Service Design
is the activity of
planning and organizing people,
infrastructure, communication
and material components of
a service, in order to improve its
quality, the interaction between
service provider and customers
and the customer's experience.
For example, a restaurant may
choose to have a Service Design
agency change the way its menu
is set out, or change the layout
of the restaurant to improve the
customer's
experience. Customers can
mean paying patrons, but also
can be within an organization, so
long as they are the direct
recipients of a service e.g. an
organization implements a new
payroll interface for its staff -
therefore the staff are effectively
'customers' of the payroll
interface. To do this, Service
Design methodologies are used
to plan and organize people,
infrastructure, communication
and material components used
in a service. The increasing
importance and size of the
service sector, both in terms of
people employed and economic
importance, requires services to
be accurately designed in order
for service providers to remain
competitive and to continue to
attract customers.
The design (or redesign) of a
service may involve re-
organizing the activities
performed by the service
provider (Back office), e.g. how
letters from customers are
processed internally; and/or the
redesign of interfaces and
interactions that customers use
to contact the service provider
(Front office) e.g. website, in
person, telephone, blog etc.
Service Design is increasingly
used by blue-chip private and
public sector organizations as a
means of creating the step
change their customers require
in terms of service experience.
Service Design agencies apply
design tools, techniques and
thinking to service challenges,
either to improve existing
services or to create new ones.
Typically, the work is based
upon deep insights gathered by
shadowing service users. This
technique produces more
accurate insights into the
usability of a service than
traditional remote surveys
because what people say they
do is frequently different to what
they actually do. Concepts and
ideas generated are captured in
sketches or in service
prototypes. The strong visual
element, combined with the
opportunity to test and rapidly
change services and interfaces,
delivers real value in today's
competitive markets.
Service design is the
specification and construction of
technologically networked social
practices that deliver valuable
capacities for action to a
particular customer. Capacity for
action in Information Services
has the basic form of assertions.
In Health Services, it has the
basic form of diagnostic
assessments and prescriptions
(commands). In Educational
Services, it has the form of a
promise to produce a new
capacity for the customer to
make new promises. In a
fundamental way, services are
unambiguously tangible.
Companies such as eBay, or
collectives such as Wikipedia or
Sourceforge are rich and
sophisticated combinations of
basic linguistic deliverables that
expand customers' capacities to
act and produce value for
themselves and for others. In an
abstract sense, services are
networked intelligence. Service
design can be both tangible and
intangible. It can involve artifacts
and other things including
communication, environment
and behaviours. Several authors
(Eiglier 1977; Normann 2000;
Morelli 2002), though,
emphasize that, unlike products,
which are created and “exist”
before being purchased and
used, service come to existence
at the same moment they are
being provided and used. While
a designer can prescribe the
exact configuration of a product,
s/he cannot prescribe in the
same way the result of the
interaction between customers
and service providers, nor can
s/he prescribe the form and
characteristics of any emotional
value produced by the service.
Consequently, service design is
an activity that suggests
behavioural patterns or “scripts”
to the actors interacting in the
service, leaving a higher level of
freedom to the customers’
behaviour.
Together with the most
traditional methods used for
product design, service design
requires methods and tools to
control new elements of the
design process, such as the time
and the interaction between
actors. An overview of the
methodologies for designing
services is proposed by (Morelli
2006), who proposes three main
directions:
• Identification of the actors
involved in the definition of the
service, using appropriate
analytical tools
• Definition of possible service
scenarios, verifying use cases,
sequences of actions and actors’
role, in order to define the
requirements for the service and
its logical and organisational
structure
• Representation of the service,
using techniques that illustrate
all the components of the
service, including physical
elements, interactions, logical
links and temporal sequences
Analytical tools refer
to anthropology, social
studies, ethnography and social
construction of technology.
Appropriate elaborations of
those tools have been proposed
with video-ethnography (Buur,
Binder et al. 2000; Buur and
Soendergaard 2000), and
different observation techniques
to gather data about users’
behaviour (Kumar 2004) . Other
methods, such as cultural
probes, have been developed in
the design discipline, which aim
at capturing information on
customers in their context of use
(Gaver, Dunne et al. 1999;
Lindsay and Rocchi 2003).
Design tools aim at producing
a blueprint of the service, which
describes the nature and
characteristics of the interaction
in the service. Design tools
include service scenarios (which
describe the interaction) and use
cases (which illustrate the detail
of time sequences in a service
encounter). Both techniques are
already used in
in software and systems
engineering to capture
the functional requirements of a
system. However, when used in
service design, they have been
adequately adapted, in order to
include more information,
concerning material and
immaterial component of a
service, time sequences and
physical flows (Morelli 2006).
Other techniques, such
as IDEF0 , just in time and Total
quality management are used to
produce functional models of the
service system and to control its
processes. Such tools, though,
may prove too rigid to describe
services in which customers are
supposed to have an active role,
because of the high level of
uncertainty related to the
customer’s behaviour.
Representation techniques are
critical in service design,
because of the need to
communicate the inner
mechanisms of services to
actors, such as final users,
which are not supposed to be
familiar with any technical
language or representation
technique. For this reason
storyboards are often used to
illustrate the interaction on
the front office. Other
representation techniques have
been used to illustrate the
system of interactions or a
“platform” in a service (Manzini,
Collina et al. 2004). Recently,
video sketching and video
prototypes have also been used
to produce quick and effective
tools to stimulate customers’
participation in the development
of the service and their
involvement in the value
production process.
[edit]Service Design in Marketing
and Management
The active participation of
customers and other actors
traditionally considered as
external to a firm’s boundary
emphasize the need for a proper
design activity that organizes the
interaction among those actors,
thus planning sequences of
events, material and information
flows. Furthermore the
involvement of “non technical “
actors, such as customers,
implies that the activity of service
design be analyzed not only
from a functional perspective
(with the aim of optimizing flows
and resources and reducing time
of operations) but also from the
emotional perspective (creating
meaningful events, motivating
customers, communicating the
service). Because of those
considerations service design
became the focus of studies and
research in the discipline
of design, initially as part of the
activities related to web
design and Interaction Design,
and later as an autonomous
professional and research area.
Service Design in the Public
Sector
In the last few years, the public
sector has expanded, with new
investments in hospitals,
schools, cultural institutions and
security infrastructures. The
number of jobs in public services
has also grown. Such growth is
also associated to a large and
rapid social change, that is
calling for a re-organization of
the welfare state. In this context
governments are explicitely
considering service design for
the re-organisation of public
services. Some recent
documents of the British
government (United Kingdom
Prime Minister Strategy Unit
2007; Public Administration
Select Committee, 2008) explore
the concept of "user-driven
public services" and scenarios of
highly personalized public
services. The documents
propose a new view on the role
of service providers and users in
the development of new and
highly customised public
services. This view has been
explored by recent works of the
and in the initiative in UK. In
those works and in of redesign
of public services, the approach
has been based on
users’ participation and active
interaction with the service. The
new approach has been
illustrated by several
authors. The New Zealand
Inland Revenue Department has
a dedicated Design & Project
Management group, with
separate streams focusing on
Government, Customers and
Specialist Policy Design.
Specific design methodologies
have been adopted and are
being continuously developed.