Our Guide to

Service Design

Our Guides

Our guides are here to help you understand a topic or to provide support for a particular task you might already be working on. Inside you’ll find lots of information to help you plan and make better

decisions. We’re not saying we have all the answers but we believe the stuff inside this guide will help get you started. If you think we’ve missed anything, or you want to join in the debate then please get in touch.

Inside you’ll find

• What is Service Design?• A Service Design process?• Who else is involved?• Service Design techniques • Some important things to remember• How we can help

What is Service Design?In a nutshell

Service design is the scoping, design, development and creation of user centred and evidence based services though the application of research and testing. Service design aims to influence environment, culture and process in delivering services that are useable, efficient and valuable in the eyes of the user.

It’s about

• Putting the user at the centre of the design and build process

• Understanding the user, their needs, behaviours, perceptions, motivations, expectations and desired

outcomes

• Designing services that are intuitive, consistent, effective and differentiated

• Designing services that take a holistic approach and recognise context, emotion, environment and

surroundings

• Working collaboratively with clients, analysts, designers, employees and customers

• Constant critique, testing and feedback. Making changes, improvements and enhancements

• Understanding best practice, appreciating the work done by existing service leaders

• Keeping up with the pace of change, new standards, trends, modes of behaviour

• Taking into account business requirements

Service Design processFrom start to finish

Is there such a thing as a Service Design process?

The answer to this is ‘yes and no’ or, rather, ‘somewhere in

between.’

It often depends on the type of project you’re involved

with and the stage at which you’ve been asked to

participate. A client might already have a service up and

running and therefore might only need your help for some

gap analysis work. On the other hand they may want your

help in designing a new service from scratch. Both

scenarios will require a methodical process, but not

necessarily the same one and certainly not with activities

happening in the same order.

I’m hearing a lot about agile service development, what

does it all mean?

Taking an agile approach to service design means that

activities are planned or amended based on project

evolution. The benefit of agile is that it helps ensure

changes in requirements are incorporated into any design,

reducing the need for later re-work.One of the many UX processes to be found online

Service Design principles From start to finish

Guiding design and decisions

Principles should be used to influence and guide those working in

service design. They act like a mantra and should be used when setting

out on any design task. They’re a useful tool in helping to ensure you

stay on track and true to what the service user really wants.

Co-creativity Flexi-build Holistic Awareness Evidence Based

Services are built

with users involved

throughout the

process. They help

to define,

research, test and

implement any

approved design

Services are built

using an agile

approach to take

into account

changes in

project reality and

the surfacing of

new information

Services are built

taking into

account context,

environment and

the emotional

state of the user.

Third parties and

suppliers are also

involved

Services are built

using evidence

throughout.

Forensic analysis

means the end

deliverable meets

the users’

expectations and

requirements

Who else is involved?Creating a Service Design community

Community stakeholders Role & remit

Customers or service users

Those using and engaging with your service. Might involve more than one type of person and various roles. The service user may also have varying needs which change as and when they interact with the service

Clients

This is you. The person sponsoring the service design work and owner of the outcomes and budget. Client may also include other stakeholders who have a vested interest in the work

Service Design LeadResponsible for managing and delivering output to help you achieve your service

design aims

AnalystsData owners and responsible for gathering, storing and analysing service data. Expert in demonstrating facts behind service use

Shop assistants / call centre staff

These are your employees and those who know the customer / end user best.

Responsible for providing a ‘real world’ view on your designs

Service Design Techniques

The briefRequirements, objectives, outcomes and expectations

The brief outlines what the client expects from your involvement in the project. It provides clarity around goals, objectives, expected outcomes, deliverables, milestones, budgets, timings and additional resource.

A good brief will also illustrate interdependent projects or initiatives that may have relevance for the project. It will provide focus while you are working on the project and need to make decisions.

All briefs should be signed off before work starts and continually updated. Briefs should act as a business case and be used to demonstrate expected outputs and provide justification when needed.

Be aware that you may not receive a brief. You may want or need to write one in collaboration with your client.

BriefClarity up front, saves re-work later

Service user personasGetting under the skin of your user

Emma, 43, Lincoln, Eastern England

A persona should bring your customer to life by outlining in detail their demographic, personality, characteristics, motivations, behaviours and desired outcomes.

