A beginner’s guide to what service design is not

This article could be good for you if:

1. you want to get into the service industry but don’t have confidence when explaining what service design is.
2. you want to hire service design but are unsure what they can do apart from what the books say.
3. you think you know service design and want to think critically about the thoughts of other service designers with your own opinion and experience.

Sounds interesting? Let’s get started

It is sometimes difficult to describe what service design is.

Service design brings a unique set of design values to organisations that emphasizes the holistic and human-centric approach to the entire organisation delivering services. It is difficult to answer what service design is, especially for someone trying to get their head into the industry, since service design can be very different from the books we read. Is service design really about co-creation? Does it create a service concept, or is it just about backend operation? These will be the sort of questions service designers would want to clarify when they are pitching service design to people.

After graduating from RCA, I have spent my time talking to service designers about their practices. This article is all about the insights I have collected from the discussions I have had with industry service designers and design directors.

It will be about service design, design change and design value for businesses.

So, what is service design?

Every service design practitioner has their own version of service design in mind.

The spectrum of different service designers stretches from a backend operation facilitator or a business designer to a seasoned UX designer (I would disagree with this one). Almost every organisation employing service designers has a different version of service design in mind. The confusion has a reason behind it and I will address this in the latter part of this article.

Graduating from RCA service design, I had the opportunity to tap into the vast service designer network it has created from the past ten years, since the creation of the course. I am writing this report hoping to get service designers old and new to come together and talk about the versions of service design we have learnt and believe in.

To open up the discussion, I put together a rough outline of what service design looks like based on 40+ interviews I have conducted within the industry. The interviewees consist of service design practitioners/ directors in the industry and RCA Service Design graduates who may or may not consider themselves service designers. It is amazing to see the diversity of the projects that service designers have touched.

So here is the question: what exactly is service design? It is hard to answer the question as there is no one with enough authority to put a definitive stamp on service design, and we wouldn’t need one anyway. The service design process is, by its nature, slightly different in different industries as it is a process instead of a special hard skill set.

Service design is a practice that uses extensive research methodologies of all kinds to pinpoint problems in a system or a service and develop the design solution to solve the problem. A service designer’s job is not just about problem-solving. A service designer also needs to locate the problem or the barriers that need to be tackled. A holistic way to approach design solutions and bring design change would be the easiest way to explain what service design is.

The result of a service design project would often be a vision of a better yet achievable future, delivered with good storytelling. A successful service design process delivery can de-risk the product and facilitate the successful delivery of the solution. A service designer should be confident to complete this process; they see the service as a sequence of products — service design designs services.

The Double Diamond design process

As a way to approach design holistically, understanding the general design process would help show why there is a need to approach the service holistically.

The design process should always start from understanding the users and the surrounding context. Understanding the context, including the users’ needs and the environment, is the key to creating a user-centred design. The difference marks the difference in designing a circuit board layout to designing a product used directly by humans daily.

Once designers understand the users’ needs, they would move on to delivering a design for their users. They would often do so by creating a design hypothesis to meet the needs and creating prototypes to validate the hypothesis. The last stage of the process would be designers scaling up the product, either physical or digital, to deliver the solution to the target audience.

Double diamond is one of the most influential diagrams to explain what design is. Double diamond could include most of the design process. Service designers at RCA learned to use double diamond to build their standard service design process. Ideally, all design processes should go through the entire double diamond process at least once. Every stage of the double diamond process is essential to creating a well designed experience.

What makes service designers special?

Service design fits into the double diamond process perfectly. The process helps designers be sure that they are solving the problem with the most significant impact they can achieve. Service designers extend themselves to focus on finding the problem to be solved. In contrast, a product/UI designer could potentially focus more on delivering the product based on the insight gained by user researchers and business strategists.

Here is where different kinds of designers sit in the project development.

It might seem to be a bit unfair to product and UI designers at first, but if we add just how deep different designers can dig into different design phases, it might start to make sense regarding how other design disciplines could be useful to design projects. In the process of making a product happen, naturally, a team needs to assign people with different kinds of specialities to fit into different phases.

But what if I do a bit of research as a product designer as well? Don’t panic, the spectrum of different designers’ skills can be very blurry and how other disciplines stretches into different stages are a sign of the organisation’s mature design thinking practice!

Service designers will be comfortable bringing the knowledge of a previous design stage to the next design stage. It is a capability that comes naturally if you are looking at the full service. Service designers’ skills might not be better than designers trained to operate in a specific stage. However, the knowledge they can take from the previous stage would smooth the development and guarantee the cohesion of the output of the entire design process.

