Service Design guide: A human-centric methodology
Service design is a methodology that aims at creating the best possible customer experience.
It involves both customers and service delivery teams in a human-centric, collaborative approach. The customer experience and the business processes are considered together to obtain an in-depth understanding of how to best deliver the expected services.
Service Design Research, or Discovery and Exploration
Service design seldom begins with the consumer, despite the fact that it is a human-centric approach that promises to start with the customer and place them at the center of its process.
Understanding the culture, organization, and objectives of the business that is delivering the service is the first step.
It's crucial to pay particular attention to the team's objectives as part of this first step. The problem that a team is expected to tackle is frequently a symptom rather than the true cause, which needs to be surfaced before further design activities can be initiated. After the project's purpose is clarified, the team gathers actual data on customer experience and behavior. To get a deeper knowledge of the practices and routines of the individuals they create for. To investigate people's behavior, context, and motives, service design uses a number of tools and techniques. Personas, customer journey maps, stakeholder maps, etc. are examples of data visualization tools. These visual methods can aid the design team in demystifying complicated concepts and offering original viewpoints on client experiences. The problems and opportunities identified during this step are then prioritized by the team.
Service Design Ideation, Creation or Concept Design
After a thorough and shared understanding of customers has be achieved, observations can be shaped into novel ideas and concepts. An essential component of service design is idea generation, although this is not as crucial as many people believe.
Ideas are ultimately simply the beginning of a larger evolutionary process. Coming up with game-changing thoughts requires an iterative approach, that includes iterative processes, including mass producing, mixing, recombining, distilling, and evolving ideas. To produce sustainable solutions, teams should be organized to include all stakeholders: Consumers, workers, management, engineers, designers, and other significant individuals who might offer particular viewpoints.
Remember that service design is an inclusive process where errors are exploited to bring better long-term solutions, rather than to avoid mistakes. With an inclusive, iterative concept design process, teams are able to take useful actions early on and deepen their learning far faster than if they were merely exchanging ideas through quick reviews of various service prototypes.
Service Design Prototyping, Reflection or Testing
Next, ideas and their underlying assumptions are tested through prototyping. To investigate, assess, and explain potential customer experiences for future service scenarios, prototyping is employed. Prototyping is one of the simplest and most affordable methods to demonstrate how a concept for providing a service may operate.
Customers must have a clear mental image of the proposed service concept. The goal of this step is to give clients a clear mental image of the proposed service. Teams can learn a lot by testing things in a low-fi style before settling on a final solution, whether they are prototyping a tangible product, such as a cardboard arrangement for a new office space, or a way of welcoming consumers. Prototyping should also help check the service's emotional components.
To achieve this, videos, pictures and storyboards can be helpful tools. By validating assumptions early on and obtaining consumer input, prototypes help prevent costly mistakes later in the design process.
Service Design Implementation, or Roll-out
Several distinct disciplines may be involved in the implementation of service design initiatives. These can involve product development or engineering for the creation of physical products, software development for applications, and human resources and operations management for organizational procedures and processes.
Change management at different levels will often be necessary for the deployment of new service concepts. To be successful, the implementation step needs to:
1. Prepare for the change by communicating clearly to both consumers and staff the future service design, and by clarifying expectations.
2. Define the implementation stages upfront to carry out the change consistently throughout the organization.
3. Evaluate the change by checking the consistency of implementation and whether a consensus on the quality of the new design has been achieved.
