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Service Design

What is service design.

Service design is a process where designers create sustainable solutions and optimal experiences for both customers in unique contexts and any service providers involved. Designers break services into sections and adapt fine-tuned solutions to suit all users’ needs in context—based on actors, location and other factors.

“When you have two coffee shops right next to each other, and each sells the exact same coffee at the exact same price, service design is what makes you walk into one and not the other.” — 31Volts Service Design Studio

See how effective service design can result in more delightful experiences.

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Service Design is about Designing for the Biggest Picture

Users don’t access brands in a vacuum, but within complex chains of interactions. For example, a car is a product, but in service design terms it’s a tool when an elderly customer wants to book an Uber ride to visit a friend in hospital. There’s much to consider in such contexts. This user might be accessing Uber on a smartphone, which she’s still learning to use. Perhaps she’s infirm, too, lives in an assisted living facility and must inform the driver about her specific needs. Also, she’s not the only user involved here. Other users are any service providers attached to her user experience. For example, the driver that customer books also uses Uber—but experiences a different aspect of it. To cater to various users’ and customers’ contexts as a designer, you must understand these sorts of relations between service receivers and service providers and the far-reaching aspects of their contexts from start to finish. Only then can you ideate towards solutions for these users’/customers’ specific ecosystems while you ensure brands can deliver on expectations optimally and sustainably .

In service design, you work within a broad scope including user experience (UX) design and customer experience (CX) design . To design for everyone concerned, you must appreciate the macro- and micro-level factors that affect their realities.

service design essay

A service design experience often involves multiple channels, contexts and products.

Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider, authors of This is Service Design Thinking , identify five key principles—for service design to be:

User-centered – Use qualitative research to design focusing on all users.

Co-creative – Include all relevant stakeholders in the design process.

Sequencing – Break a complex service into separate processes and user journey sections.

Evidencing – Envision service experiences to make them tangible for users to understand and trust brands.

Holistic – Design for all touchpoints throughout experiences, across networks of users and interactions.

Designers increasingly work more around services than around physical products—e.g., SaaS (software as a service). Meanwhile, with advances in digital technology continually redefining what users can expect whenever they proceed towards goals, brands focus on maximizing convenience and removing barriers for their users . A digital example is Square, which unbundles point-of-sale systems from cash registers and rebundles smartphones as potential point-of-sale systems.

How to Do Service Design Best

First, identify these vital parts of any service encounter:

Actors (e.g., employees delivering the service)

Location (e.g., a virtual environment where customers receive the service)

Props (e.g., objects used during service delivery)

Associates (other organizations involved in providing the service – e.g., logistics)

Processes (e.g., workflows used to deliver the service)

You’ll need to define problems, iterate and address all dimensions of the customers’, users’ and business needs best in a holistic design . To begin, you must empathize with all relevant users/customers. These are some of the most common tools:

Customer journey maps (to find the customers’ touchpoints, barriers and critical moments)

Personas (to help envision target users)

Service blueprints (elevated forms of customer journey maps that help reveal the full spectrum of situations where users/customers can interact with brands)

You should use these to help leverage insights to account for such vital areas as accessibility and customer reengagement.

service design essay

Service blueprints are an important tool in the service design process.

Do Service Design for the Complete Experience

Remember to design for the complete experience. That means you should accommodate your users’/customers’ environment/s and the various barriers, motivations and feelings they’ll have. Here are some core considerations:

Understand your brand’s purpose, the demand for it and the ability of all associated service providers to deliver on promises.

The customers’ needs come ahead of the brand’s internal ones .

Focus on delivering unified and efficient services holistically —as opposed to taking a component-by-component approach.

Include input from users .

Streamline work processes to maximize efficiency .

Co-creation sessions are vital to prototyping .

Eliminate anything (e.g., features, work processes) that fails to add value for customers.

Use agile development to adapt to ever-changing customer needs.

Service design applies both to not-so-tangible areas (e.g., riders buying a single Uber trip) and tangible ones (e.g., iPhone owners visiting Apple Store for assistance/repairs). Overall, service design is a conversation where you should leave your users and customers satisfied at all touchpoints, delighted to have encountered your brand.

Learn More about Service Design

Learn all about service design by taking our course: Service Design: How to Design Integrated Service Experiences .

Read this insightful piece, Service Design: What Is It, What Does It Involve, And Should You Care?

