Why UX Professionals Should Care About Service Design

Service Design Primer

Service design is the activity of planning and orchestrating all tangible and intangible elements of a service—including people, processes, time, communications, objects, technology, infrastructure, and space—to create an effective service experience.

I can best illustrate service design through an example: Imagine a service experience you might have eating out. Your experience of and expectations for eating out vary depending on whether you’re buying food from a food truck, a fast-food chain, or a high-end restaurant. In this example service scenario, let’s assume you’re eating at a basic, local sandwich shop.

You enter the shop, notice a menu on the wall, and a customer who is currently ordering, then approach an employee who is waiting behind the counter, at the register. A dialogue something like this might take place between you and that employee:

Employee: “Hello, what can I get for you?”

You: “I’ll have the turkey club on whole wheat.”

Employee, who enters the information into a computer system, then asks: “What cheese would you like?”

You: “None, thanks.”

Employee: “Can I get you anything else?”

You: “A Coke.”

Employee, who again enters the information into a computer system, then says: “Okay, thanks. Your total is $6.50.”

You, handing the employee a $10 bill: “Here it is.”

Employee, gives you your change and says: “Your order number is 12, and we’ll call you when your food is ready.”

You sit down at a table and wait for them to call your number. When they do, you approach the counter again and take your tray with the sandwich and soda you ordered from a different employee.

The Sandwich Service: Tangible and Intangible Elements

Because service design is the effective orchestration of the various elements of a service, it’s critical to have an understanding of what those elements are, including those that are not readily apparent.

First, people are involved in a service. In our example scenario, the people who are most obviously involved are you, the customer, and the employees you interacted with—who are front-office employees. This co-created exchange, the quasi-scripted interaction between the customer and employees, helps catalyze the sandwich service. However, in the design of services, it is also important to consider the other customers who are in a shop, because they can impact the experience of those around them. For example, an indecisive customer who constantly rethinks his or her order delays the service of other customers and likely frustrates them. This kind of frustration is a less tangible element of the service, but it is important to manage it.

Less obviously, there are back-office employees—for example, those who prepare the food or stock the inventory. They are also important to delivering a successful service experience. After all, without them, you don’t get your lunch. If its designer doesn’t consider the back-office employees in the sandwich shop service design, they might have communication issues with the front-office employees—and you still might not get your lunch—or it might be wrong.

Second, processes are involved. The verbal exchange that occurs between the customer and the employee taking the order has a flow and linearity to it. Part of the process also exists in the computer system the employee uses to record the customer’s order, handle the monetary exchange, and communicate the order to the back-office employees who need to complete the order.

Third, the space of the sandwich shop is part of the service experience. Knowing where the menu should be, where people queue to place their order, where they can wait, and where they can retrieve their order are all spatial considerations a service designer needs to plan to create an effective service experience.

Some additional elements of this sandwich shop service include the following:

• objects—the menu, receipt, order number, and, of course, the product itself—the food
• time—waiting to place an order, then waiting for the order to be served
• technology—the computer the employee used to take the order and communicate it to the employees in the kitchen

What’s so intriguing about all of these design elements is the mix of intangibility and tangibility they encompass. The overt elements of a service we can observe directly are often the easiest to intuit. However, the intangible elements of a service—the processes, time, emotions, and expectations—are equally important design considerations. Only when all of these elements come together in concert, through service design’s orchestration of these elements, is a service effective and successful.

Why Care?

If you conduct a search for service economy on the Web, you’ll find a myriad of resources that paint a picture of a world that is becoming much more heavily reliant on services. New services are continually being designed—for reasons that range from cost-effectiveness to sustainability—and existing services continue to evolve. Service design is critical, because if the elements of a service experience are not aligned, the service can fail. Services that fail to deliver what they promise won’t survive.

Service design presents interesting synergies and opportunities for user experience, because of its implicit, holistic, contextual, and inclusive nature and its potential impact. We need to look at design solutions through a more service-oriented lens: thinking broadly, contextually, and holistically. We need to consider the intangible, softer, and less overt aspects of services, just as we consider the functional, obvious, and tangible aspects of the experiences we design.

We need to tweak our design methods and forms of documentation to account for this shift in perspective. We likely need to take a more iterative and collaborative approach, exposing the insights we’ve garnered to the various people who are involved in a service. And perhaps most difficult, we need to quickly shift from user-centered thinking to systems thinking. In service design, no single element or entity is at the center, although the outcome—a successful service experience—is decidedly humanistic.

I’ve just scratched the surface here, but I look forward to exploring these concepts in more detail in upcoming columns.