Service Design: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners and the Experienced
Service design has steadily grown in popularity as a human-centered approach to business development. Many are familiar with the concept and recognize its importance within their organizations. However, due to its holistic nature, service design offers ample opportunities for both beginners and experienced practitioners to deepen their understanding. This blog post and guide are written for anyone looking to grasp the big picture of service design: its mindset, process, methods, and tools. I'll also discuss how service design fits into the broader business landscape and explore its future directions.
What is Service Design?
Service design, as the name suggests, involves designing services and, in some cases, service ecosystems while actively involving customers and employees. It combines human-centeredness, empathy, and customer understanding. This approach sees things from the customer’s perspective, not through the lens of an organization’s internal priorities. The goal is to understand the customer's current behavior, motivations, needs, and pain points by engaging them and fostering empathy. Beyond customers, it’s equally important to engage internal stakeholders, giving them the opportunity to be heard and seen as part of business development. This participation facilitates organizational learning and cross-disciplinary knowledge sharing.
Service design blends creativity with analytical thinking. It involves visualizing, concretizing, and prototyping ideas, followed by validation and iteration with both internal stakeholders and customers. Development is always holistic, multidisciplinary, agile, and experimental.
Service design can be applied to developing both physical and digital services. It combines human-centered thinking, processes, methods, and tools. A critical aspect of service design is ensuring that the right problems are identified and solved in the right way.
In the design of digital services, desirability, viability, and feasibility always intersect. When these three elements align, a company creates something of genuine value to customers and the business while ensuring it's technically feasible. Service design primarily focuses on exploring and defining desirability.
Picture 1: The focus of service design in the development of digital services.
Why Invest in Service Design?
If a company cannot meet customer needs, it directly impacts the business. Why would a customer pay for something that doesn’t serve their needs? The origin of any company’s revenue lies with its customers, who ultimately decide if a service is worth their time and money. Without customers, there is no business, and without business, there are no salaries or taxes.
Service design offers a comprehensive approach to reducing business risks by validating ideas with customers before making significant investments. Services are created for customers or, in some cases, internal users, making it crucial to understand their needs, problems, and current ways of working. This allows decisions to be based on researched data rather than assumptions. Done systematically, service design provides long-term direction, enabling organizations to focus on value-generating efforts while eliminating unnecessary actions.
In my experience, organizations often rush to implementation without validating ideas with customers. This can lead to catastrophic outcomes where months (or even years) of work go to waste when a service fails to meet customer needs. In the worst cases, services must be entirely redeveloped, incurring significant costs. Another common scenario is organizations assuming they know what their customers want, relying on guesswork instead of asking them directly.
Instead of starting with feasibility—thinking about what can be built or how a particular technology might be used—it’s better to begin by identifying who your customers are, what they need, and their pain points. In other words, start by building customer understanding and using it to inform decisions. After validating customer needs, it’s equally important to determine the business model and revenue strategy. Only then should the focus shift to technical implementation.
Service Design Process and Its Stages
Various design-related processes exist under terms like design thinking or service design. Traditionally, service design is described using the Double Diamond model developed by the British Design Council. The Double Diamond emphasizes understanding the problem first to ensure the right issues are being addressed. The second diamond represents the conceptualization of solutions.
The model incorporates the divergent and convergent thinking of creative problem-solving. Divergent thinking involves gathering and generating broad insights and ideas to explore multiple perspectives or solutions. Convergent thinking then evaluates, synthesizes, and narrows down options.
The Double Diamond model and design thinking can be applied at various levels of business abstraction, from vision and strategy development to creating business concepts, processes, and service/product development.
Regardless of the process framework, most design processes share common objectives:
Empathy and seeing from the customer’s perspective
Delivering customer and business value
Visualization of ideas and solutions
Experimental and iterative approaches
Creativity and ideation
Holistic thinking
Cross-functional co-creation
Methods in Service Design
Service design employs dozens of methods, canvases, and frameworks, with new ones constantly emerging. While methods and tools are helpful aids, they are not the essence of service design. The goal is to solve problems and create solutions that generate value for customers and businesses alike. The focus should always be on the outcome and its impact, not just the artifacts produced during the process.
Here's a broad categorization of service design methods. It's advisable to master a few and expand your repertoire with experience:
Research and Analysis Methods: Focused on understanding users and their needs. Examples include trend analysis, competitor and market research, user interviews, observations, customer journeys, and personas.
Ideation and Innovation Methods: Aim to generate new ideas and develop solutions. Examples include brainstorming, ideation workshops, and mind mapping.
Service Visualization: Encompasses customer journey mapping, service blueprints, and concept visualizations to communicate service structure and functionality.
Prototyping and Validation: Developing and testing prototypes with users. Prototyping can range from quick and rough to detailed and precise. Validation methods include concept validation, usability testing, and pilot studies.
Participatory Methods: Actively involve users, stakeholders, and other parties in service development. Examples include workshops, participatory design, and co-creation.
Behind the Scenes: Service Design for a B2B Digital Service
I once calculated that over the course of my career, I have conceptualized/designed more than 40 mobile applications and about 20 web services or services for embedded systems. My approach to service design is highly holistic and involves engaging both customers and internal stakeholders.
I have often worked on multi-channel comprehensive concepts, where either something entirely new is created, or an existing service is completely revamped. In such cases, it is crucial to approach the process meticulously—ensuring there is sufficient customer insight to define requirements and design concepts. The work is highly iterative, and in addition to customer insights, internal stakeholders are involved to ensure alignment with understanding and business needs.
In the blog post Behind the Scenes: Service Design for a B2B Digital Service, I delve deeper into the entire design process—how a new B2B service was conceptualized and highlight my working methods along the way.
Service Design in the Bigger Picture
Although service design has become mainstream, its original focus on designing services human-centrically is just one piece of the business development puzzle. While design thinking and methods can be applied across various abstraction levels, understanding customer perspectives alone is not enough for business development.
Despite its holistic approach, service design rarely emphasizes business models and revenue logic. It often focuses on designing individual services or ecosystems. However, organizations can benefit from shifting their perspective from standalone services to holistic customer journeys. Managing and developing these journeys systematically—breaking down silos and designing seamless experiences—remains an aspiration for many companies.
Future Directions for Service Design
The future of service design lies in integrating it with business design, ensuring services are not only desirable for customers but also viable for the business. Moreover, market evolution is pushing companies to compete more on customer experience. While products and services are easy to replicate, comprehensive customer experiences are not. Developing and managing holistic customer journeys, rather than isolated services, will provide sustainable growth and a competitive edge. This shift will be a key focus area in future blog posts.
Need help with service design? Whether you're looking to revamp an existing service, develop a new one, or learn through workshops or training, feel free to schedule a meeting. Let’s discuss your needs—no commitments required!