Discover more about service blueprinting in Service Design 101

Read this eye-opening piece exploring Service Design Thinking

Examine Uber’s service design in Uber Service Design Teardown

Questions related to Service Design

A service design diagram is a visual representation of the overall structure and components of a service, including the interactions between different elements. It provides an overview of the service and helps stakeholders understand how different parts of the service fit together. It may include information such as user interfaces, system components, data flows, and more.

Actors/Roles: Entities bringing the experience to the customer.

Information Flow: Details of data shared, required, or used.

Interactions: Between people, systems, and services.

Devices & Channels: Tools and mediums of communication.

The diagram is essential for understanding the current state of a service, emphasizing the intricacies and interdependencies, guiding service blueprint creation, and identifying potential breakpoints or areas for enhancement.

In the context of service design, frontstage refers to the actions performed by employees that are visible to the customer. It includes interactions such as customer service, product demonstrations, and any other activities that customers can directly observe.

On the other hand, backstage actions are performed by employees that are not visible to the customer. These actions support the service delivery and may include tasks such as inventory management, quality control, and other behind-the-scenes operations.

Good service design is a holistic approach that prioritizes every user interaction, both in digital and real-life contexts. Jonas Piet, Director and Service Design Lead at Inwithforward shares the example of Kudoz, a learning platform to demonstrate backstage service design.

While the digital platform is a crucial component, the user's journey begins long before they interact with the app. It might start with discovering the service at a community event or through a promotional video. Service designers ensure that every touchpoint, from community events to the digital interface, provides a coherent and positive experience. They focus on the intricate details, be it designing the role of an 'Experience Curator', crafting a compelling story, or ensuring safety checks. In essence, good service design intertwines various interactions, ensuring they align perfectly.

Discover the principles of human-centered design through Interaction Design Foundation's in-depth courses: Design for the 21st Century with Don Norman offers a contemporary perspective on design thinking, while Design for a Better World with Don Norman emphasizes designing for positive global impact. To deepen your understanding, Don Norman's seminal book, " Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered ," from MIT Press, is an invaluable resource.

Developing service design begins with 

In-depth user research, often ethnographic field studies, forming personas and journey maps. 

Engage stakeholders early and consistently. 

Utilize tools like the business model and value proposition canvases for a strategic foundation. 

Transition from journey maps to service blueprints, mapping out the entire service ecosystem. 

Embrace prototyping, iteratively refining with stakeholder input. 

Thoroughly test prototypes, launch the finalized service, and continuously measure its impact. 

Learn more from the video below:

Service design starts by understanding all pieces of an activity, centered on a user's need. 

It involves figuring out systems from the ground up to support the experience, considering digital, physical, and social contexts. In-depth user research, stakeholder engagement, and aligning organizational resources, user needs, and outcomes are vital. 

Service design, as discussed in our video, encompasses both the visible interactions a customer experiences and the underlying processes staff engage with. It deals with a complex web of interconnectivity, from front-end interactions to back-end systems and distribution. However, the challenge isn't just about designing services. The organizational culture must be receptive. Even if service designers identify areas of improvement, if the organization isn't prepared or faces legislative and technological barriers, change becomes arduous. Despite having dedicated individuals wanting change, they can often be constrained by larger, intricate issues. Service design requires a holistic approach, and while it can pinpoint problems, actual implementation might be held back by factors beyond the design realm.

UX (User Experience) design centers on the digital experience of users, focusing on specific touchpoints (which are often screen-based interactions). CX (Customer Experience) is broader, encompassing every touchpoint a customer has with a brand, from digital to in-store. 

Service design has the highest scope of the three concepts, factoring in business processes, systems, and other back-end elements that the customer does not interact with. While UX zooms in on digital interactions, service design steps back, integrating everything for a seamless journey. All three disciplines aim to enhance the user's or customer's experience but operate at different scales and depths.

Absolutely! As businesses increasingly recognize the value of delivering exceptional customer experiences, service design has become a pivotal discipline. It ensures seamless and holistic services that cater to both customer needs and business goals.

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The demand for professionals with expertise in service design is growing across various industries, from tech to hospitality. In order to stay competitive and satisfy the current demand, many individuals are looking to improve their skills. For those keen on mastering this domain, Interaction Design Foundation's course on Service Design provides an in-depth understanding and hands-on learning. It's a great way to get started or deepen your expertise!

Literature on Service Design

Here’s the entire UX literature on Service Design by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Service Design

Take a deep dive into Service Design with our course Service Design: How to Design Integrated Service Experiences .

