My Service Design Reflection
What is Service Design?
When I first enrolled in the Service Design Innovation course, I thought service design is about developing innovative customer services. However, this perspective changed after the first day of class. I came to realize that service design isn’t just about appealing to customers. It is a process that connects the service provider and the client. Service design involves designers communicating ideas collaboratively to develop efficient solutions and innovative experiences for customers to encounter and businesses to provide. In other words, service design is about designing a multistep journey with multiple complex interactions between the customer and service provider.
To simplify the journey as a relatable experience, think about a food place that you would go to super often. Do you ever wonder why you like the place so much? Perhaps it’s the food they serve, or the vibe the place gives off, or the employees that serve you, or just the convenience of it. All the reasons are part of the service design that interacts with you. These reasons are also known as “touchpoints” that make the user experience more interactive and builds trust between the customer and provider. Example of touchpoints includes the menu you see, the app you order from, the waiter that took your order, the delivery guy, and the food itself. The props of the touchpoints are in the forms of service, technology, people, physical space, and objects.
The service design safari assignment was an interesting eye-opener for me that gave me a deeper perspective on the shopping experience. I noticed that I start analyzing and questioning why things are presented in certain ways and mentally noting different touch-points that I encountered. It also made me reconsider a lot of impulse purchases both physically and digitally by putting myself in the designer’s perspective. Ultimately, I was able to gain higher purchase satisfaction as well as save more money because by uncovering the motive of “why,” I was able to gain further insights into the impact of the service design.
The Bigger Picture of Service Design
One of the key takeaways I learned early on in the Service Design Innovation course is that there is a bigger picture to service design. Service design on a basic level is the experience that’s broken down into three essential parts: people, props, and process. However, when we take a step back and look at service design from a higher level, we can see that while it revolves around the customer experience, the stakeholders are also involved throughout the process. The stakeholders in service design can be broken down into frontstage and backstage. The difference is that the frontstage stakeholders involve the users and the faces of the business such as employees and executives. Frontstage also includes the accessible channels, products, touchpoints, and the user interface/experience. The backstage is essentially the backbone of the frontstage. The backstage stakeholders involve the suppliers, UX designers, programmers, etc. The backstage also includes the infrastructure, technology, systems, and policies.
The frontend stakeholders and backend stakeholders form the stakeholder’s map. While the stakeholder’s map shows the involvement of the frontstage and backstage members within a company. Furthermore, there is no rule in regards to how a stakeholder map’s layout should look like, the most generic form is grouping the stakeholders into three categories: core, direct, and indirect. In my Service Analysis group project, we created a stakeholder map for the company DoorDash. We listed the essential main focus group as the core. We then listed the frontstage as direct and the backstage as indirect. Some of the frontstage overlaps with backstage and vice versa. This activity helped me gain a better visual understanding of the stakeholder layout.
Another essential part of the service analysis toolkit is the service design blueprint. It is a visual diagram that draws the relationships between the different service factors. This ties back to the people, props, and processes. Personally, I see the service design blueprint as a journey map where the customer goes through a series of touchpoints to reach the ending. Throughout the journey, the touchpoints will either give the customer a good or bad experience and will impact the overall customer satisfaction. The service design will be able to represent that visually and can help designers communicate better.
I really enjoyed the service analysis project. I was able to work efficiently and productively with my team while applying the service analysis tool kit to my company, DoorDash. While our presentation went smoothly, we did have some issues in regards to the sizing of the stakeholder map and the blueprint. In future presentations, we would want to bring more clarity to the images so that they can be more viewable when zoomed in. Overall, I have learned a lot from my peers and gained hands-on analysis experience.
Relationships in Service Design
Around midway through the semester, we have a solid understanding of service design. We moved on to the importance of relationships in service design and the design thinking process. For service design to be effective, the designers must be able to communicate well with each other and respect the boundaries. We started with a telephone game to simulate how it is very easy to miscommunicate ideas under heavy pressure. At the end of the game, it was clear that Batman turned into a rabbit and I had fun guessing and doodling. I learned that there will often be conflicts that can perhaps trigger misalignments. Thus, it is in the best interest of designers to feel comfortable around each other in order to address the misalignments and collaborate peacefully to formulate a solution. We also had a guest speaker named Vandad Pourbahrami. He was an ex-comedian and we did acting activities under pressure that pushed us even further with our communication skills. I really appreciate how he tries to draw out the humor in communication to make the experience feel more open.
Virtual Field Trip
Our virtual field trip was indeed very interesting. I was able to learn about how service design can be applied to different industries. Agnes Kwek is a policy-wonk-turned-designer that focuses on complex economic and social issues. Her presentation talks about Singapore’s service design in urban planning and policies. Next, we had Andy Vandenheuvel and who works for CVS as a senior service designer. His presentation was very interesting because he moved from the management consulting field to the pharmaceutical field and I learned that human-centered design impacts business value. Finally, we had Javiera Aremas who works with patient and staff experience at the MSK hospital. She presented the importance of service design in human interactions and it relates closely with the relationship aspect that we had learned previously. Overall, the presenters were informative and I really enjoyed Andy’s presentation the most because my career path somewhat aligns.
Design Thinking Process
In my opinion, I feel that the design thinking process is wrapping up everything we learned so far about service design and using it to solve real-world problems. There are four parts to the design thinking process. Firstly, we have to discover and then define the problem. Next, we develop the solution and then deliver it. While this may sound simple, each step is tedious and we did a class simulation to reflect that. For my team, we decided to focus on the issue of not being able to watch movies together with friends. We went through the brainstorming process of coming up with potential solutions and combining ideas to form the most innovative solution. We also addressed the customer concerns to provide the best service possible. Finally, we presented a mock-up as a deliverable and it was super entertaining yet realistic at the same time. This activity helped prepare me for the upcoming final project that will require deeper insights and analysis.
My POV on Service Design
I see the high potential of service design in disruptive services. Disruptive services can be viewed as innovations of the current services that are out there but don't fully address customer demand/need. This leaves room for improvements as well as an opportunity for a better variation to take over. Service design can help me find potential flaws because I can use the toolkit to analyze and reverse engineer the user experience. Therefore, it allows me to identify the flaws in the system as well as seek innovative opportunities to disrupt the current market. Disruptive services can be common in new trends such as augmented/virtual reality, AI, IoT, blockchains, cloud service, and cybersecurity. As the technologies in these fields are evolving rapidly, there will be major gaps to align so that these disruptive technologies can friendlier toward customers.
