Service Design Metrics Research & the State of Service Design
CfD research insights supplemented by Service Design Network’s report readout
Written by Estefanía Ciliotta and Nicole Zizzi, Center for Design, Northeastern University
This past January, we attended Service Design Network Dallas’s event “The State of Service Design in North America — Report Readout.” As service design is a part of our many research areas, we were excited to learn about the trajectory of discipline and how we might help push it forward. We even found confirmation of some of our insights from our own research.
Event Summary: What we found most surprising
1. Service design in the US is driven by product design.
“Service design wouldn’t have been able to be established in the US without technology.”
— Chris Ridson, Design Program Director, Data & Ai, IBM
In the age of digital transformation, something that is unique to the US market is the pairing of service design with technology. With the switch to digital record systems in industries like healthcare and government, service designers had been brought in to create digital touchpoints within customer journeys. This trend has led to the use of service design by big tech companies to iterate on products, adding to the experiences those products offer. However, product design moves at a different pace than service design which has consequences on the service design industry as a whole.
2. Better representation is still needed
With the entanglement of service design and tech in the US in mind, something we weren’t actually surprised to hear was that service design could use better representation from minorities. This is especially important if service design hopes to bring benefits to diverse populations… services are not meant for just one demographic group so service designers shouldn’t be either.
3. The service design discipline doesn’t have scalability…yet.
The US service design trend driven by product design has created good awareness of the discipline, Design and Product executives have been adding service design to their teams’ scopes of work. The demand is there, however, the supply of service designers is not. There aren’t enough service designers coming out of design education to fill the demand; but this also means that it is a great moment to enter the discipline, grow the community, and reach scalability.
4. All of this leads to the need for more service design in education.
There needs to be a formalized education model for service design here in the US. Currently, most service designers are highly educated, holding master's degrees but those designers didn’t necessarily learn service design in school. Most have learned it through professional experience and/or continuing education/development courses and some are self-taught, learning from books and blogs. 44% come from educational backgrounds other than design [1].
There needs to be a systematic way to fill the demand for service design positions from US companies, meaning that we need more formal educational opportunities.
Lessons we have learned through our research that were confirmed by Service Design Network’s report.
A group of researchers and professors from the Center for Design, at Northeastern University and Bentley University — Miso Kim, Bill Albert, Houjiang Liu, and Estefania Ciliotta Chehade — worked on understanding the impact of service design metrics in the service design profession.
In our study, we surveyed people from all over the world and conducted in-depth interviews with practicing service designers from 11 countries. The goal of this mixed methods research was to understand attitudes towards using metrics and the benefits and challenges of utilizing metrics in a service design process. Some of our findings revealed higher-level strategies to enrich service design practices positioned in organizational settings. Here we share some of them, as they align with the Service Design Network’s report:
Service design is diluted: service design needs evangelization
Service Design Network’s data reports that the majority of service designers who come from backgrounds other than service design look at the field as an amplification of their specific skillsets. Service design is also often associated with certain tools and methods (another research area of ours) that other disciplines can take and implement within their own contexts — both these trends reduce service design to a mindset rather than a discipline. This toolbox thinking makes service design seem less serious to companies and organizations resulting in a dilution of service design practice. Similar to design thinking — where it may be incorporated in multiple job descriptions and design roles — service design should not be considered as just a mindset or approach. Rather, it needs to be seen as a profession and a stand-alone practice with its own set of deliverables.
In our research, we found that many service designers (with different seniority levels) struggled to make service design seen as a “serious” discipline within their companies. Interviewees mentioned that service design needs evangelization within companies in order to showcase its potential and for getting buy-in from other departments. Some participants mentioned that one way of facing this challenge relies on the benefit of “making things visual.” Some service designers considered visualization as more appealing and engaging for making sense of the data, for example, and providing a common ground and common understanding among team members, within and outside the design departments.
Barriers Service Designers face working within Companies
Currently, employees doing work that touches upon service design are finding that the largest barrier to their work is the necessary cross-functional alignment. In order for service designers to ensure a seamless customer experience, they must work cross-functionally with an organization’s siloed teams. The largest barrier they face is working in this siloed system while also attempting to add value to each team and department as well as other stakeholders.
