When you face two coffee shops that sell the same quality and the same price, the point of service design is to let you walk into one rather than the other.
At present, the term “service design” in China has been noticed by many practitioners, and it has received widespread attention and spread rapidly in recent years. We often hear relevant theoretical sharing at various design industry conferences, and business and academia have also taken action to develop related service design. So what exactly is service design? How to effectively communicate service design? How is it different from the current user experience design? Let us first look at the concept and definition of service design.
What is service design?
When you search for “Service Design” on Wikipedia, you will see the relevant definition:
Service design is a form of conceptual design. Activities include planning and organizing services for users, infrastructure, communication, and physical entity components. The purpose is to promote the interaction between service providers and recipients and improve design quality.
There is also a more abstract concept that appears in a book: ” When you are faced with two coffee shops that sell the same quality and have the same price, the meaning of service design is to let you walk into one rather than the other. Here The coffee shop that customers want to choose is a typical business scenario with “process as an important service orientation”. The difference in service details between two competitor coffee shops is precise because they are separated from the cloud. These unique service details give the coffee shop its unique personality and the key to distinguish it from similar services.
This also reflects the current general trend and environment. When global companies provide similar technology products, technical capabilities, and business information, how can companies surpass industry competitors and stand out from the competition? How to seek differentiation through disruptive innovation? Both user experience and service design will become the indispensable core competitiveness of enterprises. What is the difference between user experience design and service design that most practitioners in the industry are currently doing?
The difference between service design and user experience
I’ve heard a metaphor before and found it very interesting: if the user experience is compared to the climax of a drama, then the service design is the whole drama. The service design includes the preparatory work done by the people before and after the opening, the plot and performance of each actor in the opening, the curtain call, and the perfect work after the closing. This is a comprehensive and complete ecological organization system.
In the current Internet wave, the output of user experience is mostly digital products based on IT, and it is more focused on the interaction between the user and the final digital device. So for service design, the scope of output is larger and more comprehensive. From the perspective of various channels and touchpoints, it not only acts on digital products, but also involves various channels such as customer service personnel, digital media, and physical entities.
Just like you go to a drama performance, ticket purchase methods include online ticket purchase, mobile phone order to obtain QR code, ticket exchange via QR code on physical device, ticket purchase at manual ticket window, telephone reservation, etc. Channels. For the current user experience design, it is mainly used for ticket purchase forms related to digital products, such as online ticket purchase, QR code ticket purchase, etc.
There are several obvious differences between service design and user experience design:
1. ECOSYSTEM & HOLISTIC service design focuses on the entire service ecosystem
In the past, when everyone mentioned the principle of user experience, the first reaction was “User center-user-centered”, while service design was the principle of “decentralization”. Good service design attempts to create a viable service ecosystem and obtain relevant data. In this environmental system, the roles involved in the service include physical facilities, rules to be followed, service providers in the front and back offices, and end-users of service receivers. Here, the user is no longer the most important role in the user experience in the past, not just the center of the service, but a part of the many stakeholders.
Service design thinking is to allow all users, employees, and other stakeholders to jointly establish, provide and enjoy services. In the process of joint design, we will improve user experience and employee satisfaction, continuously improve the process, and help the company finally achieve the set goals.
2. PRIORITY service has priority
In the entire ecosystem circle, we cannot always be in a position to take into account the user experience, just as drama will not always be at its climax. Therefore, in real life, with the cooperation and cooperation of multiple roles, the service is not blindly pursuing a comprehensive user experience. In different scenarios, services are prioritized, and sometimes in order to follow the rules of the ecosystem, it is even necessary to sacrifice user experience. Just like customers buying tickets through their mobile phones to watch movies, even if you want to find relevant ticket purchase information and movie introductions during the movie, you will be warned not to use mobile phones and other devices for fear of affecting other customers’ viewing of the movie. Experience and screening effects. Therefore, it is necessary to consider how to balance commercial demands and experience demands in a specific scenario.
