Service Design

I am focused on my continuous learning in UX field and Service Design approach area was not so clear in my mind, so I have decided to attend a course organized by Virpi Roto (Aalto University- Finland), in partnership with Jung-Joo Lee from Industrial Design (National University of Singapore); Jodi Forlizzi  (HCI Institute, Carnegie Mellon University); Stuart Cockbill (UX Design MA at Loughborough University).

As this course I have learned how to:

• Work together with service designers through a better understanding of SD history, scope, process, and basic terminology.
• Organize UX work to fit within a SD project by understanding the relation of UXD and SD and the possible roles of UX designers in SD projects.
• Conceptualize the relation between UXD and SD through a better understanding of SD history, scope, process, and basic terminology.

The work of user experience (UX) designers expands beyond single digital products towards designing customer journeys through several service touchpoints and channels. Greater understanding of the service design (SD) approach and the interplay between service design and UX design is needed by UX researchers and practitioners in order to address this challenge.
In the past three decades, we have been observed a global shift from a focus on general product development to a focus on service delivery. Many companies are experiencing servitization, where digital services are added to existing products; others are experiencing productization, where physical products are added to service deliveries. In the present the UX designers and researchers face a range of inter-related challenges including:

• Understanding and conceptualizing non-digital services in a digital form, such as the augmentation of taxi cab services with on demand ride share platforms.
• Delivering end to end experiences across parallel physical and digital touchpoints including, for example for the retail sector: advertising, branding, browsing of goods, payments, deliveries and returns, and backstage digitalization.
• Co-designing with diverse stakeholders as business and design converge, and evaluation of success broadens beyond usability.
• Navigating and defining roles where terminology is fluid and ambiguous at the interaction of Service Design and UX.

Service Design (SD) is a holistic approach used to stage-manage the whole service journey considering clients, service providers and additional stakeholders. For user experience (UX) designers, who have often focused on the user interface design of a digital application, this service design perspective introduces new questions:

• What does service design mean in practice?
• What is the role and scope of UX design in a multi-stakeholder service design project?
• Who is responsible for the user experience of the whole service journey?
• How can UX and service designers best work together?

There is little research at the intersection of SD and UX design, and the research communities of these two areas are surprisingly separate. 

References:

• Jodi Forlizzi. 2018. The product ecology: Understanding social product use and supporting design culture. International Journal of design 2, 1.
• Luna Leoni. 2015. Servitization and Productization: two faces of the same coin? In Conference RESER.
• Ezio Manzini. 2014. Making things happen: Social innovation and design. Design Issues, 30, 1:57-66.
• Daniela Sangiorgi & Alison Prendiville (eds.). Designing for Service: key issues and new directions. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.
  
• Jodi Forlizzi & John Zimmerman. 2013. Promoting Service Design as a Core Practice in Interaction Design. Proceedings of IASDR’13.
  
• Alison Prendiville, Ian Gwilt, and Val Mitchell. 2017. Making sense of data through service design – opportunities and reflections. Designing for Service: Key Issues and New Directions. 225-236.
  
• Virpi Roto, Jung-Joo Lee, Tuuli Mattelmäki and John Zimmerman. 2018, April. Experience Design meets Service Design: Method Clash or Marriage? In Extended Abstracts of CHI’18 (p. W26).
  
• Stuart A. Cockbill, Andrew May, and Val Mitchell. 2019. The assessment of meaningful outcomes from co-design: a case study from the energy sector. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation. 5, 3:188-208.
  
• Jung-Joo Lee. 2020. Service design and blind mice, ACM Interactions, 27 (2), 20-21.