A brief overview of Service Design

1. WHAT IS
SERVICE DESIGN?
by Nucleus Strategies

2. What is Service Design?
“A set of processes and tools that employ user-centred design methodologies to plan and
organize people, infrastructure, communication, and materials in order to provide the highest
quality service experience between the service provider and its customers.”

3. What is Service Design?
Front Stage
Back Stage
Customer-facing: websites, email, events, etc.
Internal Processes: operations, HR, financial, legal, etc.
The co-ordination of an organisation’s customer-facing processes with it’s internal
processes to provide a consistent and frictionless experience for the customer.

4. An extension of Product Design
“The effort of making things easy to use, functionally and emotionally desirable, and to make the
production processes as efficient as possible.”
Although this is a product design definition, the same can be said about designing services.

5. Then why is my experience at the bank nothing
like the experience of driving a BMW?

6. Because there’s no user-centred design process
Most often, services are designed for the needs of the system and an organization’s internal
processes rather than on the value for the most important parts of the system:
1. The people who use the service
2. The people who provide the service
Do we really need all those buttons?

7. But, services have TWO users
What is unique about services is that they are produced in the same moment as they are
consumed, meaning there are two types of users/people at the centre of the service system:
1. Customers
2. Providers
BOTH are crucial to the success or failure of the service experience.

8. Services must be DESIGNED FOR both users
and DESIGNED WITH both users
In order to be effective, a service must account for the wide variety of needs and desires of
both the service producers and the service consumers.
It is impossible to usefully hypothesize the complexity of experience for either of these crucial
groups without their direct input.
So, both must be involved in the design process from the outset and throughout.

9. Enter Design Thinking
Research Ideate Prototype Implement
Test/Validate
We use a “design thinking” process whereby we: (1) research to define the problem;
(2) ideate solutions to the problem; (3) design a working prototype to test and validate our
assumptions made in the earlier process; (4) repeat as necessary until a useful service is
designed; and finally, (5) implement the solution.
Once the prototype has been implemented, the testing and validation processes are
continued to be implemented as more and more user input is generated.
This ensures the continued improvement of the service experience.

10. The Five Principles of Service Design Thinking*
Ultimately, Service Design is a way of thinking required to design services.
Without a true common definition of the concept, we rely on five core principles to
drive our methodology.
*Taken from “This is Service Design Thinking” by Stickdorn/Schneider