Service Design: Reflection

When I first begun taking Service Design Innovation by Kathleen Chao, I knew nothing of service design, the design thinking process, or how to pitch a deliverable. Throughout this class I learned many valued skills that I can use in the workplace and in my academic career. In this reflection I’ve decided to split up my reflections weekly, having one takeaway each week.

Week 1

Design Thinking by Tim Brown taught me how design thinking can be applied to any business or practice to lead to new innovations within the industry.

• Prototyping doesn’t have to be complex or expensive, as long as it is able to receive feedback on how to evolve the idea.
• Having innovative ideas doesn’t come out of the blue, it comes as the result of an iterative design process.

1. Inspiration

2. Ideation

3. Implementation

• When defined by a constraint, look at a systematic solution
• i.e. when met with the constraint of poverty in India & an unmet need of eye care for the rural poor, Aravind manufactured lenses in basement of hospital for $4 per lens.
• Great design satisfies our needs and desires

Designing for service: Creating an experience advantage dives into the people-centered research process and how & when to use exploratory, generative, and evaluative research throughout the design process.

How non-designers perceive design vs. how designers perceive design

• Service design is considered a process
• Provide the resources for people to design — allowing them to create their own experiences
• Exploratory, generative, & evaluative research that spans the entire development process from discovery to release

Exploratory Research

• Used to define “what is”
• Research is drawn from shadowing, participant observation, and contextual inquiry
• Ex. students documented stories of their experiences. After a few hours of observation, students discovered a latent need and documented it

Generative Research

• Used to verify the framing of “what is”
• Early on: activities are more projective and include exercises that help people express ideas, emotions, and desires
• Later on: collaborations between designers & participants to encoruage creativity & conversations

Evaluative Research

• Used to validate whether the needs/expectations are being met

In-detail descriptions of the integrated service design process

Week 2

My main takeaway from The Truth about Customer Experience is that the customer’s end-to-end journey is often overlooked when looking at customer satisfaction.

• Looking at customer touch points isn’t enough to keep customer satisfied
• Must look at overall interaction

Companies need to embed their customer journeys into their models

1. Identifying customer journeys
2. Understanding current performance
3. Redesigning the experience

• Most companies perform well on touchpoints, but customer journey can set the company apart

In An Anthropologist Walks in a Bar to Understand, I learned how the way anthropologists approach a new subject is similar to how designers approach a new case study.

• Ethnographic research allows designers to better understand the system
• Quantitative & qualitative data
• No assumptions can be made about customer’s behavior
• phenomenology: the study of how people perceive life
• Ex. Starbucks leveraged the phenomenology of coffee, profiting from customers’ willingness to pay a premium for hip baristas, crafted playlists, etc
• Reframe the problem as phenomenon: “what is the chef’s experience of cooking?”

The Sensemaking Process

1. Reframe the problem
2. Collect the data
3. Look for patterns
4. Create key insights
5. Build the business impact

Week 3

Systems Thinking with Mayo Nissen taught me that system thinking helps designers see connections that otherwise may not have been noticed.

• Involves zooming out (thinking of the system as a whole) and zooming in (thinking of the individual stakeholders)
• Designers must see systems as interconnected
• Systems thinking is a natural extension of human-centered design
• Holistic and specific views when looking at systems
• Human centered design is extremely collaborative
• Broad mindset & ability to reference related things from outside the design world
• Ecosystem mapping
• Record all ideas on a mapping board
• T shaped designer

Week 4

Designing Services that Deliver introduced me to the concept of service blueprinting as a mapping tool to help understand complex interactions within a service.

Corner shoeshine service blueprint

• A service blueprint includes customer actions, frontstage and backstage activities, and interactions
• Visual tool to help designer see connections between actions
• Can get more complicated such as diagram below

• Place the customer at the core of service design
• Consistency in service quality & time to build trust w/ customer

My biggest takeaway from Design Thinking for the Greater Good Chapter 4 was asking the process questions: What is?, What if?, What wows?, What works?

• This chapter is about Kingwood Trust, a service specializing in helping people with autism
• Direct observation: designer uses ethnography
• To understand behavior of people with autism, designer mirrors person with autism’s physical actions and thought processes
• What is?, What if?, What wows?, What works? is a design framework used in the innovation phase
• What is? Defining the problem: gaining insights on existing conditions, needs of stakeholders, and challenges
• What if? Ideation phase: generating a large range of potential solutions and ideas
• What wows? Narrow down solutions: Which solutions have the potential to “wow” potential stakeholders and users
• What works? Practicality & implementation: Making sure ideas work in the real world by testing, prototyping, & refining

Chapter 5 in Service Innovation taught me the importance of customers taking initiative in service innovation and ethnography

• Customers ideas > employees ideas
• Users should participate from the start of the innovation process
• Selecting which customers to participate is important
• Many users make innovations for personal use
• Customers are more knowledgeable of their own reality or value-creation processes
• Customer ideas are based on situations the customer had experienced
• Customer involvement in service
• Understand -> Development

Week 5

My biggest takeaway from Design thinking at work : how innovative organizations are embracing design is to be aware of internal and external stakeholders and how to treat them differently.

