Design: Service Design

This is a sample chapter from the new Rosenfeld Media book Service Design: From Insights to Implementation. ©2013 Rosenfeld Media.

If we are looking to improve an existing service, our blueprint has given us a pretty good overview of the component parts of the service and how these are experienced over time. If we are developing something entirely new, we may have less detail but some idea of people’s needs and what some of the key touchpoints might be. Before going further into the details and committing significant resources to the project, we need to develop the service proposition. Read More

If you’re like me, you have a mini-library of those user experience books that are most meaningful to you. No, not the ones hidden away on your eReader, reminding you of their presence only when you see their titles on the screen. Rather, I’m referring to those tangible books, sitting on your office bookshelf or on a side table at home. Perhaps some remind you of the time when you first entered the field of user experience, wanting to absorb everything about the topic. Or maybe everyone raves about a book as being seminal to the user experience discipline, but you keep the fact that you’ve never read it a secret. Regardless of why you have them, where they live, or how much you recall of their content, these books are important to who you are as a UX professional.

I’ve recently finished reading what is now the latest addition to my own professional mini-library: This Is Service Design Thinking, by Marc Stickdorn, Jakob Schneider, and numerous collaborators and co-authors. This book is likely to become the quintessential service design textbook for students, educators, and professionals alike. In this column, I’ll share highlights from the book, along with some of my own interpretations, and tell you why you should add this book to your own personal collection. Read More

In December of 2014, I wrote a column for UXmatters titled “Designing Great Organizational Services.” It focused on the services a company offers through departments such as Human Resources, Finance, and Information Technology. As service designers, we often forget that these types of services exist. While, as employees, we interact with such services every day, only recently have companies begun to care about employees’ experiences using these services. This has, in turn, made them top of mind for service designers.

In contrast, the external-facing services that an organization offers to its customers are what designers typically envision when thinking about service design. When an organization is a service organization—that is, their revenue and business model center on offering a service to their customers—the customer service experience has a direct correlation with the success of that organization. The purest form of service organization is one that has no product. Education, cleaning, financial, hospitality, medical, transportation, and legal services are all examples of pure services. When you introduce a product into a business model, an organization becomes less of a pure service organization. For example, restaurants are a great example of service organizations that also have a product—the food they serve—at the heart of the experience. Both the service and the food have to be good for the customer to have a good overall experience. Read More