Service Design is an eminently practical guide to designing services that S E R work for people. It offers powerful insights, methods, and case studies to V I C help you design, implement, and measure multichannel service experi- E D ences with greater impact for customers, businesses, and society. E S I G “For anyone making the journey into the world of service design, this book, informed by its authors’ N hard-won knowledge and field experience, should be your first stop.” b y JESSE JAMES GARRETT P Author of The Elements of User Experience O L A “A great introduction to service design by people who shaped this approach from its early years on.” I N MARC STICKDORN E , Editor and Co-Author of This Is Service Design Thinking L Ø V “An easy-to-read introduction to service design, with great examples from one of the world’s leading L I E service design agencies. A ‘must read’ for anyone who wants to become familiar with service design , in theory, methods, and practice!” a n d PROF. BIRGIT MAGER President, Service Design Network gGmbH R E A “There’s no better way to learn about service design than from those who have built it from the S O ground up.” N MARK HUNTER Chief Design Officer, Design Council (UK) Cover Illustration by Lotta Nieminen SERVICE DESIGN From Insight to Implementation www.rosenfeldmedia.com MORE ON SERVICE DESIGN by ANDY POLAINE, LAVRANS LØVLIE, www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/service-design/ and BEN REASON foreword by John Thackara Service DeSign From inSight to implementation Andrew Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie, and Ben Reason Rosenfeld Media Brooklyn, New York Service Design: From Insight to Implementation By Andrew Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie, and Ben Reason Rosenfeld Media, LLC 457 Third Street, #4R Brooklyn, New York 11215 USA On the Web: www.rosenfeldmedia.com Please send errors to: [email protected] Publisher: Louis Rosenfeld Developmental Editor: JoAnn Simony Managing Editor: Marta Justak Interior Layout Tech: Danielle Foster Cover Design: The Heads of State Indexer: Nancy Guenther Proofreader: Ben Tedoff © 2013 Rosenfeld Media, LLC All Rights Reserved ISBN: 1-933820-33-0 ISBN-13: 978-1-933820-33-0 LCCN: 2012952337 Printed and bound in the United States of America DeDication To my wife, Karin, and my daughter, Alemtsehay, who have both seen the back of my head during the writing of this book more than they deserve —Andy Polaine To my wife, Birgit, and children, Lars and Ella, my grounding and my inspiration —Lavrans Løvlie To Kate, Otto, and Liberty. I love you. —Ben Reason how to USe thiS Book This book was a team effort by Andy Polaine (interaction and service designer, lecturer, and writer) and Lavrans Løvlie and Ben Reason, co-founders of the service design firm live|work. When we formerly worked as interaction and product designers, we realized that what we were often being asked to design was just one part of a larger, more complex service. No matter how well we did our job, if another link in the chain was broken, the entire thing was broken from the customer’s perspective. We believe service design offers a way of thinking about these problems as well as clear tools and methods that can help designers, innovators, entrepreneurs, managers, and administrators do something about it. To date, there are only a few books on service design as we understand the term. Some are collections of academic papers, and one or two give an over- view of methods. They all have their merits, but we wrote this book because we wanted to capture both the philosophy and thinking of service design and connect it with very practical ways of doing service design. This book is based on our experience with developing, doing, selling, and teaching service design over several years. It is also a stake in the ground, because we fully expect the practice to continue to develop and grow as more people take up the practice. Our hope is that readers will take what we have written as a starting point, not dogma, and go out and make the world a less annoying, less resource-hungry place. Who Should Read This Book? Service design is an activity carried out by a multidisciplinary group of people that includes Web designers, interaction designers, user experience designers, product designers, business strategists, psychologists, ethnographers, infor- mation architects, graphic designers, and project managers. Anyone from these backgrounds should find something valuable within this book’s pages. For many people involved in interaction, user experience, and human- centered design, the insights-gathering methods described in this book will be familiar, as will some of the experience prototyping methods. The mate- rial about the history of service design, blueprinting, service ecologies and propositions, and measurement may be new to people coming from other design disciplines. That said, we think the way the familiar elements fit into the service design context can also be enlightening. iv For design directors, marketing people, change agents, managers, and direc- tors of companies and organizations, the case