Midterm Reflection
What is Service Design?
Service Design is something that is unknowingly evident in our everyday lives. We interact with components of it every day and it is a relatively new idea introduced to the human-centered design world so most individuals have never heard of it before. We encounter it in all different types of industries and in every interaction we encounter. So, what exactly is Service Design? I see it as designing, innovating, and constructing anything and everything in a Service with an approach that is human-centered. The goal of Service Design is to make sure that the service is one that is effective and desirable. This means that at the core of it, is understanding the users in every way possible to make sure their needs are being heard and met. When designing a service, you don’t design for a user. You design with a user. With this in mind, aspects like Products (anything tangible), Processes (policies and procedure), and People (stakeholders, users, etc) are heavily considered. Service Design makes sure that these aspects are intertwined with one another and is streamlined for an optimized experience. In even simpler terms, as described by Oliver King, founder of Engine (a design consultancy), “understand what the big picture is and you try to help organizations join the dots up and stitch things together” (Designing Services at Engine). And in a more metaphorical way to describe it is sort of “choreographing” all the interactions embedded in a service.
When I first was introduced to Service Design, I watched a video that depicted the idea with the service being a coffee shop (shop B). It was compared to another coffee shop (shop A) and explained that Service Design is the reason why you go to one over the other. Shop A came up with a mobile app and customers thought the app had nothing they needed. Shop B instead first involved customers, employees, and really anyone involved with Shop B to determine how the business can succeed. By involving everyone, they created an app that was centered around customer needs, created a tablet system for employees, an opportunity for a new payment system, examined their key metrics, established a CRM system, and so much more. This example truly illustrates what Service Design is in a practical way and shows how both the frontstage and backstage of a service (all aspects!) need to be considered.
Learnings
Touchpoints:
One of the first skills I learned with this class in the first activity we did as well as the first project was identifying touchpoints. Touchpoints represent any interactions that an individual has with the service. For our class example, we chose Starbucks as our service and even before we walked in I began to realize so many different touchpoints that the store had. Within the store as well, a lot of the touchpoints I observed made me realize more about Service Design. These interactions we have with the touchpoints really define the customer journey and are factors that influence their emotions and pain points. Moreover, for my own project examining touchpoints, I went to a fast-casual poke restaurant where I was able to record my own touchpoints that I would have never usually taken notice of and utilize my findings to propose ideas for the restaurant to improve their service and opportunities for business growth. Examining touchpoints really helps one understand how the design of a service really has an impact on the experience of anyone who interacts with the service. After these two activities, every time I experience a service (which is every day!) I am so much more aware of my surroundings and interactions. I catch myself at times critiquing a touchpoint or noticing that a touchpoint may be intentionally there to help enhance the experience with the service.
Stakeholder Map:
In terms of tangible things that I have learned within this class, I am now very familiar with stakeholder maps and service blueprints. To begin, stakeholder maps help define those involved (stakeholders) in an experience/service. We did two exercises of stakeholder mapping with NYU students and MTA users. Both exercises were very interesting because you do not see how many different people and groups are involved until you see it all laid out in front of you. In class, we group stakeholders into three categories. The core, direct/internal, and indirect/external. Within the core were people who are the users in the specific situation, who we are designing for. In the direct group, it is the people who the users are directly involved with. In the indirect group, which I think is the most interesting part is the people who the users are indirectly involved with meaning those who do not have interaction with the users but are still an integral part of the process. The stakeholder map helps you see relationships between all three stakeholders and helps ensure that everyone is represented.
Service Blueprint:
To continue, after learning about stakeholder maps, we learned about service blueprints. Service blueprints look at some of the stakeholders within the map and document their journey, emotions, actions, and pain points. Essentially, it is a blueprint of a service but created with an emphasis on a human centered approach. You can also think of a service blueprint as an extension of a journey map. The only difference with the map is that it “connects customer experiences with both frontstage and backstage employee processes as well as support process” (This is service design doing : applying service design thinking in the real world : a practitioner’s handbook). We get to examine our core stakeholders but also our direct and indirect ones at a deeper level as well. In class, we created a service blueprint of an NYU student trying to enroll in an elective and the process of it was extremely interesting. I had completed customer journey maps before so a lot of the user-centered steps were easy to complete and familiar. Completing the steps for the frontstage and backstage was completely new to me but again, it emphasized to me the importance of service design. These people have a lot of needs and considerations too and if they are not satisfied, it can affect the user’s pain points and the overall service itself. I got to create a high-level service blueprint again for the service analysis project and it was really interesting again to see how looking at the big picture of things is necessary to understand where to find opportunities.
Applying Service Design
This past semester, I joined a club at NYU called Consult Your Community. The club provides free pro-bono consulting services to NYC small businesses. We currently just started this semester’s project and my team got paired with a small business that sells items and teaches classes related to astrology, crystals, mythological related things. One problem she wants us to address is finding possible solutions to the fact that she is currently is that a lot of individuals who buy her subscription box have stopped renewing and she lacking in retention. Another problem that she has is that her business has no real structure and strategy. I was really excited to be part of this club and project since I am now consulting a service and I can apply things I learned in this class. One thing I am currently doing is creating a stakeholder map in terms of her customers to see if I can establish relationships between certain parts of her business and help build structure. I also want to apply things learned in the service blueprint to hopefully uncover pain points and empathize with customers to see why they stopped buying her products. One thing too with my group is that they are all business majors so their main goal is driving revenue for our client. While that is important, I pointed out to them the importance of customers and how understanding humans can help find the best solutions to drive revenue. Taking this class and being in this club at the same time has allowed me to apply the skills I have been learning to a real-life project. We are still in the very early stages of working with our client but I am excited to look at it with a service design lens in order to bring a unique perspective to my group and hopefully help provide the best recommendations!
