All posts about
Service design

Reflection on business, design and value

Added on 5 December 2019 Peter Bogaards

Fits into the trend of Value Sensitive Design and more.

“​What’s been important about the emergence of design thinking aside from the capacities it creates is that it points to the activities of design as a source of value, instead of focusing solely on the products of design. To me this is an important distinction and increases the relevance of design to business exponentially. It also means that design activities, when made visible as a source of value, have the potential to be learned and used across the entire organization.”

Andrea Mignolo a.k.a. /mignolo | @pnts ★ courtesy of @odannyboy

First things first: Exploring Maslow’s hierarchy as a service prioritization framework

Added on 9 October 2019 Peter Bogaards

Like Kahneman, Cialdini, you can use Maslow for anything.

“​This paper proposes a model for categorizing library services and resources by their importance to users based on the service’s fundamentality to the other resources and services in the library’s offerings, the degree to which the service affects users, and the scope of users that access the service. Adapted from Abraham Maslow’s theory of motivation, we substitute individual human motivations for a community’s motivations for using the library. Maslow’s five tiers – physiological needs, safety needs, love and belongingness needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization – are changed to library-specific tiers: Library as Minimum Viable Product, Library as Convenience, Library as Connector, Library as Incubator, and Community as Library. The Hierarchy of Library User Needs is a theoretical tool for service prioritization with the potential to facilitate discussions between users and libraries. Libraries may wish to (re)evaluate the alignment between the resources they devote to their services and the items that are most likely to be used and appreciated by their users.”

Judith Logan & Kyla Everall ~ Weave: Journal of Library User Experience 2.2 ★

The service design maturity model: An introduction

Added on 4 October 2019 Peter Bogaards

Growth is not the same as maturity. Progression versus regression.

“​In this blog, we will be sharing a strategic framework that we created to help organisations embed service design at scale; the Service Design Maturity Model. We will shortly elaborate on the different maturity stages. The next blogs which will follow soon, will be deep-dives on each of the maturity stages and will provide some thoughts on our biggest learnings using the framework.”

Niels Corsten a.k.a. /nielscorsten | @NielsCorsten ~ Koos Service Design ★

Making the case for service design for start-ups and innovation

Added on 2 August 2019 Peter Bogaards

All manifestations of design are relevant for start-ups, scale-ups and f*ck-ups.

“Start-ups and innovation environments represent exciting, challenging and relatively-uncharted terrain for service design. Despite the fact that we as service designers are barely visible in the start-up world, and mostly unmentioned in their literature, my own experience as a service designer working with start-ups and innovation programmes has proven to me that we can add significant value in these settings. In this article, I’ll look at hurdles to address and overcome in terms of mindset, and suggest some practical ways service designers can address this opportunity.”

Jesse Grimes a.k.a. /jessegrimes ~ Kolmiot Service Design ★

UX and service design for connected products report

Added on 18 June 2018 Peter Bogaards

Take it away!

“In this Insight Report, we’ll look at the factors which make UX for IoT particularly challenging. We’ll discuss how technical architecture and business models shape UX, and how IoT blurs the line between product and service experiences. We’ll look at the need to give users transparency around how complex systems work and share data, in particular in relation to GDPR. And we’ll set out the challenges of designing distributed user experiences across multiple UIs, and show how some companies are tackling the challenges of designing for both hardware and software in parallel.”

Claire Rowland a.k.a. /clairerowland | @clurr ~ IoT.uk ★

How to map your customer’s journey

Added on 12 April 2018 Peter Bogaards

The persona of service design, nicely laid out.

“To identify the opportunities for growth along the customer lifecycle, it is first important to understand the customer’s experience engaging with the company and its product or service. A customer journey map is an illustration of exactly these experiences. The map can tell the full story covering the entire customer lifecycle from initial contact to activation, engagement, and beyond or focus on only a part of the story that lays out interactions or touchpoints critical to a subset of the customer’s experience.”

Kimmy Paluch a.k.a. /kimmy | @kimmypaluch ~ Branding Strategy Innsider ★

Connecting things: Broadening design to include systems, platforms, and product-service ecologies

Added on 30 January 2018 Peter Bogaards

Broadening the design scope leads to increase of complexity.

