This week’s class was dedicated to looking at Service Design, while service design includes many aspects of user experience design, it does look at the problem as a much bigger picture, considering everything that makes up a service rather than just the pieces the user interacts with. This involves considering a lot more aspects including human aspects such as employee behaviour and how employees communicate with each other as well as with customers.
As this was the first time I have looked at service design I wanted to look at the basics of service design and get a better feel for the practice and how I can use my skills from UX design and apply them to service design.
Service Design is a new topic to me, but one that I find incredibly interesting and want to know more about. It is also a growing field with more and more designers and design teams looking at and completing service design. Service design will most likely play a part in my future career; therefore it is time well-spent to look at the basics of service design in more detail.
I started by going to the library after class to look for a book to read about service design. However, they didn’t have any of the books we discussed in class, I did find this book though which contains basic information and service design case studies. I am in the process of reading this book at the minute and I am finding it very interesting and useful.
As this is a three-hundred-page book I also needed to look at some online articles that I could read quicker to get a basic understanding to go with our class lecture.
Here is a list of the articles I read:
A lot of these articles covered similar topics to what we covered in class, however, it was useful to read different people’s explanations of service design to get a better understanding of what service design entails. One of the best descriptions I read of service design was that service design is about designing for the biggest picture. This is how I understand service design, it involves looking at everything involved in a service, it has a much wider scope than product or UX design which concentrates on meeting customer or user needs and making sure a product meets these needs. Service design looks much deeper and considers the needs of the employees providing the service. It also looks at the processes and software that they use. This is where service design starts to look deeper at what is known as backstage actions, those actions that are not visible to a user but are key to a user being able to avail of the service. Product or UX design does not investigate these backstage actions, but service design does. It does not look at backstage actions in isolation, it looks at the frontstage actions as well and in conjunction with the backstage actions considering the transition between the two.
This is what piques my interest in service design, being able to look deeper past the user and where the opportunities to improve things in the background are. It is not uncommon when I am researching a problem for a UX project that I discover issues in the backstage process beyond the scope of my project. This would be within the scope of a service design project and being able to make suggestions that could tackle the root cause of problems as well as working on the user-facing parts of a service is something I would love to do.
As part of the class this week we got the chance to learn by doing, taking on a very quick team-based service design project to create a service design blueprint for one part of the health service. Our group selected to look at ambulance and paramedic provision and how the service of calling the emergency service and getting help works.
After working for several hours looking at this problem we created this paper-based service blueprint.
Which was turned into this much neater digital version.