A designer who is exceptionally capable at diving into how a piece of UI work is crafted would need long hours of practice and training, just as how a service designer is trained to look at the whole picture and use the research to paint a future delivery with good design value.

A service designer is like a city planner, as an architect is to product design. Definitely related, but very different skillset.

The types of service designers and their immediate value to organisations

Service design is about piloting the design process. From there, people with different design backgrounds would make different kinds of service designers. Here I put service designers I interviewed into three main categories. Note that service designers would move between different positions as the organisation requires.

Business Developing / Policy Drafting

This type of service designer is good at discovering new business barriers/opportunities to create and envision innovative services or lowering service delivery costs. They reframe business problems, rearranging (Redo) research insights to develop new design solutions. They may help businesses make decisions that incorporate design values. Eventually, they de-risk products and services.

The role of such service designers has a slight emphasis on the development side of things. They use human-centric design methods and tools to prototype, validate, and develop service proposals incorporating business and design values. Their prototype helps them paint the future vision of a desirable service and organise design strategies. They also move down the ladder of design practice to grounded user research and design delivery. They make sure the design value is present at every stage of the design decision.

Their design process works closely with the double diamond design process. They start their design process from user research with the team and then talk with the stakeholders and the employees to create a hypothesis. Next, they move to prototype the design idea and create a solution for it. The last stage would be the design delivery. Sometimes they work with the change management team to deliver the design concept.

Backend Operation Engineering / Design Solution Delivery Facilitating

This type of designer remaps the organisation structure and identifies operation constraints for the delivery.

While piloting the entire design process, this type of service designer often finds the most challenging barriers to be not being able to implement design changes or bad communication between teams. They create platforms such as service blueprints to map out where the problems could be.

They know the importance of bringing design changes, sometimes disruptions, to the organisation to achieve innovative goals.

They use their extensive experience at finding the delivery gap of a service as their work emphasises the delivery side of things.

Sometimes this type of service design practitioner focuses on design thinking, coaching and organisation transformation. Very often, their goal is to bring design thinking into different cultures. They show keen interest in learning about the target organisation and are comfortable with suggesting changes to it.

They would see the design change delivered to the very end of the design process and ensure that the design value stays with the organisation, even after leaving the clients.

One of the interviewees even pointed out that he doesn’t take his job as a design role. He trusts his fellow designer colleagues to be able to create a compelling front-end experience. He doesn’t even engage with user research works as the user researchers on his team are extremely capable. His work is to ensure the organisation takes design thinking ideas and the human-centric discipline into account, with good communication between different silos.

Venture Building

Service designers in this position differ from strategic designers. Venture building requires the most agile mind to face all kinds of challenges a designer would meet. A service designer in this position is not shy about getting their heads into all design phases. They have the capabilities to prioritise the problems to solve, aim for big impacts, and their design skills will need to cover all facets of the start-up operations.

This type of service designer may sound a lot like the business developing and policy drafting types. The difference is that they need to run multiple rapid cycles of design processes to iterate at the early design stage. The “Service designer’s instinct” truly shines as they bring the heuristic of design and business thinking together. Their value usually sits in early-stage business validation, often seen within a smaller team.

Venture building requires a service design trained designer to build prototypes to validate the craziest idea for their business. The territory of a start-up is often unpredictable, and thus, de-risking is extremely important.

However, it may be hard for a venture builder to continue working in an all-rounder style as the organisation grows. As the team grows, delegating design jobs becomes crucial to overall design management. Design management is distinctively different from service design.

With the types of service designers in mind, Let’s talk about what the service designers from the industry think. Note that some designers have conflicting opinions about service design, which may be the beauty of the service design business. It can be different to all kinds of organisations. Service design is very agile.

Service design is not just about designing businesses. To be specific, it’s about de-risking operations.

This opinion is supported by some of the most experienced service designers I have ever met, including the head of the Service Design programme at the RCA and many other industry leaders in the service design industry.

Design thinking, in general, is good at assisting businesses to identify the risk related to human factors in the product they create. The risk would be where the logic of the business makes no sense to humans. All design disciplines contribute to the de-risking of product development.

Service design sits in a unique position to look at the risks hidden in the entire operation process. The design thinking style de-risking process is about end-users, stakeholders, and employees involved in the operation.

