This in depth article is a translation of an original article that appeared in the Chinese magazine, Design Management China. In it, we reveal what makes service design such a crucial consideration, and look at the success of service-based economies.
For many designers service design is not just a flash in the pan, nevertheless, it hasn’t been long since it started attracting the attention of the European design community as well as the corporate industry. Starting mainly within the public sector, it has been embraced by Scandinavia, the Netherlands and the UK - countries with long traditions of design practices. In such countries, it is much easier to picture a scenario where a designer faces the moment of understanding why good design plus high-end technology and innovation are not enough to provide a great service.
Designit has had a long relationship with the Scandinavian public sector, working on projects focused on the simplification of management processes related to small businesses, for example, improving communication channels of social health assistance to pregnant women and their families.
Aarhus Midwife Centre at Skejby Hospital, one of Denmark’s most specialised hospitals, sought to improve communication between its pregnant patients and healthcare professionals by identifying and implementing new digital solutions.
The project was to include all concrete and abstract steps from observations and insights, to strategic frameworks, value propositions and finally prototypes.
Designit helped develop new services and practices, and delivered a comprehensive service specification for a new digital solution featuring a website for patients and health professionals.
With the new digital solution implemented, Aarhus Midwife Centre estimates a 30-minute reduction in time spent per pregnancy, 3,900 in Aarhus alone. Furthermore, the leader of the Midwife centre, Joke-Gesine Habben, points out that the current 10% of ‘no show’ appointments would likely be drastically reduced. She expects fewer and more relevant enquiries and an improved level of health for pregnant women, as the information and interaction levels would be improved and supported by visual teaching possibilities.
Today’s consultancy market provides the industry with design thinking, co-creation, social science framework and other innovative techniques that facilitate the understanding of business needs, and help designers absorb the ‘know how’ and experience of the client with its product. These techniques have confronted the design consultancy industry with the reality of the impact the culture of a company has on a product, and ultimately on their clients. This has posed the question of how design could have more impact on a client’s corporate culture.
However, as a designer you can’t help but start to wonder if user-oriented design is enough, and ask the question - what else can be done in order to get ‘this’ to work better?
Influence on Business
From experience, Designit knows that services can be perceived as complex systems involving several actors. In service-based economies, the main drive to experiment by companies and organisations is to achieve customer loyalty as their inflection points are already in a critical position. For businesses, service design is the discipline that can provide the tools that will influence the way in which their services and products are conceived. It can transform company processes from a work culture perspective, by helping organisations to map and connect the dots between their users needs and their internal processes, and can also help them to discover opportunities within their own sector. Simply described, service design is a tool-kit that directly affects brand-building processes.
“It is a business and institutions facilitator, helping them to deliver services consistent to their brand and values. Always focused on current and ever changing market’s needs while inspiring and implicating employees, through tools that encourage collaboration, dialogue and agile work processes.” Maritza Guaderrama, Desigit
For designers, service design is the framework that can actually ensure better work. It is seen as the key to reaching relevant stake holders, gaining access to service employees and having a direct impact on their work processes and as a result in to the artefacts produced (websites, applications, customer service centres, etc). Service design provides a holistic vision to the brand, and has a permanent impact on the company’s culture rather than a single company project.
Xènia Viladàs, Spanish author on design management and service design, explains that since creativity and lateral thinking became popular in management processes, it could be perceived that service design tools are already being used on service projects. The difference, she says, is that the service design practice utilises key tools such as visualisation, prototyping and testing which are proper to the design practice.
“This ability (…) allowed the entrance of design in the conception of services, to go beyond its traditional link to the “object world” and adapt itself to the wider current concept of product.”
Basic elements for success
One of the keys to executing successful service design is connecting the dots. It is a critical phrase, and goes beyond talking about user journeys, stakeholder goals, company missions or operational processes. All these methods do not have an impact on their own: they need to be harmonic, working together and following the same goal. In order to achieve this it is important to be aware of every ‘dot’ in the process.
