Midterm Reflection
What is service design?
Service design is a human-centric approach to solve an issue that we see in our lives, an entire process that a team works with from top to bottom where they try their best to improve the user experience. To put it simply, service designers innovate solutions that make our lives easier. Surprisingly, this term was devised only recently after a surge for a higher demand of quality service. Service design can be applied to any industry, and can be seen all around us; in fact, many of the things that we interact with are products of service design.
One example is Capsule. Capsule is a pharmaceutical service where they deliver directly to homes. Instead of having to pick prescriptions up at pharmacies, it is delivered right to your doorstep. For no charge, all users have to do is sign up and fill out information on their prescriptions, and Capsule handles the rest. For new users, they contact the current pharmacy and transfer all of the patient’s information and prescriptions to their database, where it is then fulfilled there instead of at the old pharmacy. It is an incredibly simplified experience for users to join, where they do not have to worry about setting aside time to go to a pharmacy and pick up their prescriptions.
Capsule completely broke the pharmaceutical industry with their innovation. Last year, they were able to make $100 million in revenue, becoming the largest startup in New York City.
We had the opportunity to meet someone who directly works in this field: Dongin Kim. Kim spoke about her experience at Thoughtworks as a service designer working across multiple industries, many of which we are very familiar with. She introduced us briefly to just a few out of the many projects she was able to take part in. Both apps for Delta airlines and Domino’s Pizza were outputs of service design from Kim and her team. She directly contributed to the creation of New York University’s Virtual Urgent Care center, breaking barriers within the medical industry as it was the first to do so.
One thing that Dongin emphasized during her presentation was how essential collaboration and communication were to be successful. Even in one of our readings “Designing Services at Engine,” the author emphasizes the importance of collaboration throughout the entire process of a project. Due of the amount of layers the process has, it is crucial to be communicating and collaborating with the entire team at any point throughout a project.
The process and applying class activities to what we learned
Another important skill that all of the readings, classes, and activities that we did over the past 7 weeks highlights is the importance of learning how to empathize. Service designers create solutions for people throughout all industries. This means that they would have to put themselves into the shoes of whomever they are trying to help to understand the big picture, pain points, and needs. Most of the time, designers are unfamiliar with these topics because they are not directly affected by the issue. Thus, service designers need to perform research to understand who and what they are working with.
This brings in the “Double Diamond Model,” a model created by a consultancy considered to be one of the pioneers in service design, Engine. This model consists of the 4 D’s: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver. When I had learned about this model, it stuck with me as the best way to explain what the process is like for service designers.
Discover
Starting off with Discover, many service designers go on what are called ‘Service Safaris’ when they first start on a project. Service Safaris are when designers go to the actual sites of users directly affected to best understand their perspective. This serves as an opportunity to observe the site in action and immerse themselves in it as if they were the users themselves. From interviews, participant journals, and service safaris, it is absolutely crucial for designers to immerse themselves as much as they can into the users’ experience to be able to come up with a solution that works. From there, they use the information gathered from this stage to generate user personas, participate in relationship mappings, and build frameworks to find the differences and similarities between everyone involved.
Define
Then, they would naturally move to the Define stage, where designers take what they learned from the Discover stage and interpret the needs and pain points. Though there are many ways to approach this, one example of this is a Service Analysis that my team and I did for Amazon Prime. We analyzed Prime because of how widely used this service is. Because of its fast shipping and product library of almost every imaginable thing you can think of, Prime has been and will continue to be one of the dominating services in the future.
First, we started with the “what”. What was Amazon Prime, and what made it so successful? After we had found our points, we created a stakeholder map that analyzed all of the factors that went inside the business. Who had the most influence? What factors affect what? Then, we went on to do a service blueprint. A service blueprint is a complete analysis on the service from the business. So, we experienced shopping on Amazon Prime to be able to consider all of the factors at play, including factors where the user is not directly in interaction. This ultimately leads to helping define the pain points and user needs accurately.
Develop
After highlighting the pain points and needs, service designers then move to develop a solution with all the resources that they have. In this stage, designers design prototypes and test them out before making the final product. They frequently use maps and frameworks to be able to fall back and see their ideas and notes, and this stage is where it proves to be most useful. Designers at Engine worked with Virgin Airlines with the goal of enticing more customers to choose Virgin Airlines over others. After completing the first two stages, they came up with the “112” Assistance Network for late/lost travelers having to face unhelpful staff. With this network, staff would be able to provide immediate information on flights when lost, and would take late passengers to the gate with their luggage all taken care of. That way, travelers who were lost or late would not end up missing their flights. With these prototype, this stage is all about trial and error, testing and retesting again to see which prototype is the most feasible.
Deliver
Last is the “Deliver” stage. This is the very last stage where designers generate the final prototype in which they put inside the market. Capsule, the Delta app, the Domino’s app, and the Virtual Urgent Care system are all examples of prototypes that made it through this final stage.
Personal reflection
After taking this course and design thinking courses in the past, the one thing that I realized is that almost everything around us is a result of service design or design thinking. We use these products and services daily without even realizing it. I learned about the key factors that were needed to work in a successful team and design process. On top of practicing and refining my skills in communicating, collaborating, and empathizing with others, I also practiced skills that I didn’t realize that I would be utilizing in this course. I was improving my listening skills, making sure that I heard everything before I asked another question. I also practiced coming into class with an open mind. Instead of rejecting any idea, I practiced being open to any and everything that was brought up when we had our team meetings.
I was really interested in Dongin’s lecture that we had last week. As an art major myself, I was inspired to see how she was able to pivot her career and have it still consist of creative thinking in a completely different field. I was also surprised to see how many industries that you can help design for as a service designer. I was fascinated to see some of her projects as I use many of the services that she took part in designing myself.
Where do I see service design in the future?
One place in which I would like to apply service design is improving technology for the elderly so that it is more accessible to them. This thought occurred to me when I saw a Tiktok about classes that Apple was offering to people who wanted to learn more on how to use their phones. Though the classes were offered to everyone, the majority of the people sitting there were the elderly. After doing some research, I found one review that I saw that could be a potential persona profile:
What struck me the most was the 228 people who clicked the ‘me too’ button, but these were also people who were skilled enough to even reach that discussion thread. From personal experience, I know that my Korean speaking grandparents would not have been able to access that website at all. That leads to the conclusion that there are so many other elders out there like my grandparents who also need to learn about the very basics of technology as it continues to advance. I saw online that Apple has already started making changes to their programs not only for the elderly, but for the disabled as well. Here, they offer individual courses for all of their devices, including all of the features that the device has to offer. I think that it would be great to see this across all technology platforms, not just at Apple.
As technology only gets better, it is harder for the elderly to keep up. The gap is already so wide, and I think that it would be great if there was a way to lessen this gap while we still have the chance to.
