Service as an object of design
Exploring the characteristics of services
Service. If I were to ask for a definition of “service” from a random group of strangers, I suspect I would get many variations in return. To confuse it all, I would probably get clarification questions, like, “Do you mean customer service? The act of servicing? A service? Service management? Service delivery? Service design?”
I want to better understand what service is, as an object of design. What are the characteristics and factors that make up a service? For example, if I wanted to design chairs, I would have to understand form, function, materiality, aesthetics, ergonomics, bodies, colors…these are characteristics, or factors, or the material of design. I would need to understand these things singularly, and I would need to understand them in combination. Just as different combinations create different chairs, different characteristics and factors of service create different experiences for those receiving a service and those delivering a service.
I want to become a true student of services. I’m playing around with service frameworks as a construct for how to deconstruct and explore. I am studying services and interviewing people who design, create, build, monitor, improve, and deliver services to see what insight emerges into the form and nature of services. There is much work out there in the world that can satisfy some angles of my inquiry, and other questions require more reflection. My goal is to write about my process of exploration and engage with those of you who share my interest.
Why services?
The desire to specifically study, learn and think about services as an object of design came three years ago and has been growing in its insistence to be taken on.
In August of 2013, I woke up the morning after attending a conference and I started writing in my notebook. It was one of those moments where the pen and hand could barely keep up with the brain.
The thing I was contemplating was “services,” a thing which we had been designing under the guise of service design. Did we really understand the fabric or makeup of services? What was the form and material of our design? Did we really understand services as an object of design, or was service design being used as a label for the design of anything?
I started to capture the aspects of services that had emerged for myself in our work at Meld Studios. The rough model had seven parts to it, and each part had a customer’s perspective and an organizational perspective. It was familiar and not familiar. It had the elements of a journey, from a customer’s perspective, while also having the elements of an organizational journey, the classic ‘these customer moments are brought to you by these organizational moments.’ Each part had the potential for many variations, so it didn’t feel like a recipe so much as it felt like a guide. Great services have these aspects figured out (most likely intentionally), the parts connect well (little to no seams), the parts feel ‘familial’ and belong together. What could those variations be?
While those thoughts served as backdrop to my ongoing design work, flash forward to two years ago. I went to see an exhibit in Copenhagen at the Design Museum Denmark called “Hans J. Wegner — Just one good chair.” I was blown away. Here was a designer who never stopped at the quest of experimenting with or better understanding the form, purpose, expression and experience of use of the chair, a main object of design for him.
“Nothing is so good that it cannot be made better.” — Hans J. Wegner
I was inspired by the thought of having such focus and exploration about services, and the service frameworks I had been playing around with came back into sharp relief. What might it look like to not only study the services of today, but to also push our understanding of what a service might be? Service design then truly became for me about the act of designing services as the object of my design work, and not just about a type of design that can be used for any kind of business problem.
Shifting from process of design to object of design
The process of design versus the object of design is an important distinction here, as my exploration of service frameworks is deliberately about services as an object of design, not how to go through the design process in order to design a service. By better understanding service as an “object”, and service characteristics as its material, I will be better able to use the act of designing more appropriately in support of designing a service. What do great services have? What should services have that we aren’t even thinking about? And how do the different combinations of service elements create the right experiences and outcomes for customers and organisations? How might we learn from great services, and even push beyond, to make all services great? How are services sometimes the heart of the matter, and other times the service sits around products, another object of design? Many, many questions to explore.
Aspects of the service framework
I have a working hypothesis for the bare bones of the service framework, and fully expect that my exploration will shake it up along the way. If I haven’t come to a very different conclusion in the end, I will be very surprised.
Do you remember those flip books, where you could make crazy, random sentences based on a limited set of words? Or playing games like exquisite corpse, where you knew you were either drawing a top, a middle, or a bottom to some emergent creature? Either concept illustrates how a fixed or flexible framework can guide us to make choices that allow individual parts to come together to make a cohesive whole. I suspect that some kind of framework can help us to better understand the characteristics of services, giving us a way to talk about the many intangible aspects of service.
My draft model starts looking at service characteristics at a high level. If we look at it from both the Recipient perspective (how a service is experienced)— Organizational perspective (how a service is delivered), there are naturally factors and options that sit across. I’m thinking of a service as being the totality of these factors, not simply the use of the service or engagement with the service. Without the totality, a service will always be lacking. (note: Recipient / Customer / Citizen / Person / Human / Student … the recipient of the service could be defined in the specific way that works for the context.)
Know — Position
How do I know that a service exists? — How do we position the service so people know it exists?
Sometimes you know about a service because you’re required to use it. Other times services need to be discovered, or they are advertised so there’s no way you can miss it. Sometimes the service is surrounding product of some kind and the service plays quietly in the background, or is held up as the reason the product should be known. When does an organization need to make recipients aware that the service exists? And how?
Evaluate — Proposition
How do I evaluate if this service is right for me? — How do we support people in making the decision to go with this service?
If a service is required, there’s no true evaluation needed, and it needs to be propositioned in a way that makes that clear. If someone has to choose to engage with a service, what does someone need to know or experience in order to make that decision?