We identified through our research some challenges that affect the use of metrics in service design, and that overall become barriers for service design:
Organization Maturity impacts outlook on Service Design.
The readiness of the organization to recognize the discipline as identified by the presence of service design teams is most related to an organization’s maturity, rather than its industry.
Through our research in understanding the relevance of using quantitative measures in service design, we found that organizations’ maturity and resource allocation provided a solid ground for service design to further develop the practice and grow as the business grows. However, some designers believe that we are lacking a holistic approach to developing evaluative strategies throughout the business that aligns and impacts business goals. We found that even though organizational maturity level can directly impact the outlook of service design, more relevant though, is finding organizational alignment throughout departments and across the organization.
Departments working in silos make it harder to practice design.
Interviewees spoke about the difficulty of requesting information sharing from other departments. When designers do not own the data, they require additional collaborative support from other teams to succeed in measurement. The problem may be the lack of integration between design and other departments across the company. In organizations that are mature enough to build strong design and data science teams, for example, designers gain more opportunities to leverage the power of quantitative measurements in their service design process.
Lacking Design Leadership and Organizational Culture that values Design
Specifically related to metrics, business maturity is not the only condition for successfully integrating metrics within and beyond service design. For organizations that effectively integrate metrics with service design, leadership is an important factor contributing to success. Some interviewees mentioned that embracing a design culture is key and should be infused throughout the organization in order to make Design more “valued” and recognized across the organization. This in turn will allow service designers to feel more empowered to demonstrate its impact.
Strong leadership that values design also allows design (and other departments) to be aligned across businesses, business units across silos, and enables the organization to have a common, shared language.
“If you’re not supported by the leadership, it just makes it harder. A lot of the points of access I’ve seen are because the high-level leadership are really keen on design (…) But not all the design teams are willing to embrace that they are agents of change in an organization. So it’s all about, what’s the position of the design team, how much empowerment, and being endorsed by the CEO.”
— a participant’s response
In addition, usually, strong design leadership helps teams build confidence and positive emotions toward other team members and their jobs, which in turn has a positive impact on customers’ experiences leading to organizational success. Furthermore, a culture and leadership that does not embed the value of design in the organization prevents designers to expand and exploit their creative potential.
Not taking “design” seriously impacts buy-in from other departments
Without the support of leadership, it becomes really complicated for service designers to get buy-in from other departments, and thus, to demonstrate its impact and relevance. In our research, participants mentioned that it was complicated for them to further develop metrics as part of their design processes because service design metrics “were not considered as an essential part of the management policy and strategy” (survey respondent).
Overall, we identified that business maturity and design culture are crucial for developing a strategic design mindset that boosts design across and beyond the organization.
Service design and design strategy are different, yet service design should have a strategic approach and get a “seat” within the C-Suite.
Though the two are equally user-centric, strategists are customer-centric meaning that they need to consider things like business models and revenue forecasting — things which service design does not necessarily encompass.
However, those working in strategy in the US report that they have been using service design tools for longer than service design roles have existed. Yet, strategists also report that they can only spend 33% of their time on service design alone, further only 34% of strategist respondents use service design 100% of their time [1]. Business strategy has been around for longer so companies are more likely to have strategist roles. This is further reinforced in the education system which has merged the two disciplines together because of their synergies, despite the distinctions between them.
However, getting a seat at the strategy table can enhance the role of service designers and service design overall. Through our research, we found that service designers think that it is necessary to “tie the metrics to the mission statements and goals” (survey respondent) and “present them showing the cross-functional value”, in order to better align service design processes to the company’s mission and vision, and thus providing more strategic approaches and frameworks for design.
To close we will share the below quote from Service Design Network’s report readout that resonated with us.
Despite the barriers service designers face, the field is in its nascent stages and will inevitably grow. So if you’re just entering the workforce in — or are looking for a career change into — service design, you will most definitely have the opportunity to help shape the future of service design as a discipline and we hope this synthesis of both ours and Service Design Networks research will help you on that journey.
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References
- Service Design Network Dallas Chapter. The State of Service Design in North America — Report Readout, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wovlHUoUQTU.
