Let me tell you about Service Design — Midterm Reflection
What is a service?
Before defining what Service Design is, I think it is essential to gain a better understanding of what a service is.
So, what are services?
Services are activities in a variety of sectors ranging from going to your favorite restaurant to booking a vacation with your family or purchasing a gift for your friends. Services are all around us and are a huge aspect of our everyday lives.
Let’s take a deeper look at the example of going to your favorite restaurant. With your favorite restaurant in mind, I will guide you through all the elements of that entire service experience.
- How do you set a reservation for this restaurant? Online? A phone call?
- How do you find this restaurant? Is it recognizable? Is there a big sign?
- How do you enter the restaurant? Can you just walk in or do you need to check in with a hostess?
- What is the seating like in the restaurant? What about the ambiance? Is it decorated a specific way?
- Think of the menu. Is it easy to read and find what you are looking for?
- How do you place your order?
- Is the waiter or waitress welcoming and receptive to your accommodations?
- How long did it take for your food to arrive?
- Most importantly, how was the food?!
- When you were finished with your meal, how did you pay?
- How did you leave the restaurant? How did you feel at the end?
Congratulations! You have just been taken through the touchpoints of an entire service.
…But, what are touchpoints?
Touchpoints are all the moments where a customer interacts with the service and what it has to offer. It is all the steps throughout the customer’s end-to-end journey.
In our class, we were able to go on a “Service Safari” to find and identify all the different touchpoints within our favorite restaurant service. By immersing myself in the service, this exercise allowed me to understand how a service works and identify opportunities for how the service can be improved.
So, what is Service Design?
Now that you have a basic understanding of what a service is, we can dive into what Service Design means.
Service Design is the process of designing the customer’s interactions with the various “touchpoints”. It involves having those touchpoints work together in a way that creates value and the best overall experience for the customer.
With Service Design, it is essential to design the touchpoints as well as the entire “big picture” experience as a whole.
Service Design is impactful because it allows you to innovate (create new services) or improve current services. Solutions reached can shift future experiences for all services and their customers.
How do Service Designers do this?
To find solutions and create enjoyable services or experiences, Service Designers apply Design Thinking to services.
What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a problem-solving approach that involves immersing yourself in the problem.
How does one do this? For one, empathy. The fascinating ability that we have as humans, which allows us to put ourselves in the shoes of another individual and identify with what they are feeling. Gathering insights into people’s needs, wants, behaviors, and thoughts reveal patterns that can be used to design solutions that solve their problems. Design processes such as user research, ideation, visualization, and rapid prototyping are used to perform this solutions-based approach.
Design thinking follows a four-step process as seen in this double diamond figure below: discover, define, develop, and deliver.
Through our design thinking sprint in class, we were able to engage in all stages of the process.
The Discover Stage:
The discover phase primarily consists of conducting interviews and research to better understand customers and stakeholders. In this stage, you reframe the problem through sensemaking. While connecting with your users, empathy and digging deep with well-thought-out questions ensure conversations that lead to interesting insights on how to improve their current experience.
This stage taught me how to ask the right questions and to listen more than I talk.
In the define stage, research and interviews are brought together to reach valuable insights. Interviews are synthesized and put together on Journey Maps. Journey Maps demonstrate each of the phases that a customer goes through on their journey. It takes information from the interviews and highlights the most important moments in a user’s journey. The user’s thoughts, emotions, actions, and touchpoints are also organized along each phase. That knowledge is applied to identify areas of opportunity and to ideate potential solutions.
In the develop stage, you begin to create your potential solution. Prototyping is the defining factor of this stage. It allows you to test your solutions with your stakeholders and receive valuable feedback from them. Based on this feedback, you can refine and make improvements. Designs aren’t created once and finished, it is rather an iterative and cyclical process.
In the final stage of deliver, your solution can be delivered to your customers as a service. The entire design process has brought you to this final stage where you have created a groundbreaking and innovative solution.
What makes a good service and experience?
While it may seem quite intuitive, what makes a good service isn’t always obvious. This is why a major role of Service Designers is to “make the invisible visible” or make the “intangible tangible”. What does this mean?
Unlike products, services don’t have a physical aspect and therefore many elements of the service get lost in time and space. As a result, services can often be taken for granted and aren’t noticed until something falls apart.
Service designers work to show customers the impact and value of what happens backstage (within the culture of the organization) and bring it frontstage (what the user interacts with) so that they can appreciate the ultimate experience.
While the list is endless, a few of my favorite elements that make a good experience include being:
- Usable (by everyone)
- Clear
- Consistent
- Easy
- Concise
A few other things you should know…
Here are a few other things that I learned in my Service Design class that got me really excited and I would like to share more about!
Mapping Tools
In our class, we learned about various mapping tools, which help create connections between the different elements in a system and service.
- Personas: a profile representing a group you are designing for. It shows their needs, frustrations, motivations, and demographic info
- Journey maps: a map that visualizes the experience of the user over time. It focuses on emotions and highlights areas of opportunity
- Stakeholder Maps: identifies who in the society, organization, and company you should be connecting with and talking to
- Service Blueprints: define what is required when delivering a service. It involves “zooming in” on the details and also “zooming out” to get an overarching view of the service
Participatory Design
This is my favorite part of the Service Design world because it allows me to invite all stakeholders (customers, consumers, employees, partners, etc.) into the design process. I can collaborate with them to understand their needs when designing services for them.
Examples of this include:
- Love Letters: ask the stakeholder to write a letter for the brand or service with everything they love about it
- Magic Button: ask how the stakeholder would fix the service with a “magic button”
- Role Play: have the stakeholders act out the service
…and endless others!
What really stood out to me about participatory design was when we looked at the example of designing services for those who are autistic or have other disabilities. Participatory design methods give them a chance to express their needs.
Applying Service Design
As I pursue a field in UX/UI Design, I plan to take the skills I have learned in Service Design with me. I will apply my empathy, listening, and communication skills, the design thinking mindset, and my ability to use mapping tools (personas, journey maps, etc.). This will allow me to think of the holistic experience as I am designing a product or service. Service Design has taught me how to place users at the center and add value to their experience. I think it is very powerful to be able to bring together service design and user experience. Our speakers made it clear how Service Design can be applied and impactful to any product or experience!
Looking Forward
In only 7 weeks, I have already learned so much! I believe that the rest of the learning comes from applying these concepts and teachings to real, hands-on projects. I am looking forward to diving into a group project for the rest of the semester. This will give me the opportunity to practice the skills I have learned in order to create services that make an impact. I am excited to immerse myself in the entire Service Design process! :)
