Service Design and User Experience
Service Design (often shortened to SD) is a design discipline that has emerged in the last 20 or so years. It’s chiefly concerned with describing all the convergent aspects of a customer’s interactions both with a product and the product provider, and potentially redesigning any of those constituent parts. Whereas, for example, Product Design can be understood in terms of designing a tangible or intangible product such as a toaster or a holiday, Service Design encompasses designing the experiences of hearing about, purchasing and any after-sales service to accompany that product.
Service Design encompasses designing the experiences of hearing about, purchasing and any after-sales service to accompany that product.
SD overlaps Customer Experience (CX), a sub-category of which is User Experience (UX). Customer Experience has been defined as “how customers perceive their interactions with your company”, including interactions with the advertising, website and/or store, product and customer service processes (Harley Manning, Forrester consultancy, 2010). CX can also refer to a discipline concerned with the “design, implementation, and management of interactions that happen across the entire customer journey” (Kerry Bodine, Forrester, 2013). User Experience is the sub-category of CX specifically relating to digital interactions, whether with websites, mobile phones or other portable devices or with electronic kiosks or any voice-interactive system.
What is SD concerned with that falls outside CX/UX and vice versa? CX/UX include the measurement and governance of customer experience; these currently fall outside SD (Bodine). SD can also include social ways of improving the quality of life for people in need; this currently falls outside CX/UK (Bodine).
How does SD affect UX? Firstly, Service Design is concerned with looking at the entire context in which a digital interface operates. Suppose the government is creating webpages for a departmental service used by members of the public, such as applying for certain kinds of licences. An SD professional would look at:
- What other channels exist for the same service to be accessed? Do they currently, and would they also, telephone or write to the department or fill in a form available at a post office?
- Why would an individual choose to go online rather than use the traditional means?
- Would users submitting an application via one channel be able to use another channel to inquire as to its progress?
- What should the overall service delivery experience look like?
- Will all types of applications be dealt with in the same way through all channels, or do some need to be processed differently, e.g. if certain applicants need to produce certain physical documents?
- How will applicants provide feedback on the webpages, or the service? Are they equally able to provide such feedback irrespective of the channel they applied through?
- How will the public be informed of all the available channels for this service?
Service Design is more complex than standard User Experience modelling
Secondly, Service Design is more complex than standard User Experience modelling as it considers:
- More Personas, that is hypothetical types of users, considering the multiplicity of channel uses they may adopt;
- Prototypes, that is models or mock-ups of the space (physical or digital environments) used by Personas, are often three-dimensional in SD, again because of the need to consider multiple channels and channel switches by Personas;
- Scenarios, that is models of the processes followed, are more complex because of the multiple channels, because they consider the actions of service providers also as processes and because they generally consider the entire service as one system. In SD such a scenario is often referred to as a Service Blueprint (Laura Keller, UXMatters.com, 2014).
Good Service Design is ultimately concerned with improving the Customer Experience in all manner of ways, including those the customer has not expected or even imagined.