How many service designers does it take to define Service Design?
Earlier this week I was asked to draft an article for my organization’s newsletter, introducing my service design team to the organization. I knew that this was my big chance to make a good impression for service design in my organization, and that I had to get it right. I sat there anxiously staring at my empty Google doc, facing the question that seems to be a daily challenge for me (and every other service designer I know). “What is Service Design?”
Luckily, I’m not alone.
I decided to crowd source my answer. We recently launched a virtual community of practice for service designers that has been growing rapidly over the last few weeks. So decided to bring the question to the community.
Here’s what we came up with.
What is Service Design?
Version #1
Service design is a human-centered design approach that places equal value on the customer experience and the business process, aiming to create quality customer experiences, and seamless service delivery. Service design helps organizations see an end-to-end, surface-to-core perspective, enabling holistic and meaningful improvements to service experiences.
Version #2
Service design is an approach to designing experiences that happen to a customer over a period of time, at a higher altitude than any individual interaction. It is setting the stage for the comprehensive chain of events that ensure successful service provisioning and a seamless customer experience.
Version #3
Service design is here to look at the processes you and your customers experience, and try to optimize them to reduce friction, cost, and increase efficiency and quality.
Version #4
Service design looks for the points of friction between a company, and their customers, whoever they might be. We use creative methods to reduce or eliminate those points of friction.
Version #5
Service design is where you look at an experience that happens over a period of time and is usually intangible, and improve moments along the way that try to create a better customer experience overall.
Version #6
Service Design is about helping your business to create strong bonds and relationships with the people you want to serve, moving away from the transactional make and sell mindset and closer to a relational way of doing business. It’s about putting people first, but in a way it fits this service economy.
Version #7
Service Design will help you work together with users instead of keeping trying to fulfill orders coming from them. It will help you uncover unspoken needs, and put users to work side by side with your team decreasing risks of building irrelevant solutions and getting tons of change requests. Like the ones I know you keep getting at every project completion.
Version #8
Once upon a time, companies could make a lot of money by focusing on what things they made. They would hire designers to make those things work really well for people, and people liked them. Think about cars and iPods and chairs. Now, companies need to do more than just focus on a good thing: they need to figure out how to work with the people who use that thing over time. Think about email providers and hospitals and transportation. When the relationship is not based on face-to-face conversations, how do the companies know what people really need? Service designers figure out what customers need over time, and how the company can deliver it simply and consistently.
Version #9
The art and science of understanding customers, systems (both online and offline), and employees as they collaborate to produce a service with the least amount of energy (e.g. cognitive load, friction, steps, handoffs, etc). The end result is better (experience, outcome, price, etc.) for people who use that service.
My final version
So, how many service designers does it take to define Service Design? Eight seemed to be the magic number. I think what we learned is that the definition is context-sensitive, and that your audience matters. After crowdsourcing the answer, I crafted a paragraph for my announcement that I think will resonate with my organization. Here’s what I ended up using:
Service design helps organizations see their services from a customer perspective. It is an approach to designing services that balances the needs of the customer with the needs of the business, aiming to create seamless and quality service experiences. Service design is rooted in design thinking, and brings a creative, human-centered process to service improvement and designing new services. Through collaborative methods that engage both customers and service delivery teams, service design helps organizations gain true, end-to-end understanding of their services, enabling holistic and meaningful improvements.
Originally published at www.practicalservicedesign.com on December 15, 2015.
