Service Design
Service design plans and shapes the people, processes, and touchpoints that make up a service so that it works well for both users and the organisation providing it.
Definition
Service design is the practice of designing services as coherent systems of touchpoints, processes, and interactions to deliver value to users and providers.
Scope
This topic covers the design of services as systems of interactions over time, the use of tools such as service blueprints, journey maps, and touchpoint analysis, the orchestration of front-stage and back-stage activity, and the extension of design from products and interfaces to intangible, co-produced experiences. It treats service design as a holistic, human-centred and systemic discipline closely linked to UX and interaction design.
Core questions
- How does designing a service differ from designing a product or interface?
- How are front-stage experiences and back-stage processes coordinated?
- What tools, such as blueprints and journey maps, support service design?
- How is value co-produced between providers and users in a service?
Key theories
- Service blueprinting
- Shostack introduced the service blueprint, a diagram that maps the steps of a service across a line of visibility separating customer-facing actions from supporting back-stage processes, making intangible services designable.
- Holistic service design thinking
- Stickdorn and Schneider frame service design as user-centred, co-creative, sequenced, evidenced, and holistic, integrating multiple touchpoints and stakeholders into a coherent experience over time.
History
Service design has roots in 1980s service marketing, where Shostack's blueprinting made services explicit objects of design. It developed into a distinct design discipline in the 2000s through agencies such as live|work and academic programmes, and has been widely applied to public services, healthcare, and digital-physical experiences.
Debates
- Design discipline versus management practice
- Whether service design is a genuinely designerly, experience-led discipline or a repackaging of service management and operations, and how its creative methods add value beyond existing process improvement.
Key figures
- G. Lynn Shostack
- Marc Stickdorn
- Andy Polaine
- Birgit Mager
Related topics
Seminal works
- shostack1984
- stickdorn2011
- polaine2013
Frequently asked questions
- What is a service blueprint?
- A service blueprint is a diagram that maps the customer's journey alongside the front-stage interactions and back-stage processes and systems that support it, separated by lines of visibility and interaction, used to design and improve services.
- How does service design relate to UX design?
- UX design typically focuses on a person's experience with a single product or interface, whereas service design takes a broader, systemic view of an entire service across many touchpoints and over time, including the organisation behind the scenes.