People
- Customer
- Service provider
- Stake holder
- Service designer
- Touchpoint: every contact point between a customer and the service provider
- Service evidence: a tangible artefact related to a service process
- Service period: pre-service/service/post-service – current period of service
As Viladàs states, service design tools inject value into businesses by integrating service design tools such as visualization, prototyping and testing into their processes. Following this, there is a need to emphasise the particular perspective of research and co-creation that a service requires, addressed on the following paragraphs:
Visualisation
Service Design provides a tool-kit that covers all the service requirements to achieve the ‘big picture goal.’ Its main aim is to provide an overview tool. Chilenans called this ‘partitura’ (music sheet) as an analogy of a well-orchestrated service, most design professionals know it as the service design blueprint. This tool is the most appropriate to achieve a holistic vision of an organisation, incorporating of all the viewpoints of a service.
Blueprinting
Blueprinting is considered the emblematic key tool of service design. It is a simple and graphical representation that brings together all the stakeholders involved. Customers, managers and front-line employees can all learn, use and even modify it to meet a particular innovation’s requirements. This in turn helps the designers to reach inside the client company without losing connection to customer actions and processes.
It is very useful as a visual notation tool that portrays business processes representing actors and activities, and shows in a single view a high-level portrait of conceptual processes and particular details of sub-processes. One of its most important qualities is that it connects these with even more internally focused processes.
It can be particularly helpful in developing brand new services, improving existing ones, adapting them to new markets, and implementing cross-team collaboration to support customer-focused solutions.
Carrefour, the world’s second-largest retailer and the largest in Europe, contacted Designit Madrid in order to identify improvement opportunities in the user experience of their quick check scanning service Scan’Lib, and reflect these in a way that helped to convey the whole service at first sight. In order to complete this objective a methodology based on ethnographic techniques was designed.
The project was divided into two steps to ensure that the project proceeded smoothly. the first involved comprehending the challenge, the second focused on analysis and co-creation.
The first step included desk research, ideation, and ethnography. All the data we had received from Carrefour about Scan’Lib was reviewed, and an ideation session was held to generate a framework that would give us orientation during the contextual observation phases. We then travelled to Chambourcy in Paris to start a contextual observation of Scan’Lib use, conduct contextual interviews with users, and undertake a mystery-shopping trip.
Once we had gathered all the information we could, we moved on to the next step of analysis and co-creation, beginning with co-creative methodologies to share the findings of our ethnographic work with the rest of the team. The findings about Scan Lib customer experience were shaped through a process of information design that allowed us to categorise and classify every item for the final blueprint. This blueprint reflects the complete buying process, starting with the client entering a Carrefour store and ending when he or she exits.
Scan’Lib has been implemented in two of the Carrefour flagships stores in Spain using all the recommendations and improvements suggested by Designit. The user experience during the buying process has been improved with a list of operative recommendations and a blueprint document that graphed them, showing both critical touch points and recommendations in a single page. Additional data, such as store signaling, subscription services and assistance from Carrefour employees during the buying process was included in the blueprint, focusing not only on the device but also on the complete customer experience (entrance, service subscription, Scan’Lib stands, product scanning during the buying processes, paying interface on auto-checkout, and receipt scanning).
Research
Professionals specifically focused on research within service design agree that traditional research skills such as listening, observing and analysing, are not enough when working on a service design project; it is required that research becomes collaborative, creative and inspirational.
“Service design aims to create a symbiotic relationship between provider and user, research is designed to actively involve and investigate all significant people in the service ecosystem. In order to understand people, systems, strategy and business models, service design borrows from, and is, a mash up of disciplines.” Tamsin Smith from Engine (UK).
Tamsin’s confessions as a design researcher provide good insight on the most important elements of this practice. Research for service design needs to actively investigate, and involve all the significant participants within the service ecosystem. It needs to set the parameters for research, and be inspirational, actionable and directional at the same time, as it builds an informed hypothesis of the project proposition.
Research has a variety of tools. The consultancy organisation Engine, divides them into three main categories: primary research tools, sense making tools and self directed tools. Each of them can be useful in improving or innovating existing and new services:
- Primary research tools: Such as ethnography, home visits, immersion, shadowing, etc. The main objective when applying these tools is for service improvement. They enable needs, demands and behaviours around an existing service to be explored, helping to identify barriers, hurdles and opportunities. They are also important for service innovation, as they explore future propositions and scenarios with users that manifest pronounced behaviours.
- Sense-making tools: Safaris, context mapping, desk research, experts interviews, etc. These can work to improve a current service by deconstructing it, building a perspective of customer attitudes and behaviours and helping to understand the system of delivery. These can be used for innovation purposes, by working with extreme users in order to start wondering “what if?”.