“Traditionally, design practice and design education have focused on giving form to physical things—apparel, buildings, messages, tools, and vehicles—the artifacts that constitute material culture. These artifacts are also the material of the traditional design disciplines—apparel design, architecture, graphic design, product design, and transportation design.”

Hugh Dubberly a.k.a. /hughdubberly ~ Dubberly Design Office ★ courtesy of @freegorifero

Level-up email campaigns with Customer Journey Mapping

Added on 3 November 2017 Peter Bogaards

Journey mapping for all areas.

“Customer journey mapping is a visualization technique that helps marketing specialists, user experience designers, and product and business owners see the journey people take when interacting with products and services. It is a great way to put on your customer’s shoes and see where your business fails to deliver a great user experience.”

Yuri Vedenin a.k.a. /yurivedenin | @yuri_vedenin ~ Smashing magazine ★

Service Blueprints: Communicating the design of services

Added on 28 February 2017 Peter Bogaards

The more details you need from backstage processes and roles, the more you need blueprinting.

“A service blueprint is, in essence, an extension of a customer journey map. A customer journey map specifies all the interactions that a customer will have with an organization throughout their customer lifecycle – the service blueprint goes a bit deeper and looks at all the interactions both physical and digital that support those customer interactions and adds a little more detail to the mix.”

The Interaction Design Foundation ★

New report on service design impact in public sector

Added on 3 November 2016 Peter Bogaards

Service design into the challenging environment of the government.

“Service design is also taking a role in the process of cultural and organizational change. It collaborates with other experts in this field in order to enable change by reframing the challenges, by engaging stakeholders in development of scenarios of futures that do not yet exist and by prototyping envisioned scenarios. These processes change the role of public servants from experts to partners. It is no longer the public service that is doing something for the citizens but doing it with them. This new way of thinking and working demands not only a change in mindset, but also in the way of doing things. Service design helps to build these new capacities. Very often it is a combination of teaching and learning by doing, in the process of capacity building small service design projects can be approached that create a sense of what service design can do and how to do it.”

Putting People First

Service Design Geographies: Proceedings of the ServDes2016 Conference

Added on 24 May 2016 Peter Bogaards

They are popping up everywhere: service design events. In China as well, I’m told.

“After a long maturation period, the discipline of Service Design is evolving in several directions and exploring new territories. The discipline has been founded on the area of affluence of many knowledge streams, from service marketing and management to interaction design and product design. The ground knowledge from those disciplinary areas has been integrated through research and cases studies that have emphasized different and new aspects of service design, including user-participation and co-creation, user experience, systemic and social aspects, technological implications and strategic perspectives. This relatively young area of design research is now exploring a wide landscape, that includes methodological contributions, practice-based research, concrete cases and prototypes, while new stakeholders are expressing interest in this discipline and promoting new cases and experiences. The last few years have also seen an increasing number of public sector initiatives with the support of design agencies, foundations and research groups that are promoting novel approaches to public service innovation. This includes for example modes to capture and amplify signals of social innovation projects or the set up of innovation labs within Government offices. At the same time the private sector is exploring the potential of more collaborative approaches to service innovation that value users contribution and participation in the design process.”

Nicola Morelli et al. ~ Linköping University Electronic Press

Content strategy in service design

Added on 10 May 2016 Peter Bogaards

The content layer of the customer journey map, sort of.

“We live in a service economy with evolving liquid expectations. Content is a fundamental component of how users engage with a service, and content strategy is the mechanism that enables that service experience to be delivered holistically and consistently across all touchpoints.”

Jennifer McCutchen a.k.a. /jennifermccutchen | @jenmccutchen ~ Fjord ★

Unlocking the power of the practical service blueprint

Added on 22 February 2016 Peter Bogaards

Customer journey and service bliueprint, the lorem ipsum artifacts of service design.

“There are a lot of artifacts and methods out there for mapping experiences. I had a great need that none of what existed could meet, so I took from all around me and came up with something new. That’s what is great about design and the creative process. We don’t have to be stuck with what we’re given, and we don’t have to stay idle and hope that someone else will come up with something to solve our problems first.”

