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Service design

This Is Service Design Thinking: Deconstructing a Textbook

Part of becoming a field of knowledge and practice for real: a student textbook.

“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.”

(Laura Keller a.k.a. @ServiceDesignLK ~ UXmatters)

Great Customer Experiences Learn Continuously

Humans just have one mission in life and that’s to learn. From the beginning ’til the end.

From Apple’s poster for its retail employees. – “All of these experiences have made us smarter. And at the very center of all we’ve accomplished, all we’ve learned over the past 10 years, are our people. People who understand how important art is to technology. People who match, and often exceed, the excitement of our customers on days we release new products. The more than 30,000 smart, dedicated employees who work so hard to create lasting relationships with the millions who walk through our doors. Whether the task at hand is fixing computers, teaching workshops, organizing inventory, designing iconic structures, inventing proprietary technology, negotiating deals, sweating the details of signage, or doing countless other things, we’ve learned to hire the best in every discipline.”

(Mike Wittenstein a.k.a. @mikewittenstein)

Desktop Summit: Claire Rowland on service design

Service design as holism applied to man-machine studies, HCI, UI and product design for Linux pros.

“Like it or not, the vision of the interconnected future is coming, and our mundane devices and appliances are going that route as well. Making those things work well for users, while still allowing user freedom, is important, and it’s something the free software community should be contemplating.”

(Jake Edge ~ LWN.net)

Designing for Service as One Way of Designing Services

Seems this issue has been in the works for almost two years. Therefore, it’s a major achievement.

“This paper considers different ways of approaching service design, exploring what professional designers who say they design services are doing. First it reviews literature in the design and management fields, including marketing and operations. The paper proposes a framework that clarifies key tensions shaping the understanding of service design. It then presents an ethnographic study of three firms of professional service designers and details their work in three case studies. The paper reports four findings. The designers approached services as entities that are both social and material. The designers in the study saw service as relational and temporal and thought of value as created in practice. They approached designing a service through a constructivist enquiry in which they sought to understand the experiences of stakeholders and they tried to involve managers in this activity. The paper proposes describing designing for service as a particular kind of service design. Designing for service is seen as an exploratory process that aims to create new kinds of value relation between diverse actors within a socio-material configuration. This has implications for existing ways of understanding design and for research, practice and teaching.”

(Lucy Kimbell a.k.a. @lixindex ~ International Journal of Design August 2011)

A Service Design Approach Is Required To Deliver Great Customer Experiences

For commercial contexts, that’s true. But there is so much more…

“Internally focussed business tools, processes and systems are often thought about and designed in isolation from the design of the things customers interact with. Or to put this another way, projects that focus on improving the customer experience often don’t fully consider the tools, processes and systems staff use in the delivery of the experience.”

(Iain Barker ~ @Iain_barker ~ Meld Studios)

What we can learn about service design from Google+

The impact of G+ is noticed on the social web and beyond.

“The tools that weave themselves deepest into the way humans communicate, do so with our help. The designer releases their invention into the world with a few bold statements, and then it’s up to us to tell them what the significance of the tool is, and how best to use it. Google+ is no exception: it’s a relatively compact first release of just a few core concepts. Like many, I look forward to watching millions of people build on these concepts with improvised hacks, shorthand and other homemade enhancements, to complete a product story started by what may have been just a few dozen in Mountain View. When taking a look at some of the decisions Google made, I found five ideas worth keeping in mind when designing any new service.”

(Chris Palmieri a.k.a. @cpalmieri ~ AQ)

The End of Client Services

G+ is a great example of the importance of UX in social.

“(…) a new economic paradigm in which the act of producing and consuming are one and the same, and he believes it’s upon us right now. I subscribe to this theory, and I believe its most fascinating expression takes the form of social software, in which there is no consumption unless its users produce, and there is no production unless its users consume. The secret sauce that starts this virtuous cycle is not just technology, but also user experience design.”

(Khoi Vinh ~ Subtraction)

What is Service Design?

Having an eagle eye reading through it might improve the post.

“Service Design is still a relatively new and emerging field within the design industry. Many people are unsure what exactly service design is and how it helps their business and their customers. Put simply, service design is planning, organizing and improvement of a service. Service design is not just about fixing the existing services of an organization, it is also used to provide new and innovative ways to fill unmet customers need.”

(Gary Davies ~ Article Base)

Service design is Dead. The New Product is Alive.

“So, I changed my job title a few months ago. I dropped the ‘service’ bit. I’m now just Sidekick’s Design Director. I’m now MASSIVELY EXCITED about a new thing – designing products. But not your old products. No, I’m excited about designing a new type of evolving, networked product that requires a multi-disciplinary team just to keep it alive, let alone make it awesome. I’m calling this the New Product. Let me explain.”