Services are everywhere! When you get a new passport, order a pizza or make a reservation on AirBnB, you're engaging with services. How those services are designed is crucial to whether they provide a pleasant experience or an exasperating one. The experience of a service is essential to its success or failure no matter if your goal is to gain and retain customers for your app or to design an efficient waiting system for a doctor’s office.

In a service design process, you use an in-depth understanding of the business and its customers to ensure that all the touchpoints of your service are perfect and, just as importantly, that your organization can deliver a great service experience every time . It’s not just about designing the customer interactions; you also need to design the entire ecosystem surrounding those interactions.

In this course, you’ll learn how to go through a robust service design process and which methods to use at each step along the way. You’ll also learn how to create a service design culture in your organization and set up a service design team . We’ll provide you with lots of case studies to learn from as well as interviews with top designers in the field. For each practical method, you’ll get downloadable templates that guide you on how to use the methods in your own work.

This course contains a series of practical exercises that build on one another to create a complete service design project . The exercises are optional, but you’ll get invaluable hands-on experience with the methods you encounter in this course if you complete them, because they will teach you to take your first steps as a service designer. What’s equally important is that you can use your work as a case study for your portfolio to showcase your abilities to future employers! A portfolio is essential if you want to step into or move ahead in a career in service design.

Your primary instructor in the course is Frank Spillers . Frank is CXO of award-winning design agency Experience Dynamics and a service design expert who has consulted with companies all over the world. Much of the written learning material also comes from John Zimmerman and Jodi Forlizzi , both Professors in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University and highly influential in establishing design research as we know it today.

You’ll earn a verifiable and industry-trusted Course Certificate once you complete the course. You can highlight it on your resume, CV, LinkedIn profile or on your website.

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What Is Service Design? How To Implement Service Design Processes

service design essay

It’s easy to think of design in terms of tangible objects, like a smartphone or a chair, or in terms of digital products, like a website or an app.

But what about those experiences we can’t touch or see?

This is where service design comes in. Just like UX , service design is all about creating a first-class experience for the customer — whether they’re buying a coffee, going for a beauty treatment or using public transport.

Let’s take a closer look at what service design is and the processes involved.

What is service design?

The main difference between service design and product design is that services are intangible. Essentially, a service designer tries to make a company’s services better than its competitors by following a service design methodology. The aim is to improve how the service works in order to improve the customer experience.

Take your favourite coffee shop.

There are probably other coffee shops you could go to, so what makes you choose this one? Perhaps you enjoy the friendly service, the smiley face on the receipt, the fact that they use fair trade coffee beans, or the plugs they have to power your phone. It might just be something small, like you never have cash on you and one doesn’t take your card.

Well, that’s service design in a nutshell!

Wikipedia explains it like this: Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its customers. Service design may function as a way to inform changes to an existing service or create a new service entirely.

Service design: Consistent vs. unique experiences

Companies like Starbucks and McDonald’s go to great lengths to make sure you experience the same service from San Francisco to Saint Petersburg.

Fast forward and times change. Today’s customers are looking for unique experiences, which throws up a whole host of opportunities and challenges. The hotel industry has definitely felt the impact of Airbnb, and traditional hotels are now striving to create unique experiences or unique rooms to win back their customers.

Of course, companies still face the ultimate challenge (and cost!) of delivering a unique experience on a mass scale.

The four approaches to customization

Source:  Harvard Business Review

Apple is a great example of outstanding service design.

Have a problem with your iPhone? Just go to the genius bar and they will help you fix it and get it back up and running for you.

It’s personal, builds the brand and generates loyalty. As a customer, knowing that if anything goes wrong you can quickly get it solved is a huge benefit.

The service design process is similar to UX!

Designers seek to understand the needs and desires of the people who will use a product or service by spending time with them. This approach ensures solutions are both fit for purpose and desirable to the people who will use them. By focusing on human stories and insights, designers build empathy for users , and ensure that the ideas they develop are wholly relevant.

Here is an overview of a typical service design methodology:

