This Is Service Design Methods

Service design? Other people might talk about design thinking, service design thinking, new marketing, UX design, holistic UX, CX design, human-centered design, customer experience management, experience design, touchpoint management, lean UX, new service development, new product development, customer journey work, or innovation, to name a few. Others will notice similarities with lean startup and agile development methodologies. We don’t care what you call it – what matters is what you do and how you do it.

• “Service design helps to innovate (create new) or improve (existing) services to make them more useful, usable, desirable for clients and efficient as well as effective for organizations. It is a new holistic, multidisciplinary, integrative field.”
• “Service design choreographs processes, technologies and interactions within complex systems in order to co-create value for relevant stakeholders.”
• “When you have 2 coffee shops next to each other, selling the same coffee at the same price, service design makes you walk into one and not the other, come back often and tell your friends about it.”

Iteration – working in a series of repeating, deepening, explorative loops – is absolutely central to the SD process, so practitioners aim for short cycles at the outset, with early user feedback, early prototyping, and quick-and-dirty experiments. As the process continues, the iteration may slow down but it never goes away, as prototypes iterate into pilots and pilots iterate into implementation.

Everyone likes to focus on processes and toolsets because they can see, touch, and use them. But without the service design mindset, people go right back to the same internally focused solutions.

Around $2 billion was spent each year in the United States on the planning and design of services, but only $70 million (about 3.5%) of this was spent on “service design.” The other 96.5% of the work was done by people who did not consider themselves service designers. (Adaptive Path)