Five principles of service design

Regardless of what your definition of service design might be, there are some principles that need to hold true:

1. Service design is not about products, it is about the areas, relationships, connections between and across products. In service design, quality is a measure of how well all parts of a service work with each other.
2. Service design is inherently multichannel. Digital is a central part but not the only part. Service design looks at experiences that take place over time, across channel, and touchpoints.
3. Service design is user centred; it is not technology or enterprise centred. Both of these play a key part in delivering the service, but they need to follow the users, both those delivering and consuming the services.
4. Empathy, experimentation, integrative thinking (showing possibilities than finding the one answer) and collaboration are central to service design. In applying service design we spend time going wide before converging to a single idea.
5. Service design is transformative. Through a careful examination of internal processes it can provide a roadmap for long-term change, promoting cost savings and service uptake.