Whither Service Design 2022
Do we even know what we mean when we talk about service design?
Here’s an observation that’s been gestating for the four years I’ve been back in Sweden: many organizations use the term service design as loose term for design research. I’m not sure if this is because most Swedish service designers are most comfortable doing the research phase of the process or whether it’s because organizations feel more comfortable hiring and buying research than they do hiring change agents.
Because service design, in my book and most other books, is more than just design research. A good service designer should be able to lead and execute all the phases of service design, including ideating, prototyping, piloting etc. Perhaps one of the major culprits here is a narrow definition of design research — most organizations tend to look at the first diamond of the double diamond as design research. Critical, yes, but not the only part of design research. Design research also occurs during prototype testing, and that research might be the most valuable design research an organization can undertake.
Let’s pause here for a moment.
What IS service design?
The Interaction Design Foundation defines it this way:
“Service design is a process where designers create sustainable solutions and optimal experiences for both customers in unique contexts and any service providers involved.”
The Nielsen Norman Group defines it this way:
“Service design improves the experiences of both the user and employee by designing, aligning, and optimizing an organization’s operations to better support customer journeys.”
Wikipedia defines it this way:
“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 to inform changes to an existing service or create a new service entirely.”
The UK Design Council describes it this way:
“Service design is all about making the service you deliver useful, usable, efficient and desirable.”
These are all typical descriptions of service design. Note that all of them focus on outcomes and results: service design should make things better. How do we do that? What is the service design process?
In essence, it is the same process as design thinking and human-centered design with an emphasis on just services. Confused yet? These interchangeable terms are great. As Richard Chamberlin says (taken from the book This is Service Design Thinking):
“Frankly one of the great strengths of design is that we have not settled on a single settled definition. Fields in which definition is now a settled matter tend to be lethargic, dying, or dead fields…”
Hmm.
Design thinking usually looks like this:
I think a better more complex visual which is both clearer and confusing is this:
And here we get to our greatest opportunity and misconception. When we define service design as design research, organizations mean the first diamond in the first image (Empathy and Define), and the Inspiration part of the second image (Understand, Observe, POV). And yet, the second image shows us why that thinking is short sighted or even shortchanges the process: what we find when we ideate, prototype and test impacts our insights, POVs and understanding, as does what we find during the implementation phase. Design never ends since the process forces us to learn, re-learn and adapt our findings and approaches. When we define service design as design research, organizations assume that the service design is “done” before the hard work of continuous learning and change starts.
Service design competence
Service designers should be able to perform, at a high level, all the steps in the design process. And they should have one part of the process that they do better than the others. A T-shaped designer. It’s perfectly normal to have tendencies toward different parts of the double diamond.
IDEO described it like this (my labels for the parts of the process):
So even though we each have a strength, service designers need to be highly proficient in all areas. Perhaps one of the issues of describing or asking for service designers when organizations really want design researchers is that many, maybe most, service designers would rather work to their self-perceived strengths, design research, at the cost of the process parts they feel less confident in.
There’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re going to be a design researcher, you should focus on being a great design researcher, one that truly uncovers unexpected and actionable insights. Right now, many service designers who focus on design research do a good job of observing and a good job of illustrating the observations but do less well in really digging into the heart of design research (see my review of Just Enough Research).
In an optimal world, we would have modest teams of service designers working on challenges together. Each would have a different bottom to their T-shape, a specialty within design, like design research, strategy, creative, maker, visualizer, storyteller, business. That’s how you cover all the quadrants in the matrix above and ensure that you deliver great work.
In the real world, service designers often work alone and in pairs. Which means that we focus on what those one or two designers do best or feel most comfortable doing.
That is part of the problem. Maybe a big part. But not the only part.
Letting the tools define us, rather than vice-versa
Another equally big, maybe bigger, challenge is that service design seems to have defined itself through some popular and powerful tools. I’m talking about customer journey maps and service blueprints.
Dig into any service design group worth its salt and you will quickly stub your toes on descriptions of customer journeys and the need for service blueprints. These tools can do a phenomenal job of describing peoples’ experiences through a particular service while also enabling a deeper dive into the mechanisms and processes that make up these experiences. They are both highly illustrative and descriptive, which allows groups to experience greater empathy for their humans, and to allow groups to attain a consensus on problem or opportunity areas to improve.
And yet…it is only a part of the design process: the first diamond. Erik Flowers and Megan Erin Miller who run the phenomenal Practical Service Design community describe service blueprinting as:
“Your guide to generating actionable insights for service experiences.”
And that journey maps are the customer experience part of the blueprint — it tells the emotional and rational story of people while the blueprint puts that together with an internal analysis of the business. What emerges from this amazing work are
“…strategic areas of focus that can drive service roadmap planning, and tactical fixes that you can do immediately.”
To recap, customer journeys and service blueprints build common understanding and focus. Changing something comes afterward.
Because service designers have built their businesses on delivering maps, blueprints, understanding and insights, it’s not surprising that organizations who purchase and hire service design competency have come to equate service design with design research. If that’s what we’re selling than the buyer is never wrong.
A better opportunity
As we look ahead toward and past 2022 my sincere hope is that those of us in the business can help change the conversation and descriptions of service design by having honest conversations with our workmates, our clients, and our networks.
We pride ourselves on being part of an industry that acts bravely to uncover unmet needs, to help imagine new futures and to help organizations change for the better. That should mean that we can use these processes on ourselves and each other for honest, maybe even brutally honest, assessments.
Personally, I find it extremely disappointing to field request after request for service designers when most organizations seem to want to limit themselves to design research. I wish that the resumes I see showed more T-shaped service designers and fewer design research specialists. I hope that more organizations and the people who lead them come to realize that understanding and empathy are necessary, critical even, but not sufficient.
I think almost everyone I know in the design business has chosen that profession to help make the world a better place. I think we service designers needs to roll up our sleeves and start working on and delivering change rather than settling for sharing observations and long PowerPoint decks.
If not now, when?
P.S.
I can already hear people shouting at me: But Rich, the bigger problem is that most organizations don’t do nearly enough, if any, qualitative design research to understand their customers!! Why are you minimizing its importance while we are working so hard to convince people to invest in it?
If you’re having that reaction, I get it and yes, we should be convincing organizations to do more customer research. Customer research needs to show its value and the way to do that is to leverage the insight and understanding into change. That is service design. If you want to just do customer research, great! But let’s not pretend that design ends there. That’s all.