(Nick Marsh a.k.a. @choosenick)

Service Design: Setting The Stage For The Consummate Experience

“Mention service design to your UX colleagues and you may find yourself unwittingly engaged in a game of Buzzword Bingo. Whether you call it ‘service design,’ ‘holistic design,’ ‘multi-channel experience design’ or ‘cross-channel design,’ chances are you’re all talking about the same thing. And your next challenge is defining exactly what you mean when you say ‘service design.’ The field of service design is still young and evolving. And its interdisciplinary nature makes it difficult to define. In fact, (…) no common definition of service design exists.”

(Megan Grocki a.k.a. @megangrocki ~ UX Magazine)

Ubiquitous Usability

“For too long usability has been the preserve of geeks – a specialism confined to websites and screens, form factors and devices. We need to realise that usability – in other words ‘how easily people can use something to achieve a goal’ shouldn’t just be restricted to the lab and the engineer. It should be something that everyone expects to get, and everybody strives to provide. Usability should apply to all walks of life and everything that we encounter – it should be ubiquitous. It needs to be about the services we use and the spaces we inhabit.”

(Daniel Letts ~ live|work)

Bill Moggridge: Prototyping Services With Storytelling

“The storytelling supports the exploration of the service idea. Through the use of simple workds, the teller will illustrate the solution as it is a story. This allows the communication of the idea inside a group but also the preparation of the first sketches for the storyboard. The storytelling leaves some blanks to be fill in by the suggestions of other stakeholders and users.” (think + design + change)

How Design Thinking Can Help Prevent Another Mortgage Bubble

“Here was a chance to remake a tool that plays a vital role in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people every year. But what happened that day turned out to be much more than streamlining a critical form in the home-buying process. Even much more than the redesign of a vital ‘touch point’ within the larger ‘user experience’. What happened was that the symposium’s attendees discovered just how radical a solution Design Thinking could offer; not only to the problem of a broken mortgage process, but to public policy at its highest levels.” (Monica Bueno ~ Co.Design)

Why UX Professionals Should Care About Service Design

“I’m very excited to be kicking off my new UXmatters column, Service Design: Orchestrating Experiences in Context, with this discussion of the value of service design to UX professionals. In my column, I’ll explore the concepts of service design and how to leverage its practices to optimize the user experiences our companies and clients look to us to create.” (Laura Keller ~ UXmatters)

My So Called Service Design Life

“There is a fierce debate about the relationship between service design (SD) and interaction design (IxD) here in the United States, particularly among interaction designers. The discussion often devolves into hostile crossfire between two camps: one that believes that the service design is a type of interaction design, and another that believes that the two disciplines are separate and distinct. When a teenager is a smart, compelling, interesting, independent, charismatic, hardworking, analytical, talented, humorous, knock-kneed being, a parent would rightly feel a great sense of pride. Interaction designers — and those whose careers, and sources of income are indebted to that practice — have very good reasons to hold strongly to the idea that service design is indeed a chip off the old block.” (Renna Al Yassini ~ Cooper Journal)

Prospecting in the 21st century

“Service design is the natural progression from UX – taking interactions across platforms and concentrating on the invisible and tangible connections around customer or user interactions. Information architects should be at the heart of this design work and don’t be surprised to start to see IAs appear in companies that you didn’t even think of as ‘digital’. (…) It is not just interface design. It is not just about making the world more usable and ethically correct. It’s all this and more. It is a force for changing business in its approach and to make it economically stable by providing for needs but also satisfying wants beyond the present day. This is the business value of UX. How you interpret the data you collect, and create something truly unique, relies on the teams skill set and experience.” (James Kelway ~ user pathways) | courtesy of petermorville

Touchpoints Bring the Customer Experience to Life

“Taking the time and effort to look at your touchpoints not just as isolated mini-experiences, but as a collective whole, will help you shape them for a better customer experience, and perhaps even point to opportunities to invent new types of touchpoints, as Progressive did. Or, perhaps there are some touchpoints you have been overly reliant on third-parties who are not not upholding their place in the journey.” (Adam Richardson ~ Harcard Business Review)

Social business & service design

“Economists, capitalists, entrepreneurs, public servants and policy makers are on their way to recognize the new source of (economic) value, ‘human experience’ and the designers are delivering the tools & mindsets to create them. Great times for designers and design thinkers, great times for a new kind of multidisciplinary collaboration of formerly opposed mindsets, great new business and public service opportunities and a great moment in human development and history.” (Sylvain Cottong ~ ServiceDesign.lu)