Service Design Thinking — Principles & Major Tools
Services are everywhere and they allow meaningful connections & interactions. We all anticipate a commendable customer service, but when an experience is well organized, we don’t remember the service instead we remember how it made us feel. This could be possible with the help of service design. Service design thinking simplifies the complexity of delivering a service. It helps us see the world form the customer’s perspective, from the first interaction to the building of the long-term relationship. It compiles activities that are done to counterbalance the service quality by interweaving the service provider and customers thus leading to deliver a seamless, user-friendly & relevant service to the customer.
Principles
Service design works are based on certain principles that are cataloged below.
User Centred: Service provided should revolve the user. Each step which we take should focus on customer’s utilization.
Co-Creative: Service design should involve all the stakeholders, especially those who are part of service who faces the customer frequently
Sequencing: Services should be visualized by sequences or key moments which consists of interrelated actions in a customer’s journey which makes our job much easier.
Evidencing: Customers need to be aware of the elements of a service. Evidencing creates loyalty and helps customers understand the entire service experience.
Holistic: Finally service should be holistic so that the entire environment of a service is considered.
Major Tools
Innumerable tools involved in UX overlap with that of service design & utmost is Map & interview based. The major tools in Service design are indexed here
Expectation Maps: Expectation Maps are Investigating and charting what customers expect when they interact with a service. It is done by Conducting in-depth interviews with customers designed to gather their reflections. It serves as a diagnostic tool, drawing out those areas of a service in need of attention from a customer-based perspective and it is a useful way to define and review those areas where customers are regularly experiencing problems.
Personas: Personas are fictional profiles, representing a group based on their shared interests. They are developed from research insights gathered from stakeholder maps, shadowing & interviews. Personas can provide a range of different perspectives on a service & identify different interest-groups that may exist within their target market.
What IF: “What if …” is a question that leads to the exploration of outlandish scenarios. Looking at how well a service could adapt to the potential problems of the future will meticulous what it is doing right — and what could be done better — today.
Story Board: A storyboard is a series of drawings or pictures to visualize a specific sequence of events. It is a comic-strip format, designed to create a series of illustrations that describe the story of the situation being examined. The process of creating them renders the designers into the shoes of the people using a service, which again assists to bring that perspective into the design process.
Desktop Walkthrough: A Desktop Walkthrough is a small-scale 3-D model of a service environment. Employing simple props like Lego figures let designers bring a situation to life. A single scene can be acted out multiple times, and in several locations, with new ideas and modifications which leads to generating new ideas. The main aim is to have a tangible setup that enables people to exchange expectations on future usages
Story Telling: Story telling is a process of expressing a complex idea or deep insights about the service in a much simpler way i.e. in a form of a story. While executing this process even the people unfamiliar with the content also can understand deeper & better.
Service Roleplay: Here, theatrical rehearsal methods are used to explore and generate ideas where Staff members are asked to enact several situations in which they might come into contact with a customer. They also help staff members build up ownership over the innovations they’re being asked to implement, as their feedback fine-tunes the introduction of new ideas.
Business Model canvas: It is a Tool for describing, analyzing & designing business models. It is a visual chart with elements explaining a firm’s or product’s value proposition, infrastructure, customers, and finances which is divided into nine detailed blocks. It helps to Bring clarity to an organization’s core aims. & Identify its strength, weaknesses & priorities.
Thus Service design thinking, in the beginning, helps to plot & plan the spaces we want to play in and the behaviours we need to support; Later it helps us to identify the areas where we are not doing a good enough job as well as some tactics on how to approach solving them