Service design is the activity of planning and arranging people, infrastructure, communication, and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its users. Service design may function as a way to inform users of changes to an existing service or create a new service entirely.
The purpose of service design methodologies is to establish the most effective practices for designing services, according to both the needs of users and the competencies and capabilities of service providers. Service design is successful when the service is user-friendly and relevant to the users, and is also sustainable and competitive for the service provider. For this purpose, service design uses methods and tools derived from different disciplines, ranging from ethnography and information science to management science and interaction design.
Service design concepts and ideas are typically portrayed visually using different representation techniques according to the culture, skill, and level of understanding of the stakeholders involved in the service processes. As emerging technologies associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution have developed, the significance of service design has increased, as it is believed to facilitate a more feasible productization of these new technologies into the market.
Definition Service design practice is the specification and construction of processes which deliver valuable capacities for action to a particular user. Service design practice can be both tangible and intangible, and can involve artifacts or other elements such as communication, environment and behavior. Several of the authors of service design theory, including Pierre Eiglier, Richard Normann, and Nicola Morelli, have proposed that services come into existence at the moment they are both provided and used. While a designer can prescribe the exact configuration of a product, they cannot prescribe the result of the interaction between users and service providers in the same way, nor can they prescribe the form and characteristics of any emotional value produced by the service.
Consequently, service design is an activity that, among other things, suggests behavioral patterns or "scripts" for the actors interacting in the service. Understanding how these patterns connect and support each other are important aspects of the character of design and service. This allows greater user freedom and makes the provider more adaptable to the users' needs.
Scope and characteristics Service design is the process of creating and improving services to meet the needs and expectations of customers.
Service design has many diverse definitions as it is ever-evolving in nature.
Service design involves creating a service concept that defines the customer's experience, as well as the physical, human, and technological resources required to deliver the service. It focuses on the experience, including customer interactions, service delivery, and support processes.
History
Early service design and theory
Early contributions to service design were made by G. Lynn Shostack, a bank and marketing manager and consultant, in the form of written articles and books. The activity of designing a service was considered to be part of the domain of marketing and management disciplines in the early years. For instance, in 1982, Shostack proposed the integration of the design of material components (products) and immaterial components (services). This design process, according to Shostack, can be documented and codified using a service blueprint to map the sequence of events in a service and its essential functions in an objective and explicit manner. A service blueprint is an extension of a user journey map, and this document specifies all the interactions a user has with an organization throughout their user life cycle.
Servicescape is a model developed by B. H. Booms and Mary Jo Bitner to focus upon the impact of the physical environment in which a service process takes place and to explain the actions of people within the service environment, with a view to designing environments which accomplish organizational goals in terms of achieving desired responses.
Timeline In 1988, service design was first introduced by Vandermerwe and Rada, and since then, it has been debated within multiple research fields. In 2004, the Service Design Network was launched by Köln International School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, Linköpings Universitet, Politecnico di Milano, and Domus Academy in order to create an international network for service design academics and professionals.
In 2001, Livework, the first service design and innovation consultancy, opened for business in London. In 2003, Engine, initially founded in 2000 in London as an ideation company, positioned themselves as a service design consultancy.
Principles
The Five Service Design Principles The article "Service design: a critical examination and future research directions in servitization literature" by Cardoso et al. (2024) proposes five service design pillars:
User-centered: Services should be experienced through the customer's eyes. Co-creative: All stakeholders should be included in the service design process. Sequencing: The service should be visualized as a sequence of interrelated actions. Evidencing: Intangible services should be visualized in terms of physical artifacts. Holistic: The entire environment of a service should be considered.
Descriptions of principles
User-centered In the 2011 book, This is Service Design Thinking: Basics, Tools, Cases, the first principle is "user-centered." User refers to any user of the service system, including customers and employees. Thus, the authors revised user-centered to human-centered in their 2018 book, This is Service Design Doing, to clarify that human includes service providers, customers, and all other relevant stakeholders. For instance, in the retail industry, service design must consider not only the customer experience, but also the interests of all relevant people.
Co-Creative The second principle, "co-creative," outlines how all stakeholders should be integrating resources to deliver value in services. It also combines two sub-principles, "collaborative" and "iterative," that derive from the principle "co-creative" in This is Service Design Thinking. The service exists with the participation of users, and is created by a group of people from different backgrounds. In most cases, people tend to focus only on the meaning of collaborative, stressing the co-operative and interdisciplinary nature of service design, but ignore the caveat that a service only exists with the participation of a user. Therefore, in the definition of new service design principles, the co-creative pillar is divided into two sub-principles of "collaborative" and "iterative." "Collaboration" is used to indicate the process of creation by the entire stakeholders from different backgrounds. "Iteration" is used to describe service design as an iterating process, continually evolving to adapt to the change in business posture.
Sequencing The third principle, "sequencing," helps determine the timeline of a service blueprint. Service design is a dynamic process over a period of time. The timeline is important for users in the service system and sequencing helps organizations map their service development process with a sequence of actions. For example, when a customer shops online, the first information displayed should be the regions where the products can be delivered. In this way, if the customer finds that the products cannot be delivered to their region, they will not continually browse the products on the website. The sequencing in this example would be the steps the organization took to ensure the user was optimized and got the information they needed at the forefront of the website.
Evidencing The fourth principle, "evidencing," is a key aspect to implementing a successful optimized approach to service design by making the service design process "evident." For example, when people order food in a restaurant, they cannot perceive the various attributes of the food. If we play the cultivation and picking process of vegetables in the restaurant, people can perceive the intangible services in the backstage, such as the cultivation of organic vegetables, and get a quality service experience. This service also helps the restaurant establish a natural and organic brand image to customers.
Holistic The fifth principle of service design is "holistic." Thinking in a holistic way is the cornerstone of service design as it considers the entire environment. Holistic thinking needs to consider both intangible and tangible service, and ensure that every moment the user interacts with the service, such moments known as touchpoints, is considered and optimized. Holistic thinking also needs to understand that users have multiple logics to complete an experience process. Such holistic thinking can extend to safe and sustainable concerns, such as Safe and Sustainable by Design. Thus, a service designer should think about each aspect from different perspectives to ensure that no needs are left unattended-to.
Methodology 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 was proposed by Nicola Morelli in 2006, who suggested three main directions:
Identification of the actors involved in the definition of the service by means of appropriate analytical tools. Definition of possible service scenarios, verifying use cases, and sequences of actions and actors' roles in order to define the requirements for the service and its logical and organizational structure. Representation of the service by means of techniques that illustrate all the components of the service, including physical elements, interactions, logical links and temporal sequences. In addition to these methodology directions, service design continues to use participatory and engaging methods that include users directly in the creation of scenarios and service concepts. Kankainen et al. (2011) shows that collaborative storytelling sessions help participants to imagine future service scenarios and situations while reflecting on their own experiences. This methodology improves our understanding of user motivations, emotional and personal responses, and expectations in ways that that compliment analytical methods.
Analytical tools refer to anthropology, social studies, ethnography, and social construction of technology. Appropriate elaborations of those tools have been proposed with video-ethnography. Other methods, such as cultural probes, have been developed in the design discipline, which aim to capture information on users in their context of use (Gaver, Dunne et al. 1999; Lindsay and Rocchi 2003).