Erik Flowers a.k.a. /erikflowers | @erik_flowers ~ Practical Service Design

Running contextual design research for service strategy

Added on 8 February 2016 Peter Bogaards

Service design discovers other established design research fields, like contextual inquiry.

“One of the first places to start when you want to improve your service is to look to your customer feedback and data. But what do you do when no one in the room understands how people are using your service, and the data you have is limited to high-level usage analytics? This is the perfect time to introduce ethnographic research into the mix to better understand how your service is perceived, used, and experienced. (…) In this post, I wanted to share my process for running this research—how I went from one step to the next, what tools I used and why, and the realities of what the day-to-day looks like running a research project of this kind—in the hopes that it might be helpful for those considering running similar research.”

Megan Erin Miller a.k.a. /meganerinmiller | @meganerinmiller ~ Practical Service Design ★

Top 6 predictions for Service Design in 2016

Added on 28 January 2016 Peter Bogaards

We also have to invent it, the future of service design.

“The service design movement is gaining a tremendous amount of inertia. New conferences are popping up each month, existing conferences are adding service design to their speaker and workshop schedules, new books books are being published, and whole global communities being spun up. For better or worse, it’s becoming the latest buzzword and practice that many companies want to talk about, but are still grasping at how to integrate. I’m going to share my top 6 predictions for what we can expect from service design over the next 18 months. This is a combination of what I’ve experienced, what I’ve seen, what others have shared with me, and aspirations that I want to put into people’s minds as a seed.”

Erik Flowers a.k.a. @erik_flowers ~ HelloErik ★

Customer experience architecture

Added on 8 September 2015 Peter Bogaards

How about information architecture connected to experience architecture.

“Service providers are continually reshaping their offering in response to changing customer needs and demands. As customer expectations change, businesses need to rethink the experiences they deliver. Meeting new demands does not only require delivery of the right propositions – it also requires developing broader capabilities around the needs of people, across the entire ecosystem.”

Melvin Brand Flu a.k.a. /brandflu | @MelvinBF ~ Livework Studio ★

Service Design: Creating delightful cross-channel experiences

Added on 24 August 2015 Peter Bogaards

The holistic design view on digital and physical is taking hold.

“Service design seems to go by an increasing array of names: Customer Experience, Cross-Channel UX, or even just ‘design thinking’. In most cases, these terms describe a holistic approach to your users’ and customers’ needs, no matter where or when they’re interacting with your product or service. In traditionally siloed organizations, it can be no small task to ensure that you are providing the best possible service. Communication is at the heart of service design and Marc Stickdorn knows the core of it is getting everyone on the same page. He says that the importance of this lies in the fact that customer experiences sometimes aren’t tangible – a user or customer could be experiencing an internal event. It’s important to understand how different customers come in contact with the design.”

(Sean Carmichael ~ User Interface Engineering) ★

Journey Maps: Not the end of the story

Added on 18 May 2015 Peter Bogaards

Have we found another silver bullet for UCD? And remember, the map is not the terrain.

“Journey maps have been around for the better part of a decade – some would argue longer – but it’s really only in the last three or four years that they’ve come into more common use, and more strategists are advocating their use as a framework for improving the customer experience. Without getting into the specifics of what a journey map is or isn’t in this column – there’s no shortage of material on the subject – suffice it to say that many in our field, including me, strongly believe in the potential of journey mapping for helping companies to achieve human-centric business transformations.”

(Ronnie Battista ~ UXmatters) ★

Merging service design with user experience design

Added on 26 April 2015 Peter Bogaards

Designing the flow and the journey as a coherent experience.

“There are as many ways of doing Service Design and User Experience Design as there are design companies working in these fields. This makes it somewhat complex and perhaps pointless to define these design fields. I understand that this blogpost will be a subject of discussion, and I’ll therefore begin by saying that the description that follows is based on my own, professional experiences as to the differences and similarities between Service Design and User Experience Design. (…) I’ll describe the differences and similarities between service design and user experience design and how they can work in symbiosis to generate exceptional services, products, business models and customer experiences.”

(Erik Westerdahl a.k.a. @erikwesterdahl ~ Screen Interaction) ★