Service design interprets insights from user research into potential risks and opportunities and turns them into design solutions. The famous service blueprint sits here. Sometimes, through this type of communication, service designers can find the barriers to successful design solutions. The process creates an achievable future that could drive the business forward while including the design value.

It is usually bigger organisations that use service design in this way. The project is immensely complex and requires careful collaboration between everyone involved in the specific operation. For smaller businesses, it is hard to adopt this type of service design work because it would require an immense amount of resources to conduct the research that could back the development. Also, sometimes when working on smaller projects, the risky part of the operation is often more obvious than for multi-billion businesses. An end-to-end design solution may be more desirable than a time-consuming service design cycle.

Service design is not just about design strategy. It participates in the end-to-end design process.

The similarities between service design and user experience design are about the holistic view of the design task. Experience designers tend to look at the whole frontend process. In contrast, service designers do not limit the scope of the design even though they are able to zoom out and look at the design in different layers. Understanding how designing screens work is still essential for a designer trained to look at the problem holistically.

The holistic approach to design is about finding the place that needs to be designed but overlooked. A service designer needs to have the capability to identify the missing cog within the whole context. To achieve that, service designers should understand the value of traditional designer skills such as designing crafts and user researching. Service designers probably won’t be able to compete with designers who have been practising particular design skills for decades. What service designers could bring is maintaining cohesion between teams and ensuring the value to be delivered is aligned with the needs of their clients.

A holistic approach to a design process brings a set of entirely different perks to the projects. The insights that service designers pull could often become useful information for design managers to connect people and pool their skills. Service design can thus help design managers’ work and sometimes even the change management teams.

Service design is not unsuited to smaller organisations. It just needs trust to be conducted.

At the front end of design, Service/Experience designers bring more than just crafting UI. Many designers still struggle with only being tasked to work on UI. Around the industry, there has been a misunderstanding of a UX designer to be a senior UI designer and a service designer to be a senior UX designer.

Most of the interviewees give the straightforward answer that service design is not UX design, but why would this type of misunderstanding be there in the first place?

The nature of design thinking is to bring a fair amount of disruption to the business to invoke innovation. It means risks, and it changes things. Though it could be a nuisance sometimes, the value it brings to the organisation could be enormous. That being said, disruption makes people uneasy. Becoming the character to bring changes requires good trust. Naturally, businesses would want experienced and trusted partners to work on risky things.

Imagine that a new service designer comes into the team and starts pointing fingers about the part of the operation with bad risks. Such behaviour would not be desirable to anyone if they couldn’t understand the service designers’ good intentions or don’t know about service design.

I had the chance to talk with an extremely experienced designer who easily navigates through all design tools and methodologies. He does not identify himself as any specific designer but rather just as a Designer. He suggests that junior designers throw away the myth about job titles. In his opinion, designers also need to learn that trust is required before changing the organisation to allow designers to touch the top-shelf stuff.

A LinkedIn post would complain about how organisations don’t know what UX design or service design is. The reason behind that might not just be the incapability of the management team. To be empathetic to the management team, a service designer would learn that design thinking changes the organisation a lot. That level of trust needs time to build. Service designers might just be one step away from being arrogant if they don’t get this.

Even though the skillsets of different designers could be different, the upskilling process can be framed as trust-building. Still, the daunting part would be that the organisation would never be open to such upskilling. For a person with a dream of working on a design thinking implementation job, it can be scary to work on UI jobs forever.

Service design is not just about a service blueprint. It’s about weaving design value into operations.

Service blueprinting is a famous addition to service designers’ output. It is often requested from service designers. It is as if a person who knows service blueprinting knows how to do service design.

The interviews showed a strong sentiment of service designers disagreeing with this opinion. One RCA graduate, who now works in a UK based digital agency, expressed his disapproval about how companies repeatedly request service blueprinting as their asset.

To him, a service blueprint is a platform to cooperate within different departments and stakeholders. It is the service designers who wield the blueprint as a tool. Once service designers are out of the development process, the service blueprint would be rendered useless as the content of the blueprint could shift drastically if there are any changes to the operation. Service designers are about bringing a design solution to the table. The service blueprint itself is not the solution.

He says his job is more about design thinking coaching instead.

In his opinion, organisations need to learn how to do service blueprints and keep them as an integrated part of their operation. Coaching design thinking and seeing that it gets included in the target organisation would be one of the true powers of service designers. A key quality of service designers is to facilitate design change. The service blueprint is more like a notepad to the service designers than an asset to the operation. It helps service designers to move across silos.

