6 things I learned as a service designer
I recently finished my Masters's program in Service Design at the University of Arts London and here are some things I have learned about service design.
1. Explaining what service design is
Coming from a digital product world, I always found it difficult to define a service as clients look for tangible outcomes and service design focuses on creating value and impact. Services have products in their cycle but the product is not the centerpiece. Service design for me is about understanding a system, and building connections between multiple smaller services to fill gaps and bring efficiency to processes. It is rooted in design thinking and adapts a human-centered approach to service improvements. Service design helps organisations gain a proper end-to-end understanding of their services, enabling holistic and meaningful improvements.
In short -
Service designers think about Everything. Not just What’s happening on the screen.
2. Taking a systemic lens
Services are a combination of process, people, data, and technology. It is essential to understand all of these dimensions to find bottlenecks. I usually start building a systems map during the discovery phase, with every data point the map gets bigger and I started to draw links, highlight patterns, and most importantly the people that were involved in the system. This exercise went on throughout the different stages of design thinking and worked as an important artifact while showing the findings to the client as it visually displayed pain areas in the existing process.
3. Think beyond digital interfaces
While working as a Ux designer, I often take an outcome-driven approach to problem-solving. While I confined myself to digital interfaces and prioritising the end customer needs, service design encouraged me to look at all the actors while drawing journeys It helped me leverage the data and tech to tie some existing services into one big service instead of creating from scratch and re-inventing the wheel. This approach helped in making processes efficient, and solutions feasible through the aid of some digital products wherever needed.
4. Every actor is important
A service consists of multiple actors from the users to businesses to supporting actors like the community and the environment. While designing, it is important to validate the pain areas across all actors and gain their perspective in order to create solutions that add value across the system and not just the users. Artifacts like ecosystem maps help see actors beyond the end users, it highlights the key player that runs a service and brings out some invisible actors who may not be directly involved in the workings of a service but still get impacted. Similarly. impact maps help in demonstrating the value the service/product created across these actors and how the solution can bring more minor changes in the wider audience.
5. Increase the maturity of service design
Large organisations usually lack the vision of thinking processes and rely more on thinking solutions. We as service designers need to assess that maturity and build upon it by using tools like stakeholder maps, blueprints, and service prototypes to equip them with design thinking tools and motivate problem-solving behaviour. This can be done by creating maturity assessment frameworks and defining lenses like product, people, process, and technology assessing where the organisation is and what steps to take to increase the maturity level.
6. Artifacts trigger discussions
Service design comes with tools like service blueprints that map the service journey of the user (frontstage) parallel to the processes that happen backstage and that are not visible to the end users. Such artifacts show the bigger picture while setting a stage for discussions and thoughts at an organisation level. It helps see problems at the root level and also identifies some existing initiatives that may help improve if connected with other services. While service design processes and solutions are intangible, artifacts act as a medium to communicate the unknowns bringing a structure to the thinking.
So, Why bother with service design?
I think so, for two reasons.
- Because service design encompasses product-centric thinking. It can deliver value beyond user and/or business needs.
2. Most importantly, service design provides a framework to tackle systemic problems that have implications across societal practices
I hope this write-up helped you broaden your thinking beyond products and accommodate a “think service” attitude.