  • Framing:  Get your objectives and outcomes for the project and determine how you will measure your success. Use this template from Service Design Toolkit.
  • User insights:  From surveys and interviews to user shadowing, you need to get some qualitative data from people. A key aspect of this is asking unbiased questions that get to the bottom of your service design challenge.
  • Personas:  The persona you build is made up from the research of user insights and data from any customer information you have. It can help you to recognise that various individuals have different demands, behaviours and assumptions, and it can also help you to identify with the individual you’re designing for.Remember: Creating a business for everyone, creates a business for no one! Your persona helps you to come up with ideas and set up experiences to appeal to a specific target group. Check out this guide .
  • Ideation: Using the information that came up in the research phase: what ideas/hypotheses have emerged that are worth exploring further? Working in a group and spending time on this section pays off. Having thinking time is underrated in today’s world. Another common failure is to study the competition. Don’t study the competition, study the winners in other industries and draw ideas from a wide range of sources
  • Service blueprint: The service plan is a strategy originally used for service design and advancement, but has additionally found applications in identifying problems with operational effectiveness. The method was first described by G. Lynn Shostack, a bank exec, in the Harvard Business Review in 1984. A service blueprint is different from a customer journey map . A blueprint works on the business back-end on how a service works, how it will be delivered, and where it fits into the customer experience.
  • Prototype and test:  Validate with prototyping , and be aware of biases that might be introduced into this part of the project. Different factors affect the prototypes: people (not limited to the customer, including yourself, the business owner, and staff), location, and timing. Have a list of what to observe and what is important to gather in the testing. The main priority is getting out there and trying things out.

Service design examples

Let’s bring to life the service design which is all around us with some real-world examples.

Organ donation

If you live in an ‘opt-in’ country, then people have to take the time to actively register to donate their organs. The ‘opt-in rate’ is always a struggle for countries to meet and requires heavy marketing and an army of volunteers to remind people. The intent from people is that it’s “something they’ll get around to doing” — but we all know the outcome of that.

Social psychologists Shai Davidai, Tom Gilovich, and Lee Ross set out to understand the psychology behind these different organ donation rates.

In Austria, your organs are donated unless you ‘opt-out’. 90% of the population are registered organ donors.

The average for an opt-in country is 15%. That’s a huge difference!

Davidai, Gilovich and Ross found that people who were already opted in found it to be an ethically trivial and inconsequential action.

In this example, service design and the operations behind it have a huge impact on organ donations — ultimately saving lives.

This example has become a Design 101 case study around the world. Airbnb uses a platform to create a unique customer experience that previously wasn’t so widely available. People wanted to feel free in an apartment and have a unique experience without feeling held hostage in a hotel room.

They started by storyboarding 45 different realistic emotional moments for Airbnb hosts.

They studied the consumer journeys to understand their feelings and pain points.

According to Airbnb’s Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy, Chip Conley, the experience of staying in an Airbnb is the core of its customer strategy, and they work towards creating the experiences that would match with a customer’s desires.

To further this, they released Airbnb Plus which features homes vetted by Airbnb staff around the world to build further trust.

As you can see, service design and UX design have much in common. To learn more about design thinking and creating user-centric experiences, try our free 7-day UX design short course . And if you want to learn more about design in general, here are a few guide you’ll find helpful:

  • The ultimate UX design glossary
  • Psychology principles that will make you a better designer
  • What’s the difference between inclusive design and universal design?

How to Create a Service: Introduction to Service Design

Adam Fard

A user’s interaction with a service is entangled in a wide array of relationships and dependencies. Their field of activity, their needs, their fears, the context in which they use a particular service are but a few of the things we need to factor in. 

In order to provide your customers with a solution that is useful, thoughtful, and holistic, businesses should seek a structured approach that will take this host of factors into account. Fortunately, there’s a practice that dates back to the early '80s called service design (SD) that seems to provide an answer to this conundrum.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the benefits, principles, and components of service design and why businesses should seek to incorporate this practice into their company’s workflow.

Let’s dive right in. 

So what’s service design?

The idea of service design was coined by Lynn Shostack in 1982. Its primary purpose was to achieve a more in-depth and all-encompassing understanding of the processes behind a service and how they interact with each other, rather than leaving their management to the discretion of individual employees. As a result, SD is a responsibility of the organization as a whole. 

Jeneanne M. Rae, the co-founder of Peer Insight, once said that

[Service design is] one of those areas that is a tweener, falling between other departments in a company. It’s never one person’s responsibility, it should be the adhesive substance that holds a service together. 

One of the most important goals of this approach is to guide employees, their communication, the infrastructure, and other elements of a service into a meaningful direction. This allows businesses to improve, rethink, or design a new service from scratch. Additionally, an essential byproduct of service design is a comprehensive map of the elements that go into creating a service, which becomes a vital piece of documentation. 

Two crucial parts of the SD terminology are “front end” and “back end.” The former is the part of the service that is customer-facing—it’s what a user sees and interacts with. The latter is the facet responsible for the machinery behind what users see. An analogy for the relationship between the two is an iceberg—the front end being the visible part of it, while the back end is the huge mass that is submerged underwater, away from a person’s gaze. 

service design essay

Service design blueprints a lot like a customer journey map , but their focus revolves around the back-end side of events. 

service design essay

Service blueprint example / Source

Why is service design helpful?