Service design is not as obvious as UX/UI solutions.

The UK design industry is vibrant. All businesses see the value of design, but sometimes it stays at the stage of being “a way to make things pretty”. Compared with the east Asian mindset, the industry is much more mature with design thinking.

Of course, now that you are reading this article, you might not be just looking for insights on how designers can craft pretty mobile app screens.

I had the chance to interview design directors around the UK for industry insights. They mostly come from small to mid-size firms that hire digital designers. These agencies usually focus on user research, digital strategy and creative marketing with a small and agile team with different skills.

These design directors recognise the value of design thinking in the innovation process. To them, the design could craft the vision of the future of the organisations. Yet, the budget and the resources at hand mean that service design and holistic experience design remain a luxury. Resources for research are not infinite. Another round of user research means increased budget. Without that, it could be difficult for designers to complete their design process.

At the same time, digital agencies can keep a small to mid-sized digital design studio sustainable by delivering designed interfaces sold in the package of the digital transformation strategy.

Limiting the frame for work to just creating UI and digital strategy is a viable business option. The cost is easier to calculate, and the demand is high. An actual thorough front to back end design service is less requested for relatively small organisations because it’s pricey and time-consuming. Plus, most businesses are confident that they can get the organisation run correctly.

The reality is that a UX designer would need to do UI screens in many different scenarios. Also, remember that sometimes service designers, interaction designers, product designers, graphic designers, visual communication designers, digital designers, industrial designers and many, many more designers are all educated to design interfaces.

Designers started building physical user interfaces way before Apple’s iPhone hits the market. The job started when designers created operable machinery like cars and landline phones that appeared around the industrial revolution. Some designers do it better than others, thus the title UI designer. Perhaps when the profession of a “UI/UX designer” is requested, the hiring manager is just asking for someone who can do UI.

After all, a good user interface is a part of a good user experience.

The exposure to high-level design thinking strategies is not low or absent at all around the UK. Most organisations understand the importance of being user-centric. Leaders know the value of having the design process at the strategic level. The barrier is often about being allowed to work on such things. With service design and experience design’s deliverable crossing with UI designer, it would be intuitive for the managers to do these “service design” jobs themselves. After all, their job is to point out where design needs to be done for the juniors. The outcome of it would be another Medium topic.

Here is another interesting opinion from one of the talks: Service design is what UX design was supposed to be before the trend of digital world transformation pulled them to design digital experiences. UX and UI design are different jobs, but seeing a UI/UX designer job title has become a norm. We are so used to it, sometimes we stop questioning why such a job title is a thing.

Summing up: How the service design industry looks now

Even though a service designer’s skillset is very different from a seasoned senior UX designer, the industry is still reluctant to use people with such skills for way too many reasons. From there, it seems that the chance of a fresh service design graduate getting hired as a service designer gets dimmer. The exception would come from places that see the value of different design disciplines. Service design, a combination of social science/ business research and solution architecture, is a set of very desirable skills.

For bigger companies, the capability of a service designer navigating through complicated problems makes their life much easier. More and more UK firms have started to see it as a separate discipline now. Many are looking towards building their in-house service design capability. The UX/UI industry may be saturated, but new territories are drawn around the relatively old discipline. While some are still struggling to accept service design, famous service design studios are acquired by major consulting businesses and continue to create amazing works with some of the brightest minds I have ever talked to.

On the other hand, service design sometimes is deemed as a buzzword to a digital-focused company. Surprisingly, I would agree with them. Those digital agencies are already doing fantastic work combining business and end-to-end design artefacts that could fuel the design transformation. They don’t need service design. However, I will still argue that a service designer can help them dig deeper into their clients’ operations and potentially do more design work for their partners. With that particular design thinking coaching capability, service designers would also make clients get the agencies’ design language even better.

Another department that shows interest in service design is the business transformation/ change management team. As said earlier, service designers can paint a possible and desirable future with careful research and collaboration. It could show the barrier to achieving design changes, and they help map out the operation to make sure everyone understands the direction of changes.

There are many other exciting topics about service design such as, how co-creation and team-building service designers would usually dig in. However, I will leave that for another day. Service design is continuing to evolve with more and more people recognising its value. So, try to work with a service designer (or be one) if you have the chance. It will be a fantastic experience if you know what you should ask from service design.

Do reach out if you want to talk about service design, even if it’s just a casual chat.