- Self directed tools: Journals, video diaries, blogging & forums. These tools help to explore and discover customer or staff experiences over time, setting up a more in depth research that will help to improve the service. Self directed research utilises customer wisdom, and when it is well executed, can build communities of consumers providing insights into an organisation. This can lead to a permanent innovation dynamic of fostering new solutions through co-creation.
Tamsin reflects on the importance of research dynamics, suggesting that emphasising engagement, navigating tensions, and constructing carefully considered cultural artefacts for design ethnography, especially designed to build trust with participants, all encourage self reflection and facilitate articulation of thoughts, needs and desires.
Analysis is where much of the research value is centred, making sense of service context occurs through playing with the research data in many ways; re-framing concepts, shifting perspectives etc. As a last insight Tamsin proposes to measure design research success through degree of impact on the services and organisations rather by a degree of insight.
Participation
The role of service design is the one of facilitator rather than of a technician. Co-creation is a key element of service design. It is more than a tool – it is an environment in which the designer can apply any of the other tools of service design in order to achieve:
- Organisation processes insights
- Stakeholders participation
- Work processes transformation
- Provide an holistic view for the service in general
Designit identifies key points that have to be taken in to account, in order to carry out a successful co-creation session. It is important to identify the relevant stakeholders and to ensure their participation and involvement. It is also important to set up the right environment and materials to work with, to ensure and make visible dynamics of divergence and convergence in order to relax discussion or to bring focus to specific issues.
As Stickdorn and Schneider mention in the Service Design Thinking book, co-creation does not mean the ideas gathered in a session will be presented as final solutions. Through the design process, they will always be iteratively filtered so that only the strongest get developed in to prototypes and innovations. The book points out that a co-creation session aims to explore potential directions and gathers a wide range of perspectives in the process. This activity facilitates future collaboration, as it brings groups together, creating a feeling of shared ownership over the concepts and innovations that are being developed.
Designit is currently working in projects where co-creation together with other implementation tools have provided an important client within the insurance sector to:
- Can result in to a cultural shift through it’s tools
- Encourage cross silo engagement
- Promotes transparent and collaborative work
- Empowers all level employees with the user oriented vision in order to be more confident in their decision making processes
Test and iterations
Villadas explains how design is a trial-and-error discipline, with a strong emphasis on prototyping and iterations. In complex situations when reflection and analysis have done their jobs and can’t provide a final solution, creating something tangible from the obtained ideas can often help the process. Providing something that everyone can touch allows further reflection and problem identification in order to refine the solution proposed. A designer creates a sort of 3D-print of the ideas to allow thinking, sharing, testing and creating.
Service prototyping helps in three important aspects:
1. Create a strong narrative to share vision with key people
To make service innovation possible, Fran Samalionis explains in the book ‘Designing Services with Innovative Methods’ that:
“There needs to be commitment to that change from all influential stakeholders (from marketing and service development to finance and human resources). Having everyone on board is essential, as challenging existing paradigms requires endurance and imagination. The solution is a strong narrative that describes the changes in service design in a consistent and compelling way, which will win over key people and give them a story they understand and can easily share.”
2. Research tool
“Quick, low-cost mock-ups allow emerging ideas to be expressed, explored, modified, and shared with customers, experts, and stakeholders in very tangible and emotive way. They encourage informed decision-making, more than a paper description could ever do, and they encourage the idea to continually evolve.” From Small Ideas to Radical Service Innovation, Mark Jones, Fran Samalionis.
3. Risk Reduction
As Samalionis says, service design can ‘conquer the fear of failure’. Working with prototypes helps improve the solution and make it viable and desirable and therefore reduce risk. “A good prototype will prompt questions around consumer desirability, business viability, and technical feasibility.” Mark Jones, Fran Samalionis.
Designit experience on prototyping, specifically with role-playing technique with the client had great value, to the extent that it helped to land the scope for specific artefacts definition.
Visualization and prototyping tools can convince key people of the benefits of the new service but are also useful in developing new ideas. As they are full of information, success and failures can be identified and solutions proposed.
