I’m yet to find, or produce my own, ‘perfect’ definition of Service Design. But the two above cover all the points I think should be covered.

So what are Service Designers trying to achieve?

When designing an end-to end service, Service Designers are constantly striving to:

• gain a deep understanding of users types, their respective needs and pain points, and how these work across both time and touch points
• map all impacted services, capabilties and integration points
• define the user journeys the concept, prodcut or service should enable
• gain a deep understanding of the technical understanding and feasibility
• gain a deep understanding of relevant existing business processes, policy and regulations

So what do Service Designers do?

Leadership & Guidance

• Provide design guidance and expertise to the client & team, to develop the service design capability
• Interpret and drive the vision of the project.
• Collaborate and drive design QA with other projects and designers.

Strategic Thinking
Using a strong understanding of the digital ecosystem and industry, they translate the client’s business strategic initiatives into the service that is design. Key to this is defining and measuring success (user and business value).

User Focus

• Advocate and drive user engagement continously.
• Identify user needs and turn this insight into actionable opportunities
• Manage the continuous feedback loop with the users.

Communication

• Advocate a user-centric mentality across the business, and articulate it’s value.
• Clearly articulate design, but importantly why decisions were made.
• Work with other project and manage interdependencies.

Design

• Solution complex problems and make design decisions, based upon user insight.
• Design services that take into consideration user needs, technology, and business processes (see my lovely venn diagram above!)

Workshops

• Own the vision of the workshop, maintain the agenda and crucially drive stakeholder engagement.
• They lead faciliation of the workshop, but the key part that makes it a success is the preparation.
• They are responsible then for the implementation of workshop outcomes and insights into project delivery and the design of the services.

Activities across the delivery phases

All designers are the same right?

Often clients are confused (and rightly so) by the term ‘designer’. As someone who has worked as both a Service Designer and a User Experience (Interaction) Designer, I (as does everyone) has their own definition of the responsibilities. Below is another handy venn diagram…