Design: Service Design

This is a sample chapter from the new Rosenfeld Media book Service Design: From Insights to Implementation. ©2013 Rosenfeld Media.

If we are looking to improve an existing service, our blueprint has given us a pretty good overview of the component parts of the service and how these are experienced over time. If we are developing something entirely new, we may have less detail but some idea of people’s needs and what some of the key touchpoints might be. Before going further into the details and committing significant resources to the project, we need to develop the service proposition. Read More

If you’re like me, you have a mini-library of those user experience books that are most meaningful to you. No, not the ones hidden away on your eReader, reminding you of their presence only when you see their titles on the screen. Rather, I’m referring to those tangible books, sitting on your office bookshelf or on a side table at home. Perhaps some remind you of the time when you first entered the field of user experience, wanting to absorb everything about the topic. Or maybe everyone raves about a book as being seminal to the user experience discipline, but you keep the fact that you’ve never read it a secret. Regardless of why you have them, where they live, or how much you recall of their content, these books are important to who you are as a UX professional.

I’ve recently finished reading what is now the latest addition to my own professional mini-library: This Is Service Design Thinking, by Marc Stickdorn, Jakob Schneider, and numerous collaborators and co-authors. This book is likely to become the quintessential service design textbook for students, educators, and professionals alike. In this column, I’ll share highlights from the book, along with some of my own interpretations, and tell you why you should add this book to your own personal collection. Read More

The focus of many services is some primary object: your car in for maintenance at a garage, your clothes at a dry cleaners, your home being cleaned by a maid service. But for some services, the object of focus is you: your hair being cut at a salon or barber shop, your back being adjusted by your chiropractor. Your whole body can even be the focus of a service—for example, transportation, restaurant, or hotel services.

The service design challenges when the human body is the object of service are significant. One particular challenge is the diversity of customers’ contexts and mindsets. The service goal for an airline is getting you to your destination. But as a designer, you cannot assume that the reason someone is traveling is for a vacation at Disney World, a boring business meeting, or a funeral for a close friend. In healthcare and, specifically, for hospitals, the body is the service focus. Although the service goal of a hospital visit is improved health, the reasons for needing healthcare are diverse—ranging from getting treatment for a case of flu to an operation to correct a heart defect to palliative cancer support—each with an infinite number of accompanying patient and caregiver contexts and mindsets. Read More