The value of service design is rooted in its understanding of the user’s problem . While this almost sounds like a truism, it’s an often-overlooked side of the modern startup culture. By doing extensive research on the ins and outs of a user's environment and how these factors influence their interaction with your service, you’ll be able to ask the right questions and tackle the right challenges.

As a result, this quality of service design allows businesses to:

Optimize their offering by spotting redundancies and conflicts in a particular service;

Locate and eliminate existing and potential bottlenecks;

Ensure a well-thought-out service by providing a solid framework;

Innovate their offering by breaking down a service into its components, enabling teams to identify areas for improvement; 

How we create services

Any service encounter must take into account the interaction between the following factors:

Actors: e.g., team members who provide the service;

Props: e.g., objects used during service delivery;

Location: e.g., the environment where the service takes place;

Associates: other organizations involved in providing the service – e.g., logistics;

Processes: e.g., all of the activities, their sequence, and contingencies that go into the service;

service design essay

A service blueprint is how you document and consolidate all these factors in one place.

The principles of service design

One of the most important books that unveil the depths of service design is called “ This is Service Design Thinking .” On page 27, we can find a brief yet all-encompassing description of the principles of the practice:

Service Design is a practical approach to the creation and improvement of the offerings made by organizations. [...] It is a human-centered , collaborative , interdisciplinary , iterative approach which uses research, prototyping, and a set of easily understood activities and visualization tools to create and orchestrate experiences that meet the needs of the business, the user, and other stakeholders.

Let’s take a closer look at these principles: 

Human-centered: the framework focus should be oriented towards people (employees, customers, stakeholders, etc.). They are the ultimate actors that maintain and run the service. Their needs should be a priority;

Collaborative: service design should entail as many stakeholders to accurately represent their needs, concerns, and goals;

Iterative: you’re not going to get everything right on the first attempt. You try things and make continuous improvements.

Interdisciplinary: it involves all facets of the development of a service, not exclusively design;

Some other principles indicate that SD should also be:

Sequential: the service design map itself should outline activities in chronological order;

Real: you should minimize the impact of your assumptions by testing things in the real world;  

Holistic: the framework is designed to include as many people and other non-human factors as possible;

service design essay

When a product’s back-end processes are not on point, they will invariably result in front-end consequences like poor service, user frustration, and channel inconsistency. Service design is a vital framework that allows businesses to have a solid foundation that will assist them with creating a customer-centric and value-oriented solution. 

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Service Design 101

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July 9, 2017 2017-07-09

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In This Article:

What is a service, definition of service design , components of ‘service design’, service design vs. designing a service , benefits of service design, history of service design  , references .

Traditional economics draws a clear distinction between goods and services. Goods are tangible and consumable — pens, sunglasses, or shoes. Services are instantaneous exchanges that are intangible and do not result in ownership—medical treatment, the postal service, or public transportation. 

Today, there is no longer a clear distinction between goods and services. A continuum of goods–services exists with a plethora of combined products and services in the middle. For example, a song (an mp3 file) is a product that can be accessed via a service like Spotify or Apple Music. To the user, the difference between a product and service—owning the sound file versus streaming the song—can be close to identical while behind the scenes they are quite different.

NN/g Service Design 101: Goods-Services Continuum

As services grow in sophistication, so does the need to support them. Complex user experiences often break due to an internal organizational shortcoming — a weak link in the ecosystem. For example, when was the last time you called a support hotline, gave your personal information, only to be transferred to another agent asking you to repeat the exact information you had already provided? This pain point stems from an internal process flaw that was produced by a lack of service design. 

Most organizations are centered around products and delivery channels. Many of the organizations’ resources (time, budget, logistics) are spent on customer-facing outputs, and the internal processes (including the experience of the organization’s employees) are overlooked; service design focuses on these internal processes. 

Service design: The activity of planning and organizing a business’s resources (people, props, and processes) in order to (1) directly improve the employee’s experience, and (2) indirectly, the customer’s experience. 

Imagine a restaurant where there are a range of employees: hosts, servers, busboys, and chefs. Service design focuses on how the restaurant operates and delivers the food it promises—from sourcing and receiving ingredients, to on-boarding new chefs, to server-chef communication regarding a diner’s allergies. Each moving part plays a role in the food that arrives on the diner’s plate, even though it is not directly part of their experience. Service design can be mapped using a  service blueprint .  

