Day 60 — Future of Design series 1/7: “Service Design & Innovation”
For quite some time, Service Design has risen and helped countless business re-invent the way they provide services to customers. In the age of Digital Transformation, how can we harness the power of Service Design to re-invent the business model to boost efficiency and revenue? In this article, I’m going to share my knowledge in the following areas:
- What is Service Design
- Why Service Design can help innovation
- How to adopt Service Design
What is Service Design
Still design, but not the eye candy
Historically, because design education have been part of the art school program, people associate design as an artistic approach applying to non-art matters. However, if you look into architecture design and industrial design, you’ll realize that lots of design effort focus more on non-aesthetic aspect: understanding users, their needs and behavior, what emotion and feeling they have and what they’re looking for in life, there are so many contextual information for designers to capture in order to make the right design decisions.
Service Design is no exception, it’s about gathering the information from the service model, and visualizing these collected data, and using creativity to propose appropriate solutions. According to Nielsen Norman Group, Service design is the activity of planning and organizing a business’s resources (people, props, and processes) in order to (1) directly improve the employee’s experience, and (2) indirectly, the customer’s experience.
The deliverables of design doesn’t have to be something aesthetically stunning or attractive, but it has to solve a specific problem with a thoughtful process and yield satisfying result. Service Design focuses on true understanding of the service model in individual stages, not just the business analysis but also the human factor: who are the actors/contributors? how do they feel about the task/process? what’s their individual goal? how can we help them to help us (project/business)?
Why Service Design can help innovation
In my past article, I talked about the differences between creative, artistic, and innovative. The key to innovation is not only have creative solutions, but the ideas that can actually generate business value, not being creative for the creativity’s sake. So, how do we know which idea can generate business value? It’s simple, by truly understand the business model and service provided by the business.
The strength of Service Design is to utilize design research methods and designer’s facilitating skills to extract important information that’s traditionally ignored by business school teaching and technology perspectives. For example, the emotion/satisfaction level of the whole user journey, the pain points that internal service providers are facing, and holistic view of service provisioning channels.
Another important perspective is that lots of times business innovation is not only done through consumer innovation, many are achieved by integrating existing internal process, streamlining the workflow, and boost internal efficiency and efficacy. That’s the beauty of Service Design, in which it doesn’t just look at consumer experience, which we call “Front Stage” in Service design term, but also the “Back Stage” which is internal workflow and journey.
How to adopt Service Design
Process
- Problem Framing: The first step is to figure out what we’re trying to solve by working closely with stakeholders, which includes business, service providers, and users. The important thing here is to identify the relationship among stakeholders, and understand the whole service eco-system (what application/ platforms are involved)
- Insights Mapping: Once we gather crucial information about the problem space and frame the right problem to solve, the next step will be map out the existing experience journey. It will be one journey map per user, so that we can accommodate unique experience/journey of individual users. By doing so, we can identify in which stage our provided service fell short from the user perspective.
- Opportunity Exploring: After the mapping is done, we can start looking at individual pain points across the whole journey, and utilize that insights to brainstorm business opportunities, whether it’s internal facing problems, or external facing issues. By creating a future/ideal state journey, we can start comparing with the existing journey and identify the gap. Based on the user satisfaction trend line across each stages, we can holistically prioritize which problem area we want to address first.
- Concepts Iterating: With all the foundation work done as mentioned above, now we can really focus on solutioning the problems. Depending the scale of the project and the release planning, we’ll focus on iterating solutions for the first release and test with internal/external users to understand the impact, so that we can pivot quickly.
Conclusion
- Service Design is not really looking at designing the “eye candy”, but rather a solution for business problem from a human-centered perspective to resolve service issues and enhance the experience of user journey.
- The power of Service Design lies in the holistic view for both internal and external users, so that we can effectively eliminate waste, boost efficiency and morale.
- Each journey map of Service Design focus on one distinct type of users. Not only that we also want to map out existing journey and future journey so that we can compare and contrast to find the gaps of experience and opportunities for enhancement.
Do you have experience utilizing Service Design for business innovation? I’m eager to learn from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not represent current or previous client or employer views.