Service Design as a business values generation tool
Oliver King, director of Engine, one of the most recognised consultancies of service design, highlighted the key differences between UX and service design, at the UX London conference 2011. Most of his points are truly articulated and sensible to each field practice. However, his first reflection stands out and could be trigger for controversy, suggesting that UX is in charge of the interface and service design is in charge of the service and the organisation behind it.
Acknowledging that user experience and service design share many principles such as: user centred design, experience, prototyping, doing and thinking, being participatory, creating ecosystems and certainly working with journeys.
King points out that service design leans towards qualitative research based practice, to physical artefacts and human interactions. He suggests it performs a facilitator role, aiding exploration of new business models and human innovation. User experience design is more focused on a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches, focusing more on digital or virtual environments and artefacts. Its role is more of a technician that delivers focusing on discovering new technologies as solutions. King mentions that service design practice is based on situations - what would you do in a situation - rather than on providing a set up project.
Service design is about providing tools and not about developing the final solution. It is about helping to establish a collaborative working process, and addressing a new way of working. Furthermore it is impartial, as it does not pursue visibility on the final product.
Its big challenge is changing a company from a silo organisation, to the one that deals with their own particular issues. The final insight King provides us with is that user experience and service design are not mutually exclusive. Service design is about situations not about best practices, and both have different but symbiotic tool-kits. Both services can be beneficial to businesses.
Besides all mentioned above, it is clear that establishing implementation plans is key for service design as it helps the organisation map key processes in order to ensure smooth implementation.
From service to service design
In countries like Spain, who have long since been known as service based economies, service design has only started to be adopted by the corporate market in the last few years.
As an example of previously closed economy, due to a dictatorship regime provoking a delay towards the competitor market as its economic landscape was populated by services that were previously state-run monopolies. For many years Spanish companies didn’t face greater pressure, and focused only on product penetration, expansion and optimisation. Now, with a wider range of foreign and national competitors providing innovative services, is difficult to maintain their gained customers and many times they lose them to competitors.
It requires certain corporate maturity and stronger economic forces to articulate a direction capable of challenging its own culture in order to build a brand that relates to both its clients and employees.
In 2010 Schneider and Stickdorn compiled a book presenting basic principles, tools and cases of Service design practice. In this publication, Sitckdorn a set of five service design thinking principles:
1. User Centred
Services should be experienced through the customer’s eyes
2. Co-creative
All stakeholders should be included in the service design process
3. Sequencing
The service should be visualised as a sequence of interrelated actions
4. Evidencing
Intangible services should be visualised in terms of physical artefacts
5. Holistic
The entire environment of a service should be considered
On the other hand, since 2006 we have an academic point of view on the matter. Birgit Mager from the Köln International School of Design assembled a list of 10 service design basics:
1. Look at your service as a product
Just like products, good services need to be connected to good business strategies
2. Focus on the customer benefit
Focusing on benefits for customers might involve rethinking the organisation
3. Dive into the customer’s world
Service design explores the emotions and experiences and helps customers to explain more about their own desires
4. See the big picture
A customer’s service experience might start long before their first interaction with the provider (such as discussions with friends and family). Services are embedded within larger systems of interactions and relationships
5. Design an experience
Service design uses techniques that have their roots in interaction design, experience design and performing arts
6. Create perceivable experience
Service design strives to make the invisible visible and the not yet existing perceivable
7. Go for a standing ovation
The service performance needs to be supported by a designed setting that meets the needs of the ‘actors’
8. Define flexible standards
100% standardisation of production sites is not applicable to services
9. A living product
The service system should involve an ‘open membrane’ between the customer, employees and environment
10. Be enthusiastic
The corporate culture has a major impact on the quality of the service
Both of these principle approaches to service design refer to its practice more than the outcome. There are models developed by different consultancies that visualize the stages of impact the Service Design practice goes through within an organisation, and it is important to keep in mind that in order to transform a whole of a company’s work culture, it requires maturity, vision and courage. This can, in turn, transform a whole country’s economy.
By Marcela Machuca with support from Charlotte Schoeffler, Maritza Guaderrama and César Astudillo
Bibliography
[PDF] Service Blueprinting: A Practical Technique for Service Innovation
by Mary Jo Bitner
[Video] SD & UX, Oliver King (Engine UK)
Confessions of a service design researcher
10 Service Design basics (Brigitte Mager)
[Book] This is service design thinking (2010)
by Jacob Schneider and Marc Stickdorn