NN/g Service Design 101

In user experience design multiple components must be designed: visuals, features and commands, copywriting, information architecture, and more. Not only must each component be designed correctly, but they also must be integrated to create a total user experience. Service design follows the same basic idea. There are several components, each one should be designed correctly, and all of them should be integrated.

The three main components of service design are people, props, and processes.

This component includes anyone who creates or uses the service, as well as individuals who may be indirectly affected by the service. 

Examples include: 

  • Fellow customers encountered throughout the service

This component refers to the physical or digital artifacts (including products) that are needed to perform the service successfully. 

  • Physical space:  storefront, teller window, conference room
  • Social Media
  • Digital files
  • Physical products

These are any workflows, procedures, or rituals performed by either the employee or the user throughout a service. 

  • Withdrawing money from an ATM
  • Getting an issue resolved over support
  • Interviewing a new employee 
  • Sharing a file

Returning to the restaurant example, people would be farmers growing the produce, restaurant managers, chefs, hosts, and servers. Props would include (amongst others): the kitchen, ingredients, POS software, and uniforms. Processes would include: employees clocking in, servers entering orders, cleaning dishes, and storing food.  

Frontstage vs. Backstage 

Service components are broken down into frontstage and backstage, depending on whether the customers see them or not. Think of a theater performance. The audience sees everything in front of the curtain: the actors, costumes, orchestra, and set. However, behind the curtain there is a whole ecosystem: the director, stage hands, lighting coordinators, and set designers. 

NN/g Service Design: Frontstage vs. Backstage

Though not ever seen by the audience, the backstage plays a critical part in shaping the audience’s experience. In a restaurant, what happens in the kitchen dictates what appears on your table. 

Frontstage components include: 

  • Touchpoints 

Backstage components includes:

  • Technology 
  • Infrastructures 

Service design is not simply designing a service.

  • Service design addresses how an organization gets something done— think “experience of the employee.”
  • Designing a service addresses the touchpoints that create a customer’s journey — think “experience of the user.”

As a parallel, every software application has a user interface, no matter how rudimentary. However, writing code that creates an interface as a bi-product would not be called a ‘user interface design process’. Similarly, even if the user interface were created from a deliberate design process, it would not be a product of ‘user experience design’ unless the experience of the user is taken into account.

Why do we need to care about service design and the “experience of the employee” as UX Designers? An organization’s backstage processes (how we do things internally) have as much, if not more, impact on the overall user experience as the visible points of interaction that users encounter. If a server does not successfully communicate allergies to the chef, a diner could consume food with severe consequences. If a restaurant is overcrowded, but has a systematic process for clearing tables and assigning seating, customers never have to wait or know its overcrowded in the first place.

Most organizations’ resources (time, budget, logistics) are spent on customer-facing outputs, while internal processes (including the experience of the organization’s employees) are overlooked. This disconnect triggers a common, widespread sentiment that one hand does not know what the other is doing.

Service design bridges such organizational gaps by: 

  • Surfacing conflicts:  Business models and service-design models are often in conflict because business models do not always align with the service that the organization delivers. Service design triggers thought and provides context around systems that need to be in place in order to adequately provide a service throughout the entire product’s life cycle (and in some cases, beyond).
  • Fostering hard conversations:  Focused discussion on procedures and policies exposes weak links and misalignment and enables organizations to devise collaborative and crossfunctional solutions.
  • Reducing redundancies with a bird’s-eye view:  Mapping out the whole cycle of internal service processes gives companies a bird’s-eye view of their service ecosystem, whether within one large offering, or across multiple subofferings. This process helps pinpoint where duplicate efforts occur, likely causing employee frustration and wasted resources. Eliminating redundancies conserves energy, improves employees’ efficiency, and reduces costs.
  • Forming relationships:  Service design helps align internal service provisions like roles, backstage actors, processes, and workflows to the equivalent frontstage personnel. To come back to our initial example, with service design, information provided to one agent should be available to all other agents who interact with the same customer. 

The term “service design” was coined by Lynn Shostack in 1982. Shostack proposed that organizations develop an understanding of how behind-the-scenes processes interact with each other because “leaving services to individual talent and managing the pieces rather than the whole make a company more vulnerable and creates a service that reacts slowly to market needs and opportunities.” 

This is still true today, but the responsibility does not fall on only operations and management, as it did twenty years ago. Practicing service design is the responsibility of the organization as a whole.

Kalbach, Jim. “Mapping Experiences.” O’Reilly Media, Inc, 2016.