Acquire — Provision
How do I acquire this service? — How do we provision the service?
If a service is right for me, do I need to apply to get it? Do I pay for it? Do I need to ask for it? Is it simply given to me? What does an organisation need to have in place to manage provision?
Use — Deliver
How do I use or get use out of this service? — How is the service delivered?
Once acquired, I now get to use it/experience it/receive it. For how long? Do I need anything special in order to benefit from the service? How much control does a person have in using or getting benefit from the service?
Ask — Support
What do I do when I need help or things aren’t going as they are supposed to? — How do we provide appropriate and impactful support for those engaging with our service?
Things don’t always go as planned. How will an organisation provide support structures for those receiving a service? How might support be proactive and preventative and not necessarily rely on customers to indicate challenges or needs?
Change — Improve
How do I get the benefits of a changed service, either a portion of it or in its entirety? How might I adjust the service I’m receiving? — How will we learn, evaluate, and adjust a service? There are different ways to look at this one. If a service is a ongoing service, and there are options around a level of service I can have, or aspects I could choose from or change to, how might I do that? How do I know that? Another way, how do services flex and reflect learning, changing the way organizations deliver service based on insight, measurement and action to adjust?
End — Offboard
How do I stop engaging with or having the service? — How do we offboard recipients from the delivery of our service? Is it a one-time engagement, with a natural ending built in? Is it ongoing, with commercial ties, and I need to go through a process to say goodbye? Does an organisation need to make the goodbye a hello or invitation for next time?
Choices within the framework
Perhaps each service characteristic has potential options, and any one option has the power to change the very nature of the service. So one angle for me is to understand the options underneath each high-level characteristic, and then to see how choices in one start to limit the choices in other, creating interesting dynamics and constraints.
Even this may be too simplistic as an end point, and should only be looked at as a beginning, as there are then other materials of service that span across the framework, such as the intent of experience, the people and behaviours within it, the environments of service (virtual and physical), places, and time. All things that will need to be kept in mind and will emerge as materials in their own right as I dig in.
Why the obsession with services?
Think about a single day in your life. Even an hour. Can you count how many organisations you engage with, and therefore how many services you engage with? Sometimes it becomes so easy to miss, so much of it becomes the fabric of our days.
Every organisation is inherently (or could be) a service organisation, even if it doesn’t see itself as such.
If you produce, if you manufacture, if you make, if you advise, if you teach, if you protect, if you govern, if you transport, if you distribute, if you feed, if you clothe, if you design, if you heal, if you treat, if you plan, if you make, if you install, if you explore…basically, every possible organisation, profit or not for profit, is (or could be) supporting or delivering a service to someone or some entity.
The service is for someone or some entity, and that is something your customer/visitor/patient/citizen receives, engages with, experiences and gets value from. That service is something you deliver through your employees, environments, products and/or systems. It can be THE thing you deliver; or it can be the thing you deliver around a tangible product or environment. I love the intersection of tangibility and intangibility with services, and makes the materiality of services so challenging and fascinating.
My driving motivations for exploring this:
1. Identify characteristics of a service: When it comes to services, what makes up a service? What are its characteristics? What variations in service structure shift the experience of receiving and delivering the service? It’s through knowing the fabric of things that we can push forward.
2. Create a guide: Whether you’re creating a new service from scratch, monitoring and managing or looking to shift and improve an existing service, what should you be looking for to give yourself and your customers the best chance of having a great service experience and having the desired impact and outcomes?
3. Internal alignment: How might we have something as a guide in the support of designing, building, supporting and improving services? How might these frameworks help ensure we are considering all the elements necessary for a successful service? Ultimately, service designers could use this framework as a guide around what characteristics of service need to be understood and designed. Product and service managers could use this in framing a holistic view and ensuring the appropriate aspects of the service are considered to have the aspired impact.
4. Making better services: Ultimately, by understanding the fundamentals of service, we can create better experiences. We can question the services of today, and we can potentially reimagine what they could be.
What this won’t be:
This is not about service design, the deliberate act of using a human-centred design process to create a service. This is about services, the focus of service design.
What I’ll be doing and where you fit in:
I am becoming a student of services, from many angles.
1. Exploring service characteristics: What characteristics do services have that make them great? I’ll first start by looking at different types of organizations and looking at what a service might mean in different contexts. I’ll start by looking for the seven parts of the service framework and look at the variables and variations within them. I also think there are characteristics that are global in their reach across a service, never quite tied to a particular part or aspect of the service, so that’s another thing to chew on. Basically, research. Gather, gather, gather to understand today.
2. Explore different types of services: Based on the gathering, start to look at how collections of service characteristics make up different types of services. What services are great examples for the best of these characteristics?
3. Talk to different people across the service ecosystem: How do those who work with services strategise, plan, create, deliver, monitor, maintain and improve services? How do those who receive services experience them?
I want to make the act of the exploration transparent, so I’ll be doing that under the Service Frameworks publication. I want to create dialogue along the way. I want to discuss and debate and build on the thinking with those who have interest. I would love to connect with others who are interested in exploring service as an object of design, please join me!
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Janna DeVylder is a Co-Founder and Principal of Meld Studios, an Australian design firm.
