship might feel like just a set of instructions, like the blocking for a play, or a recipe you don’t personally cook.
• You’re not so much shipping as you are choreographing, while the segments of the choreography (silos, business units, teams) ship their components. And because of this, your role becomes more of a facilitator, guide, advisor, and leader.
• Unless you’re in UX design upper management, you typically work “heads down” and aren’t a part of designing for the bigger picture. Service design floats at a different altitude where its focus IS the bigger picture, and you’ll find yourself more involved in the higher-level activities that you might think are reserved for managers, directors, or strategists.
• There’s no real guide or handbook on how or what to look at transferring. The answer (aside from creating lots of experience maps) for “what to do” is still “we don’t really know.”
• You used to be surrounded by UX design peers. Now, you are not. If you’re outside of the major cities in the US, likely you won’t find many local service designers to meet face-to-face. You have to go online. And yes, it can be quite lonely sometimes.

What you can do to prepare for skill transfer

The best way to prepare and train yourself is to, well, prepare and train yourself. There are resources and books, none of which you’ll find in the UX section of Amazon or wherever else you buy books. This is going to be a self-teaching journey. Fortunately, there are plenty of peers to learn from and with!

This hurdle is the reason we created the active and vibrant service design Slack community. The knowledge is locked away in other people. Tribal knowledge. Oral histories that will be the books of tomorrow, but not today. The best place to learn is from those who are 1, 3, 6, 12 months ahead of you, not from people decades ahead.

• Obviously: join the Slack community and get talking. It’s filled with UX to service design migrators — some just starting, some in the middle of it, some who have done it, and some who are too scared to bring it up. Get in there and start talking to your peers!
• Find local meetups and SDN chapters and attend, and bring your list of questions. Be unashamed and humble, talk to everyone, ask everyone questions, do not fear if they look like “experts” or that you’ll be looked down upon. You won’t be.
• If there aren’t local SDN chapters or meetups, start some and see who shows up. Someone has to be the first to stand up and act as a lighthouse.
• Conferences. Find some with a service design focus, or service design workshops or classes. There is formal knowledge out there, you just have to find it. It’s expensive and a big time investment, but it’s the audience you meet that matters, not the speakers.
• Be diligent about reading. There’s a whole body of content that is ultra-applicable, but not captured in UX literature in real meaningful ways.

Bonus reading list

• Our top recommendation is Service Design for Business
• Great book with broad techniques and case studies, This is Service Design Thinking — and a “coming soon” sequel This is Service Design Doing.
• By some of the same authors of the first book, Service Design: From Insight to Implementation, this is a good mid-level intro for people who know what service design is and want to go a little deeper.
• Service Innovation Handbook, a hands on guide with a lot of method ideas.

If you want a quick jumpstart, check out our Service Design 101 page. There is a lot there you can get started with right away. Links, resources, templates, etc.

If you’re feeling even more adventurous, watch Megan and my videos from the Adaptive Path SX Conf talking about our journeys to service design.

Finding jobs in the tech space will be very hard

If you’re from UX and looking to work in service design at digitally-focused places of the same nature, it’s going to be hard to get those places interested. Larger companies with strong UX presence already have their product design systems nailed and won’t have the “space” for service designers to take root. For these kinds of places, you are best off figuring out how to adapt a different role to accomplish service design work.

Startups and other smaller tech companies, they can’t afford to hire people outside the UX wireframe box when it comes down to where to put the budget. Product and UX still rules the tech design kingdom.

There are those that do embrace service design, the places that have real human-to-human interaction like Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, etc. — but those are clear services companies. People interact with people on a front stage and a backstage.

What does Facebook, Google, Netflix, Apple need with service design? It’s not as obvious to them as you might think it would be, and this may surprise you. This is the service design question that remains unanswered. Will they? Or do they?

Is service design overreaching thinking it belongs in tech? Does tech need end-to-end design outside of the screen? Or is the value manifested in what you touch and interact with (even if that means voice, AI, etc). Marc Andreessen said “software is eating the world.”

Companies that see themselves as products and a brand; they will struggle. Companies that see themselves as providing a service — or better, acting IN service — will thrive.

At the same time, 80% of the US GDP is service based, likely all of it backed by software. There is still service being delivered, even without people involved. So where do we fit in as service designers?

As you go on your job hunt, brace yourself for:

• Not finding very many “service designer” jobs
• Applying for non-service designer jobs with the intent to “feel them out” to see if they can adapt and morph to become service design focused.
• Having your portfolios scoured for visual design examples, and being asked where they are; even when you think “but I am not applying for that type of job.”
• Having your portfolios scoured for interaction, wireframe, interface examples; even when you think “but I am not applying for that type of job.”
• Talent and hiring managers having never heard of service design, and quickly falling asleep when you explain it so they can move on to the next Dribbble-ite.
• Rejection. Even when your UX chops get you through the interview process, behind closed doors, the hiring groups may just end up saying “this person is great, we just don’t know what they’d do here.” Even if it seems clear to you.
• Excitement over the broad theory of service design, but companies feeling that management and leaders already provide that strategic vision, and design executes the vision. Having a service designer as an individual contributor who helps choreograph the vision — does this sentence even make sense to us, the service designers? It will make less sense to those hiring you.