Internal Stakeholders

• Treat as users, empathize with them
• Actively engage them
• Involve them throughout the entire process, including failures

External Stakeholders

• Integrate & collaborate
• Integrative thinking: the ability to resolve the tension between two opposing ideas by coming up with an alternative that has elements of each but is superior to both
• Focus on leverage points in the system
• Include abstract stakeholders

The culture map : breaking through the invisible boundaries of global business p89–114 showed me different ways of presenting and how cultural differences have a role in the difference.

• Arguing a point in Germany is theoretical based whereas the US is more based on practicality and to-the-point

Principles-First versus. Applications-First

Principles-first (deductive reasoning): i.e. Gravity is a force that pulls things down. When I drop a pen, it falls; therefore, the pen drops due to gravity.

Applications-first (inductive reasoning): When I drop a pen, and when I drop a book, they both fall down. Therefore, there is a force that makes things fall

• Different countries have different positions on a persuading scale

Persuading scale

• It’s important to recognize that different cultures follow different principles, as they may come up in business

Week 6

With the rise of automation, Elevate Employees, Don’t Eliminate Them Unlock value by connecting them with customers argues that companies should focus on elevating employees instead of hiring fewer employees. I was surprised how positive this article was and was intrigued to see how automation won’t destroy jobs, but redirect workers.

• When customers see how hard employees are working, they put greater value on that work

Post-pandemic playbook

1. Conditions for employers to connect with customers
2. Help employees make meaningful connections
3. Find ways for customers to lend a hand
4. Make sure employees can see the impact of their work
5. Invest some of the value created towards beneficial things such as better scheduling

• The knowledge that someone is readily available and willing to help makes a huge difference
• Service is the business of people helping people
• Shift from employees behind the counter to out on the floor helping people

Trends in Service Design goes over 5 recent trends in the Service Design Industry as it evolves. A takeaway from this is understanding why some of the design thinking processes are so important, for example the Service Blueprint.

1. Greater complexity
2. Designing for AI Delivered services
3. Service Mindset vs. Product Mindset
4. Data informed Service Design
5. Specialist roles in Service Design

Week 7

From the article Human Machine Collaboration — Designing for a New Kind of Relationship, my takeaway is that whenever envisioning incorporating AI as a stakeholder, I envision treating the AI as a human, even though it is not.

• The media portrays AI much differently than the way AI works in real life
• Media increases the fear to public to make public afraid of AI taking over their jobs
• AI should be considered not only as a tool, but as a stakeholder with it’s own set of conditions to succeed
• Similarly to Elevate Employees, Don’t Eliminate Them Unlock value by connecting them with customers, this article discusses how AI can augment workers rather than replace them
• Humans and machines process the world differently

Groupthink by Jonah Lehrer taught me how groupthink works and how to think creatively as a group.

• Brainstorming is used for generating creative ideas in advertising, design, and business
• Traditional brainstorming isn’t as effective as it could be
• Benefits of collaboration
• Debate & constructive criticism instead of traditional brainstorming
• As problems become more complex, there must be interdisciplinary collaboration and discussion

Conclusion

While reviewing all of the readings done in class, what strikes me the most is how ethnography is a recurring theme throughout many of the readings. Ethnography is mentioned to be important from the end-to-end in the design thinking process, from empathizing, to ideation, to testing. Having written one takeaway per reading helped me understand the main idea of each text and helped with comprehension and retention, and synthesization. Having these notes in one document will be very helpful to reference to when following the design thinking process.

Service design is about designing the backbones and interactions that occur within services customers use everyday. I used to think of service design as the backstage that customers don’t see, however now I have a more holistic view of service design. Service design encapsulates customer service, systems, user journey, problem solving, stakeholders, iterative design, design thinking, prototyping, research, interdisciplinary collaboration, and much more. One of the most important traits that a service designer can have is communication.

In this class, my biggest takeaways are how to communicate and how to present to an audience. In the past I’ve never considered the medium in which I presented in. I would only present in Google Slides, but now when I do a presentation I think of how other ways may be more beneficial and engaging rather than a slideshow. Additionally, I’ve improved in engaging the audience while presenting. I learned that if there is too much text on the screen that the audience will lose focus, and that to present my research I must downsize and summarize drastically to keep the audience engaged. Regarding presenting I learned from The culture map : breaking through the invisible boundaries of global business about the cultural differences in persuasion and how to adjust actions to meet expectations. I learned that I should introduce myself to the audience to give them context to who I am, and to be more personable. I learned to watch out for readability regarding presentations, and to think about different mediums if a screenshot has text too small or blurry. And lastly, I learned about engaging the audience through different questions and artifacts to help keep them engaged and entertained.