It should also outline the relationship the customer has with the service and highlight their expectations and perceptions.

It’s important to remember that personas should be built using evidence sourced from customer data, analytics and insight. Making up a persona without using data and insight will only dilute the effectiveness of your work later on.

Don’t forget that you may need more than one persona, depending on the types of customer using your service. Remember to be cognisant of emotion and how this might change throughout the service journey.

An example of a persona we recently employed at a visitor experience conference

Clarity up front, saves re-work later

Empathy mapping Identifying best practice and commonalities

Empathy mapping is a great way of really getting to know your service users. By asking yourself the questions shown in the image on the left you can really start to understand the expectations people have of your service and what you will have to deliver against.

Understanding their perception and emotions will help ensure that your designs reflect the context and situation that your service users find themselves in.

Thinking about the pain a user might go through will really help foster some appreciation for the user experience. The output from this will help you create a service experience that anticipates these issues and dispels them for the service user as quickly as possible.

Putting yourself in their shoes

An example of an empathy map from the great book ‘This is service design thinking’ (Stickdorn/Schneider)

Competitive immersion Identifying best practice and commonalities

Competitive immersion is a great way of assessing a competitor service from the perspective of a service user. Whether it’s using an airline lounge or visiting the local general practitioner, it’s a great way to understand how everything starts to fit together.

You can start to identify the major touch points throughout the service and note down the feelings, emotions, sights and sounds you experienced as you interacted with the service.

Competitive immersion is about assessing and learning from leaders in service design. A lot of best practice and common service features can be gathered during these sessions. It’s really important to identify the things your customers really value and identify leaders who are particularly good in that area.

Exploring competitive worlds

Service user research 5W X H

Why, what, when, where, who and how

User research is a large subject, which is difficult to cover in such a short document. The approach or methodology you decide to adopt will invariably depend on your objectives and the insights you’re trying to discover.

Research can take a variety of forms, from straight forward qualitative and quantitative analysis to interactive contextual interviews.

Taking contextual interviews as an example, it can be a great way of understanding how users find, engage with and travel through a service journey. Interviewing users as they actively engage with a service can really help unearth those insights that would otherwise remain hidden. There’s no better tool for understanding why a user did or didn’t do something or how they reacted to a certain situation or event.

Storyboarding Milestone and event based scenarios

Graphical service design

Everyone loves a story and it’s a great way to engage everyone in the design process. The purpose of the storyboard is to walk colleagues through a future service experience from the viewpoint of the user.

The storyboard often takes a high level view of the service experience but provides readers with enough information to be able to identify and understand the major milestones and any potential pain points.

A storyboard doesn’t necessarily have to be a graphical drawing and you don’t need the skills of an artist to be able to create one. You can cut images out of magazines, sketch low fidelity matchstick people or even act out the story using amateur dramatics. The benefit of storyboarding is getting everyone on the same page and starting the necessary debate and discussion.

An example of storyboarding used to describe the major events happening within a service scenario

Customer journey mapping Define journeys, activities, tasks and events

End-to-end journey design

Journey mapping and task modelling are great ways to better understand what your customer is trying to achieve and the likely steps they might go through.

The best way to create a customer journey map

is to observe the customer in a real world setting. Watching the customer engage with a service or a similar environment can really help you gain clarity on the triggers, events and activities the customer goes through and experiences.

The journey map will help define the end-to-end service lifecycle and will encourage debate and discussion around key themes and events. Don’t forget to involve customers in this work. They will often highlight a lot of tasks and activities that would otherwise have remained hidden.

One of our own client journey designs. Used to bring to life the end-to-end service experience

Service blueprintDesigning behind the scenes

Thinking on-stage, remembering back-stage

A service blueprint is similar to a customer journey map. It traditionally covers the end-to-end experience from the customer point of view, albeit with a significant addition: the blueprint also includes behind the scenes activities and the business responses to service

user activity.

The merging of the customer and business perspective enables those using the map to understand how everything fits together. The ability to plan how a service reacts to customer behaviour is one of the most critical elements in ensuring the design works in reality.

