Service Design

Service design is all about making the service you deliver useful, usable, efficient, effective and desirable.

It’s not intangible or about the feeling given to customers or users. It’s about actual things, which service designers might call touchpoints. commissioning a service designer they might:

Help identify problem areas and generate ideas for improvement

Redesign  products to improve the way they allow customers to interact while they use a service.

Design spaces so that they deliver a service more efficiently.

Create printed material, websites, uniforms, adverts and the branded things that allow  to communicate what service is all about.

So a service design project is a strategic project which uses design techniques like thorough client research, collaborative ideas generation and early stage prototyping and testing to deliver services that are built around the real needs of clients, that simplify complex problems and deliver solutions that are future focused and cost conscious.

Three quarters of the UK economy is due to services and 80% of employment is service related. While half of the UK’s manufacturers think design is crucial to competitiveness, The service industry, whether that’s financial services, retailers or public services, are less convinced. Only one in 10 services businesses thinks design can set them apart and make them more competitive.

That means the UK’s £1trillion service economy and its service business and public services are missing many opportunities to distinguish themselves from competitors by improving their offering, better communicating what they do or providing innovative new services.

The importance of services to economy keeps growing and as our expectations of value for money from our public services keep rising, designers have started working with service providers to help them make their services better. This approach is often called service design, but it’s maybe easier to start thinking about why it is that designers can help services.

• Designers have the tools and experience to understand what users want and need
• Their work combines technology, function and aesthetics, it’s not just about the surface level
• They are issues-centred, and work on anything from saving the planet to making business opportunities

Different businesses to create ideas for service improvements, engage different stakeholders, understand user perspectives then create a framework for service innovation.

Service design techniques

If you choose to work with a service designer there are some common tools and techniques they will use while developing your service. They will:

• Observe the situation. They might use ethnographic research techniques and tools like digital cameras and video recorders to capture insights
• Involve users. Games, brainstorming or spending a day in their life will help
• Create a blueprint of your service so you can see where everyone who delivers it, how they work and your customers fit into what you deliver. Find out more about service blueprinting
• Analyse the quality of your service. User feedback will be important here, but designers aren’t just about emotional responses. They might consider the cost effectiveness of the way you deliver your service or look for opportunites your business could take advantage of
• Develop and map out ideas in a way that is easy to understand even if you aren’t a designer. This will help you evaluate the ideas
• Prototype a new service. By acting out a service or getting staff members to try out use newly designed tools on each other designers can prototype new service delivery methods like an interactive map or questionnaire and test them early when failure won’t cost a lot
• Create a toolkit at the end of the ideas stage to help you service providers procure what you need to make the service improvements the designers have created and tested

Bridging Designers and Managers

As a group, designers possess a powerful set of talents, beliefs and aptitudes that are often lacking in today’s average corporate culture, but that is uniquely suited to effecting change for more responsible, humane, and sustainable business practices.

Designers are innovators, problem solvers, and implementors. They are empathetic, focused, and keen observers of environment, and they put challenges and assignments into a context that allows for effective, appropriate holistic solutions. However, they typically eschew corporate politics, bureaucracy, and territoriality.

Following are few insights to bridge the gap between designer and management executives.

• A designer applies knowledge about physical, cognitive, social, and cultural human factors to communication planning and the creation of an appropriate form that interprets, informs, instructs or persuades.
• Designers successfully aspired for open-office architecture—and the accompanying collaborative ethic it encourages. The key to this is establishing clear positive open communications , and then maintaining full mutual understanding at all times, irrespective of how much freedom is delegated.
• To work with other organizations (competitor’s) to share effective proofing and regulatory compliance practices—an important process that benefited consumers.
• Designers empowered to shape the focus of major strategic initiatives, as needed to uphold sustainable and socially responsible standards.
• Designers shall be capable enough to lead the major product development team as product directors.
• A designer aspires to ensure the highest level of strategic design, ensuring a higher return on investment and shall demonstrate the integrity and honor.
• Need a paradigm shift in the Role of Designers in Strategic management.
• The principles and practices of design are often unfamiliar to managers trained or experienced in other domains. Incorporate design thinking to managers. Design thinking is the way designers think, the mind processes they use to design objects, services, or systems, as distinct from the result of elegant and useful products.
• Design thinking results from the nature of design work, a project based workflow around wicked problems.

Feature	Managers	Designers
Flow of work	Mostly Ongoing tasksPermanent assignments	ProjectsDefined terms
Style of Work	Defined roles,Wait until it is right	Collaborative, Iterative
Mode of Thinking	Deductive, Inductive	Deductive,Inductive,Abductive
Status of source	massive budgets, large staff	Solve wicked problems
Attitude	Limited by budgets, constraints are unwanted.	can do attitude
Constraints	Constraints are  hindrances	Constraints are challenges

In the early days of industrial design, the work was primarily focused upon physical products. Today, however, designers work on organizational networks structure and social problems, on interaction, service, and experience design. Many problems involve complex social, behavioral, and political issues. As a result, designers have transformed into applied behavioral scientists, but their capability on social and behavior discipline has to be more intense. Design schools do not focus on complex issues interlocking complexities of human and social behavior and about the behavioral sciences. Many designers are ignorant of the complexity of social and organizational problems.

• Designers often have  inadequate knowledge in social and behavioral sciences.
• In addition, designers are often ignorant of the biases that can be introduced into experimental designs and the dangers of in-appropriate generalization.
• Designers are practitioners, which mean they are not trying to extend the knowledge base of science but instead, to apply the knowledge.
• Design forms part of Architecture / Design / Anthropology (A/D/A) paradigm,where as management forms part of Mathematics / Economics / Psychology (M/E/P) management paradigm.
• Design education has to be enhanced in the schools of management education.
• Vital need exists is for new kind of designers T shaped individuals,  who can work across disciplines, who understand society, business, and technology and the appropriate means of validation. Service design, interaction design, and experience design require knowledge of the social sciences, stories, back-stage operations, and interactions.