BOOK REFLECTION
BOOK TITLE: Service Design: From Insight to Implementation
AUTHOR(s): Andy Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie, and Ben Reason
MAIN TOPIC: How to “consciously” design services based on insights collected from qualitative research and implement them so that people have can have a good experience using the service
Why did I choose this book?
Personally, for me, when I think about design thinking, my first thought is always about designing a “product” or improving an old “product”. At the same time, the irony is that I almost find myself complaining about the problems associated with how “services” are designed. When I take the NYC subway daily, I sit by the window and think of the number of complaints and solutions I have for how this service could be improved. Therefore, when I saw the list of books that our professor suggested us to read, I immediately picked up ”Service design: From Insight to Implementation”. Recently, I am immensely interested in the way services are designed and how we can make a service that people interact with daily a smooth and pleasurable experience, and when I read the summary of the book, I assumed that the book would help me understand more about the topic I had been pondering on for days. Therefore, because of my interest in the topic and the fact that the summary of the book caught my attention, I chose this book for my reflection
Overall impression:
Overall, my impression of the book was great. The book is divided into 9 chapters and takes one on a complete service design journey. Through each of these chapters, the book discusses the change in thinking from designing things to designing services, how services need to understand the relationship among all the people involved in the service, methods for capturing insights and using them to inform the design, how to use the service blueprint to highlight the complexity of service, prototyping service experiences and lastly the challenges faced in service design. My favorites were chapter 6 and chapter 7 as they discussed customer journey maps and prototyping which we have working on extensively since the beginning of our design thinking class. I could easily understand what these chapters were trying to convey and could relate to the case studies mentioned because working on our project we have been facing similar challenges. Overall, I would rate the book 3.8/5 and recommend it to anyone looking for a basic understanding of Service Design.
Main Insights:
1. The first insight I would like to highlight is when the book mentions how “Statistics are not very actionable for designers — we need to know the underlying reasons”. It talks about how important it is to dive deeper into people’s needs, behaviors and motivations because these form the basis of design problems that designers need to solve. I could relate to this well because, at the beginning of the design thinking class, I was focused on being solutions centric i.e., if this is the problem then this should be the solution. However, the best thing I learned in class was to stop and “Listen” to what people are saying instead of designing solutions on my own experiences and assumptions. I felt this was a very important insight as I witnessed it firsthand when we conducted interviews for our project and when other classmates shared how they had assumptions about what could work but it was different when they came back after their field research. Even if the quantity was less, qualitative research matters, and it is about designing solutions that could help a certain segment of society first and then making an impact on a larger scale.
2. The second insight that I would like to highlight is a tool called “Brand Sheet”. It is a sheet of logos of different products and services, and people can talk about how they feel about them, how frequently they use the products of their favorite brands, etc. For me, I had never heard about this idea, so I felt this was a new and unique concept and it seems like a good way to begin discussions about what experiences these brands offer that make people their loyal consumers or what a certain brand is doing wrong. I believe this could be a good conversation starter for future field research.
3. Lastly, I would like to mention how the book highlights the fact that the service experience is made of customers’ interaction with many touchpoints, and the service quality is defined by how well all the touchpoints work together. I think this is a point our professor always keeps reiterating to us about how we in a journey map we should look at every touchpoint and we will find the problems and solutions once we closely look at all the touchpoints the target user/customer must go through. The book also mentions that the biggest missed opportunity in development is that organizations don’t think about their customers as valuable, productive assets in the development of service but as anonymous consumers of products. This I believe is a very important point to note because actively listening to the voice of someone who is going to or has experienced the service is the most valuable insight in design thinking.
In my opinion, the book is a great read for anyone looking to understand more about service design which is completely different from product design. It also touches upon a lot of things we did or learned during our design thinking course, so it is easier to understand. The book also covers a lot of case studies, and it is very interesting to read the challenges the company faced and how they came up with innovative solutions through a design thinking process.