3. Omni-channel cross-channel experience of OMNI-CHANNEL service
As mentioned earlier, service design is like a good drama, it needs to be done in a good narrative way to avoid putting too much pressure on users and customers. The service designer needs to grasp the normal sequence and rhythm, link the scenes, stories, characters, and other elements together, and arrange the priority and priority, and control and evaluate from a diversified level to ensure that stakeholders can learn from it. Get a quality experience.
The diversified level mentioned here refers to the omnichannel cross-channel experience. It means that in the process of using services and products, users may not only touch a single touchpoint or a single channel but use and complete the service across multiple channels. In the same scenario and environment, stakeholders will receive different content due to different needs, realizing seamless online and offline docking and conversion.
After comparing the difference between user experience and service design, we can measure the user experience of digital products through related indicators such as user conversion rate and user registration number. For service design, how should it be measured?
How to effectively communicate service design
In the entire ecosystem of service design, service design involves multiple scenarios, roles, rules, and task processes. Some of the elements involved are tangible and visible, while others are intangible and virtual. Service design emphasizes a transformation from intangible to tangible. The tangibility and visualization are well understood. What you see is what you get. What about those who cannot see in different scenarios? What methods and channels should be used to make users perceive it?
For example, when we are sitting in a restaurant and eating, the user buys the food from this restaurant, but cannot perceive the various attributes of the food material. If we broadcast the cultivation and picking process of vegetables in the restaurant, users can perceive this intangible service, such as green, natural, organic, healthy, etc., and display these intangible services so that users can perceive the restaurant’s food The pursuit of quality, and then get a high-quality service experience. And this also fits the cultural characteristics of the company, that is, how to establish a natural and organic brand image among the customer groups.
In order for different roles in different scenes to better perceive service methods and concepts, we need to locate precise channels and visualize the work of each role. For example, the more we understand the behind-the-scenes footage of film production, the more clearly we will recognize this. The quality of the film, the more favorable the film company’s brand is, the more naturally it will pay more attention to the films produced by the film company.
In addition, what we call service design is to maximize the value of service design through the links of various touchpoints, so that the entire link and the system have no breakpoints. For example, the author went to the “Harry Potter” park in Universal Studios Osaka a while ago. In addition to seeing the actual scenes of Diagon Alley, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and Pig’s Head Bar in the original and the movie, visitors can also You can experience games that cover virtual reality such as Quidditch, and the dining establishments also provide the butterbeer mentioned in the book. Even the toilets and washrooms have broken the traditional impression. There will be a crying myrtle in the background and the sound of puffing and puffing into the water. This fully restores the original work and surprises Harry Potter fans. From sight and hearing, A complete and systematic service ecosystem is created on each sense organ.
Finally, service design emphasizes how to integrate and utilize existing resources to achieve sharing, especially social public infrastructure and public resources. At present, various industries of food, clothing, housing, and transportation have consciously begun to calculate the input-output ratio in various dimensions such as system, management, time, and manpower. For example, Airbnb and Uber have fully demonstrated the need to integrate social resources and increase utilization to achieve a win-win situation.
Therefore, to convey service design, it is necessary to integrate various channel resources in the ecosystem and connect various touchpoints to form a transparent service. As for the multiple roles involved in the ecosystem, how to improve service quality and efficiency requires a detailed classification of multiple roles such as users, employees, stakeholders, and service providers. The responsibilities of employees are no longer the most singular in the entire ecological cycle, but should serve the diversification of resource allocation, and need to be unified and coordinated to enhance the competitiveness of products or services. The same applies to the industry. Thinking about how to integrate with the same industry, field, and upper and lower industrial chains will make the entire ecological chain more perfect.
Because service designers need to have various skills such as strategic planning, national culture, visual and information design, product design and industrial design, operation management, brand experience design, space experience design, technology development, system development, organizational innovation, industry fields, etc., The required talents are also very comprehensive. At this stage, service design is in its infancy in China, and the practitioners and industry are not yet mature. There are not many actual cases that can be referred to. How to do service design, how to improve the competitiveness of products or services, how to cultivate a systematic way of thinking, and how to improve resource cost utilization are all worthy of more exploration and practice.