Shostack, Lynn. “Designing Services that Deliver.” Harvard Business Review, 1984.

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Product and Service Design and Innovation from the Marketing Essay

Innovation, product and service design, organisational theories, works cited.

Services can be described as variable, intangible and deliverable over space and time. Words alone can be used to refer to them, and hence resulting in the immense over simplification and incompleteness. The service concept can be interpreted and specified by the use of a variety if biases.

Essentially, the new product early stages of development which is commonly known as the fuzzy front end are known to be problematic for service innovation (Trott 33). This is because they characteristically involve decision-making and imprecise processes. Marketing involves presentation of relationships, activities and interdependence of the process of service in a precise and objective manner.

General systems theory

General systems theory (GST) is among the widely acceptable intellectual perspectives of organization theories. It has been shaped by many proponents such as: Ashby, 1952; Boulding, 1956; Miller, 1978; and Bertalanffy, 1972. This theory originates from the holistic Aristotelian worldview that the sum of its parts is less than the whole.

The major goal of GST is to bring forth generalized phenomena principles as well as deliberate disciplines whose objective is to enhance the unity of factors in an organization.

As social systems, organizations are qualitatively and quantitatively different from living cells or other concrete physical systems. The ultimate goal of the multilevel perspective is not to come up with principles that are general to other types of systems.

The major goal of the multilevel perspective in organizational theory is to identify principles that bring forth a more integrated understanding of phenomena that unfold across levels in organizations.

Formative theory development

Early efforts to conceptualize and study organizations formed their bases in the Interactionists concept, and focused on coming up with an organizational climate (Lewin 87). Interactionists’ perspective view behavior as a product of both the individual and situation, the combined effect of both is broadly felt. In this case, behavior is seen a combined product of individual-difference and contextual effects.

The standpoint of interactionists has a considerable implication on organizational study. It is significantly shaping research on climate (Lewin, Lippitt, and White 54). It continues to add impact through the research on person’s organizational fit.

With the development of organizational psychology as a separate sub discipline in the 1950s, organizational climate emerged as a pivot element for understanding organizational effectiveness. Researchers have described climate as a representation of the organizational stimuli or what a number referred to as environmental characteristics, expected to affect individual behavior and attitudes.

Theoretical framework

The emergent process is largely affected by the nature of social psychological interactions and can thus vary depending on the phenomenon. This calls for the use of the alternative theoretical framework. An organization often has a direct effect on the social behavior of its individual employees. For instance, the organization culture dictates the accepted patterns of employee interaction with one another and work behavior.

This could be how officially employees address one another, or the extent to which employees interrogate their seniors’ directives. The concept of organizational culture if particularly broad and inclusive, serves to summarize the common behaviors, traits and organizational members values.

Characteristics of design process

Organizations that proved to be successful in providing new services normally try to maintain their service development processes stable. A well designed service that is pleasing to experience can provide the firm with a key point of differentiation from competitors.

A smoothly delivered service with a positive outcome is more likely to result in favorable service quality and brand image evaluations, which both have influence on customer loyalty. Recurrent service quality problems are often the result of the poor design.

As the development of a new service process nears design implementation, the original idea that relates to the service should be enhanced to appear as a more developed idea, to the prospective employees and customers. Responsibilities and roles of service providers and customers are also spelt out.

A major success leader at this juncture is the ability to observe service process and describe them such that the customers, managers and employees can have a good understanding of the services and their delivery of co-creation roles.

Importance of intellectual property

Most people in society create and use intellectual property. In essence, international as well as national rules which are referred to as intellectual rights of property are the means of protections being referred to as intellectual property. New product development involves provision of financing and incentives for creation and innovation, which goes a long way to improve economic, cultural and social status.

Protection for intellectual property also runs the production and distribution of a variety of services and goods as well as knowledge. Patenting ideas, design registration, and trade marking add value for consumers and thus offer an assurance of quality and source.

Such results in the economic growth as innovation, technical development and cultural diversity are encouraged as a part of a wider policy framework. When appropriately protected, intellectual property rights can also be the key tools for the alleviation of poverty through trade.

Lewin, Kurt, Ronald, Lippitt, and Race White. ‘‘Patterns of aggressive behavior in experimentally created social climates.” Journal of Social Psychology 10 (1939): 271- 299. Print.

Lewin, Kurt. Field theory in the social sciences . New York: HarperCollins, 1951. Print.