One of the biggest benefits of generating a blueprint is the unification of disparate internal teams.A great service blueprint example from the guys at Servicedesigntoolkit.org

Service gap analysis Service improvement planning

Best practice service improvement

Service improvement is an important capability of any service organisation. Understanding the user experience can help identify, prioritise and plan improvements to further develop and strengthen the service being offered.

One of the best ways to do this is by running a maturity model exercise. The purpose of the model is to grade the service based on a set of attributes and capabilities. The model should take into account the view from service users and the organisation itself. The model is accompanied by a survey that enables those responsible for the service to score their current performance.

Viewing these results in line with service satisfaction reports can really accelerate improvement planning.

Using a maturity model can really help you understand current service experience versus the future once improvements have been made

Service prototypeService dress rehearsal

Practice makes perfect

Once you’ve designed your service you’ll want to test out your design and theory.

A great way to test your design is to conduct a service prototyping event. This involves re-creating the service, albeit using props or false

artefacts, to illustrate and represent major elements of the service experience.

By walking through the experience you will start to notice small improvements that need to be made. You’ll also start to understand what does and doesn’t work.

As the design work continues you can start to introduce more real life service elements into the prototyping.

A more creative way of running a service prototype event. It certainly gets people talking

Some important things to consider

Live practical testing is essentialDon’t stay in the land of theory

Real world testing

Testing your designs in the real world is the only way of ensuring the end design will actually work. Testing should happen throughout the design process, as this will help smooth out any problems and help to accelerate development.

It’s important to change testing over time. Practical testing can take the shape of prototyping or theoretical testing. However, at some point you’ll need to conduct some live testing using real environments, people, materials and processes.

Whilst it can be a nervous time for

any service designer, the benefits of real-world testing are significant.

Metro Bank. Renowned for the high service levels and differentiated banking experience

Design through participatory activities Get service users involved

Solicit help from actual service users

Encourage users to have their say on the service or any improvements you might want to make.

Service users are more than happy to share their views on what does and doesn’t work. Involving them early in your design process will help ensure the end result matches their needs and requirements. Manage their expectations though, you might not be able to fix and improve everything they have recommended.

It’s often a good idea to bring a new set of service users into the project at regular intervals. This helps prevent thinking and opinion from becoming stale whilst also helping to provide new critique of the on-going work.

Remember, without involving your service users any design is certain to fail. People will happily share their views with you. People love discussing

problems, issues, hopes and dreams

Engage third parties and suppliersServices are made up of interdependent ecosystems

Taken from Macmillan Cancer Support

Look beyond the service organisation

When designing services it’s important to consider the wider context within which your design will operate.

Taking the example on the left, Macmillan Cancer Support often has to design services in collaboration and partnership with other organisations within the state, voluntary and private sector.

Service experiences are often viewed by the user as encompassing a multitude of smaller journeys and experiences. It’s important to pull this all together and to take a holistic approach to design.

Consider the wider world. If you’re designing a healthcare service think about the other parties involved.

Anticipate the randomHope for the best, plan for the worst

Thinking about service user ‘side-steps’

Those involved in service design often get carried away in creating service experiences that differentiate and innovate. Whilst these are positive goals, it’s also important to consider and anticipate how users might react or behave differently to how you imagined.

Some service users might have different requirements or want a different solution to a particular problem. You need to ensure that your

service can deal with these ‘side steps’ and respond accordingly.

It’s difficult to respond to every potential deviation that a user might take but it’s worth spending some time at the very start of a project brainstorming some of the potential ‘side steps’ that might occur.

The ash cloud left airlines struggling to deal with upset and angry passengers. Those same airlines now have plans in place to deal with a future ‘unlikely’ event

How we can helpYou’re not alone

1Facilitation

Whether you’re looking

for us to run a design

session or simply attend

as a disruptive influence

we can help build a

blueprint that really

drives improvement

planning

2End to End

You may want us to

conduct a service

design project or

develop and manage a

continual improvement

initiative. We can be

both creative and

executional

3Strategy

You may be lacking a

coherent service design

strategy. You might have

grown very quickly. We

can help get a clear

strategy in place to help

you expand effectively