Following excerpt from: Designing for Interaction: Creating Innovative Applications and Devices by Dan Saffer (in our library), Also: http://www.designingforinteraction.com/
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More and more, the products that interaction designers work on are connected to a service, to the point where it may not be meaningful to distinguish between them anymore for interaction design. A service is a chain of sequential, parallel, or nonlinear activities or events that form a process and have value for the end user. You engage in a service when you get your shoes shined or your nails manicured or when you visit a fast-food restaurant. Your mobile phone’s usage plan is a service, and you participate in a service every time you travel on a plane, train, or taxi. Services can be small and discreet, such as the sale of postage stamps by some ATM machines, or they can be huge, such as the sorting and delivery of physical mail. Service providers are all around us and account for an enormous portion of the world economy from restaurants and bars to dry cleaners, hospitals, construction companies, street cleaners, and even complete governments. Services are everywhere. Services greatly affect our quality of life because we are touched by so many of them every day. A poor service can make your subway ride to work uncomfortable, your packages late or undelivered, your lunch distasteful, your mobile phone coverage poor, and your ability to find evening TV shows problematic.
Why is service design important?
According to one IBM report, today more than 70 percent of the U.S. labor force is engaged in service delivery. New technology has enabled internationally tradable services. We are at a tipping point. A huge portion of the economy is now focused on knowledge-based information services. I believe that as we shift to this service-centered society, it won’t be good enough to view services from a purely management or operations-based perspective. Companies will need to turn to service design and innovation to differentiate themselves in increasingly competitive markets and to create opportunities that address new challenges in the service sector. How is designing a service different from designing a product? When designing a product, much of the focus is on mediating the interaction between the person and the artifact. Great product designers consider more of the context in their design. In service design, designers must create resources that connect people to people, people to machines, and machines to machines. You must consider the environment, the channel, the touch point. Designing for service becomes a systems problem and often even a systems challenge. The elements or resources that designers need to create to mediate the interactions must work on all these levels and at the same time facilitate connections that are deeply personal, open to participation and change, and drop-dead stunning.
What can interaction designers bring to the design of services?
Interaction designers use methods in their process that can be directly applied to service design. Immersive ethnographic methods can help designers account for the complexity of service elements that are onstage, backstage, visible, and invisible in the service experience. We add a kind of theater or enactment to our service process. Enactment is when first the development team and then participants from the delivery organization act out the service experience with specific roles and rough props. I’ve seen this technique become more popular with interaction designers in recent days. Developing constituent archetypes or personas is also useful in service design since the characters can be used to drive service scenarios before they are enacted. […].
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Following excerpt from: Design Dictionary edited by Michael Erlhoff and Tim Marshall (see library reference shelf or general catalogue)
What exactly is service design? Service design addresses the functionality and form of services from the perspective of clients. It aims to ensure that service interfaces are useful, usable, and desirable from the client’s point of view and effective, efficient, and distinctive from the supplier’s point of view.
Service designers visualize, formulate, and choreograph solutions to problems that do not necessarily exist today; they observe and interpret requirements and behavioral patterns and transform them into possible future services. This process applies explorative, generative, and evaluative design approaches, and the restructuring of existing services is as much a challenge in service design as the development of innovative new services.
When seen from this angle, service design stands in the tradition of product and interface design, enabling the transfer of proven analytical and creative design methods to the world of service provision. In particular, there are close ties to the dimensions of interaction and experience that originated in interface design. Even if these fields of study are still primarily oriented around designing human-machine interfaces, parallels have emerged in theoretical and methodological development, in the search for factors to be noted and influenced when designing an experience, though experience cannot really be designed, only the conditions that lead to experience.
The development of a formal language for services is one of the exciting new fields in development and practice, because a formal language of services just might become the basis for systematically creating conditions that would make it possible to design the experiences of services. A formal language for services empowers service designers to create interactions, spaces, and processes on the basis of a solid knowledge of causal relationships.
The use-oriented approach that came to the fore in interaction design in the 1990s and channeled creativity in the development of methods such as persona creation is one of the approaches refined and rigorously applied in the creation of human-human and human-artifact interactions in service design. Taking the perspective of clients as the starting point reverses many customary approaches by service companies and raises questions about truly innovative and user-centered, flexible, and dynamic organizational structures and processes. The understanding of product-service elements that has since become well established in service provision research has been an especially important factor in giving the interdisciplinary networking of competencies (which is, in itself, characteristic of design processes) a central role in the service sector. There is still debate about whether service design is primarily about the simultaneous definition of virtual and material aspects of the service, the coordination of human-human and human-machine interfaces, or the design of experiences where functionality and emotionality are equally accounted for in the integration of new technologies for intelligent and client-oriented standardization. This debate can ultimately only be resolved by interdisciplinary design teams.
On the one hand, service design can make use of theoretical and methodological competencies in established design capabilities; on the other, it opens up new questions. Can service-specific methods — for example blueprinting that was developed in service marketing — be further developed and optimized as a creative tool? The creation of service blueprints was certainly an important first step in making virtual services an actual and visible object of design. Nonetheless, this method remained very much anchored in the presentation of processes in the form of flow diagrams and left open the question of how the emotional dimension of client interaction with these processes could be integrated systematically into the design process.
That question led to the development of the client journey as a schema by which service design can capture and illustrate the complete process of a service with its emotional, material and procedural components from a client’s perspective — thus making it possible to model it.
“Touch points” are essential to understanding the client journey. The analysis of existing services examines whether touch points are correctly positioned. Is the concrete, visual, olfactory, acoustic, and tactile evidence suitable for making the service comprehensible and able to be experienced by clients? Hence the development of service evidence is an autonomous focus in service design concerned with making it possible to observe the virtual and assign dimensions to it.
All approaches to redesign and to the innovation of services are extremely well served by design competencies in prototyping, because service prototypes are vital aids in the whole process of developing ideas and making decisions. Storyboards illustrate the newly created service process from the perspective of the clients and help to visualize the full observation of scripts, roles, scenery, and props. With little effort, mock-ups can clarify where design interventions are possible in service provision. Service enacting — role-playing service interactions — is a method for designing services that amounts to a new form of rapid prototyping: acting out service situations very quickly clarifies the direction the service design process should take.
The performing arts are one field being explored by current service design research projects to tap into their potential for concept transfer and provide inspiration for innovative forms of organization, notation, and communication. Perceptions and procedures derived from the performing arts have proved useful when embarking on the service design process. Hence the metaphor of front and back stage is a very helpful model for creativity, because it reveals the necessity for a comprehensive view of the whole system and the necessity to cast processes, locations, props, and actors from one mold. Storyboarding provides a comprehensive system for thinking about and visualizing the procedural narrative structure from the perspective of clients. There may be many more such impulses concealed within the theatrical process of ideas to performance that would be valuable and fruitful for the autonomous design of services.
Service design is a rapidly growing field that has since been given a thorough theoretical and methodological basis and has established itself internationally in research, teaching, and consulting. However, it is still a very young discipline that contains many exciting, undiscovered lines of research and continues to invite us to explore the unknown and pursue exciting experiments.
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GD301_Fall 2019 