What you can do to get there faster

Job hunting for service design is going to be something you look back on and feel proud when you finally land that job. It won’t be easy, but it’ll be worth it. Here’s how you can help arm yourself:

• Your first service design job might be your current job! Start doing it today! Fortune favors the bold; do it in the open by talking to your boss about these new methods or activities you want to try, OR…
• Do it without telling anyone, just start! Start doing it, applying it, learning it, morph yourself into that service design superhero you know you can be, and then when you start making noticeable changes, you have that one key you need: evidence.
• To that point, don’t bring up service design yet as a term — it’s a rogue element and the design cultural immune system may react to it. Call it something else, such as:
• Thinking more end-to-end; looking at deeper customer scenarios and what is going on behind the scenes; trying to find out what customers are experiencing before, between, and after the screen interactions; etc.
• If you want to move companies, then focus HARD on finding those who want service design, not on the companies who need the skills you have. If you continually lean on UX skills to transition roles, you’ll just end up on the same merry-go-round.
• Network, network, network. Get to those conferences. Join the community. Start writing (even if you don’t feel like you are a good writer we can help you and get you posted on our big blog.practicalservicedesign.com)! If you can’t be seen, how do you expect to be chosen or seen as a leader who can move the company towards a new way of working?
• Go read this as soon as you are done with this post for a cheerier outlook on being a service design job seeker.

You may have to morph your role into one, or search high and low to find one. You are going from a “role” that has hundreds of openings at any given time, to one that maybe has a dozen.

You are still a designer, but trying to compete in the UX tech market, you’re outgunned, outnumbered, and lacking support. Service design isn’t in demand in tech yet.

This is is one of the hardest pills to swallow. The service design jobs in tech simply are not there.

Even when you start working in service design, it will be a rough ride

If you’ve made it this far, both in the sense of this monster article, but also your career, you’re likely introducing something all new to your organization, team, and peers.

Here is what you might be feeling: the cultural immune system, isolation, ambiguity, not being understood. You will feel alone. Afraid. Where do you fit in the digital tech world, and how do you fit?

You are a service designer in tech, it’s not going to be comfortable. We’re five years too early. It is up to us to make space and capability and act as examples to our internal organizations, other companies, the design community at large. And foremost, to our service design peers that need us.

The essential survival list

I have some essential survival tips that can help you, just like they helped me. Memorize them. Print them out.

• Find the allies who already “get it.” They are out there, they’ve been craving this. Raise a flag and see who salutes. Without them, you can’t move forward. The lone hero approach is a path to failure.
• Make the intangible work you have tangible. Let people see it. Service design can seem like strategic tomfoolery; it’s not. So take what you’ve done and turn it into something people can see and touch and quantify. Make it actionable, practical, tactical.
• Dig deeply into the motivation of others, not what motivates you. How does service design includes benefit for them? We all know how it benefits you. Can you clearly state how it benefits your customers, your stakeholders, your company (and maybe your shareholders!).
• Leverage existing objectives. What are those surrounding you working on, and how can you help? How can you add service design fuel to the fire? You’ve got a lot to offer with this toolset you’ve chosen, forget about getting acceptance of what it is called and just start adding it in!
• Self promote. Make sure people know what you’re doing and that you’re bringing something new to the table. You don’t have to say, “I have service design, here is what it does, you should all want it.” People won’t follow you because they need something you have, they will follow you because you have persuaded them to believe what you believe.
• Dont resist the cultural immune system. Cultures never embrace new things at first. You inoculate slowly, introducing it a little at a time until you start to hear conversations in the hall around service design, blueprinting, jobs to be done. And then you know you’re home.

That which you push against pushes back against you

It’s going to be an incremental process. No organization can just stop so you can figure out how you can fit into the team. After all, this is your adventure, not theirs. Be a hero.

Truth is a pathless land — take from all that is around and make of yourself something more

It might feel like doom and gloom; quite the contrary. Sometimes you need a authentic look at both sides of the story, even if it feels stark and dark, so you can be prepared for what lies ahead.

Fear not, I won’t leave you hanging! I’ve spent an article talking about what people won’t tell you. If you’ve read this far, here is what I will tell you:

1. Embrace that service design is not UX, and don’t try to cram either into the other’s box.
2. The open roles and jobs are few and far between: morph what you already have, or be ready to commit to a search, undaunted.
3. Service design in tech is new. Almost unheard of. Be ready to stay strong and endure the cultural immune system and find your allies. You can’t do this alone. You CAN do this with support.
4. Don’t give up. Service design’s time is coming. The more the tech world moves past seeing themselves as code-based manufacturing, and starts seeing themselves as organizations that serve those in need, the more service designers will make sense.

It’s going to happen. I hope that it is sooner rather than later. It’s another shift in paradigm that tech will go through. The next evolutionary step is mastering offering service through products and other digital intangible methods that may involved human actors less and less.

This is your chance to be a part of the next shift in design in tech. Take control of your career. Be the evolutionary missing link we all need.

Always Clap!

But before you go…

You should give this article a recommend 👏🏻 or 50, follow me Erik Flowers on Medium (and on Twitter — @erik_flowers).

Want to read more about service design careers? Check out Megan Erin Miller’s article on the service design job landscape:

Hey, service design job seekers, we need to talk.

Then continue the conversation! Join the global Service Design Community of Practice in Slack at www.practicalservicedesign.com/community