Trott, Paul. Innovation management and new product development. Harlow: Prentice Hall, 2005. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2023, December 8). Product and Service Design and Innovation from the Marketing. https://ivypanda.com/essays/product-and-service-design-and-innovation-from-the-marketing-essay/

"Product and Service Design and Innovation from the Marketing." IvyPanda , 8 Dec. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/product-and-service-design-and-innovation-from-the-marketing-essay/.

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IvyPanda . 2023. "Product and Service Design and Innovation from the Marketing." December 8, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/product-and-service-design-and-innovation-from-the-marketing-essay/.

1. IvyPanda . "Product and Service Design and Innovation from the Marketing." December 8, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/product-and-service-design-and-innovation-from-the-marketing-essay/.

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IvyPanda . "Product and Service Design and Innovation from the Marketing." December 8, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/product-and-service-design-and-innovation-from-the-marketing-essay/.

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Service Design Innovation and why it is gaining importance

Service Design Innovation has become increasingly popular in the last decade to continuously improve existing service offerings and create completely new offerings. Read this article to find out exactly what it means and why it is becoming increasingly important.

Service Design Innovation is the creative application of design thinking methods to the development of services.

What is Service Design Innovation?

Service design innovation is the creative application of design thinking methods to the development of services. Just as products are designed in product design, concepts for services are developed in service design. Either existing services can be improved or completely new services can be created.

  • Customer-centric: Service Design Innovation focuses on understanding customer needs to make  service user-friendly, competitive and relevant to customers. The focus is on the customer experience.
  • Holistic: Service design is based on the assumption that the entire organization is involved in the process. The focus is therefore not only on the touchpoint visible to the customer, but also on internal company processes and employees that are important for the functioning of the service. 
  • Interdisciplinary: Customers and employees work together in interdisciplinary, heterogeneous teams. The team gets deeply involved with the problem and experiments with new solutions.

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Service Design designs services in the interest of the customer and at the same time takes entrepreneurial interests into account by involving its own employees. This makes it possible to offer innovative services of the highest quality, for which the customer is prepared to dig deep into his pocket.

Service design is an iterative process

Service Design Innovation is based on an iterative design thinking process in which employees from different departments work together with customers at the forefront. The process includes a variety of methods:

  • Research: Qualitative and quantitative research methods to understand employees and customers in the context of the service.
  • Ideation: Creative and human-centered idea-finding methods.
  • Prototyping: Methods for service prototyping to test new ideas quickly and cost-effectively before investing a lot of money in their development.

A service design innovation process begins with research to find out what type of service potential customers would prefer. Based on this research, interdisciplinary teams create ideas and design the first service design. Prototypes are built and tested for usability, functionality, cost, market response, etc. Only if these tests are positive will the new service be implemented.

Why is service design innovation gaining in importance?

Service Design Innovation can be used to design services that address previously unmet customer needs and open up new business areas, sustainably differentiate the company from the competition and increase customer loyalty.

1. Customers want inspiring service experiences

Emotional customer experiences are becoming increasingly important. Customers' expectations of the customer experience of services are increasing due to the growing possibilities and fast-moving product and service cycles. A Gartner study from 2014 shows that 89 percent of the companies surveyed recognize the importance of customer experience as a competitive advantage. However, Bain & Company revealed an "80/8 Delivery Gap" in the study " Closing the Delivery Gap ": They found that 80 percent of the companies surveyed believe that they deliver an above-average customer experience, while only 8 percent of the customers share this view. There is therefore still scope in many companies to improve and innovate services.

bain

2. Differentiation from the competition

Today, products are often interchangeable. The markets are saturated. Defining and establishing unique selling propositions is therefore more important than ever for companies today. Service Design Innovation helps companies to develop outstanding service offerings, to sustainably differentiate themselves from the competition and to open up new customer groups. To illustrate this with an example: If two shops are next to each other and both offer the same products at the same price, the quality of the service is the reason why customers prefer one of the two shops.

3. Increased customer loyalty

Customer retention is highly dependent on the perceived experience of a service - including availability, accessibility and service level. Service is the only consistent loyalty driver in all industries. Good service will bring customers back and strengthen loyalty to a brand, while poor service will drive customers to the competition. Service Design tries to understand where companies have customer service problems and how services can make a positive difference for customers and companies, and then design solutions that add real value.

Conclusion: Service Design Innovation

People want to be inspired and expect a smooth process when they use the services of a company. In order to create customer-oriented service design innovations and get the right feeling for the market, it is not enough to work together with creative agencies and brand ambassadors. Companies must know the customer perspective in their service offerings and enable their employees to work efficiently. Service design concepts can help companies achieve this goal.

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Daniel Zapfl

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