studies and strategic thinking sections will probably be the most inspiring, but we are at pains to point out that the devil is in the execution. The rest of the book deals with the details, which are as important as the vision. Understanding how service designers gather the material they present to stakeholders and what they intend to do with it afterward is important for those who commission designers. This understanding helps everyone work together more fruitfully and speak the same language. Lastly, this book provides a good framework, set of tools, and case studies for anyone teaching service design, either as a module of another design program or as a complete program in itself. We believe this book contains a valuable mixture of theory and practice. In fact, we would not separate the two. What’s in This Book? In Chapter 1, “Insurance Is a Service, Not a Product,” we begin with a complete case study of Norway’s largest insurance company, Gjensidige, to provide an overview of how service design deals with everything from small details to business strategy. This chapter touches on the entire process and puts the rest of the book into context. Chapter 2, “The Nature of Service Design,” examines the history leading to the development of service design, the shift from product to service economies in developed countries, and the ramifications for both design and business. The change in thinking from designing things to designing services is greater than many people think. We also make the case for why services need designing at all, and develop a rough taxonomy of services. Chapters 3 and 4 are all about people—the heart of services. Chapter 3, “Understanding People and Relationships,” makes the case that designers working with services need to understand the relationships among all the people involved in the service, as well as recognize what opportunities exist for improvement or innovation. Chapter 4, “Turning Research into Insight and Action,” offers a range of very practical tools and methods for capturing insights into people’s lives and using them to inform the design. How to Use This Book v Chapters 5 and 6 tackle the design of services and the methods most specific to service design. In Chapter 5, “Describing the Service Ecology,” we show how defining and mapping out the service ecology and developing service blueprints enable designers to understand and describe how services work. Chapter 6, “Developing the Service Proposition,” describes how to use the service blueprint to view the complexity of a service through the eyes of customers or users taking a journey over time and across the multiple chan- nels of the delivery of a service. Chapter 7, “Prototyping Service Experiences,” explains the need to work with people outside the office, studio, or lab to prototype the experience of a service. Working with people who have a stake in the service as customers or staff enables designers to improve the design before development costs are incurred. Prototypes need criteria by which we can measure the success or failure of the design, which is the topic of Chapter 8, “Measuring Services.” We show how measurement can be introduced by service designers to not only monitor a service’s performance for management but to empower delivery agents and teams to understand how to improve their role in the overall quality of the service. This does not have to be a case of choosing between customer experience and profits, but can be a win-win situation for all. Chapter 9, “The Challenges Facing Service Design,” is our vision of where we think service design is heading and where its opportunities might lie. This chapter is more speculative, though we use case studies to highlight some of the trends we are seeing in the field. What Comes with This Book? This book’s companion website ( rosenfeldmedia.com/books/ service-design/) contains links to resources related to service design and to this book in particular. You’ll find more at the live|work site (www. livework.co.uk) and at Andy’s site, Playpen (www.polaine.com/playpen). We’ve also made available the book’s diagrams, screenshots, and other illustrations (when possible) under a Creative Commons license for you to download and include in your own presentations. You can find these on Flickr at www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/sets/. vi How to Use This Book FreqUently aSkeD qUeStionS Is service design just customer experience, user experience, or interaction design? No. They are close cousins to service design, but they are not the same, although work in both customer experience and user experience forms part of service design’s remit. We often use the term “user” instead of “customer” in the book, sometimes interchangeably, but sometimes because there are contexts in which a service user might not be a customer or because a service user might also be a service provider (such as a teacher or a nurse). Some projects lend themselves to different language—customers, partners, clients, patients—depending on the project context. Interaction and user experience design are often understood as design for screen-based interac- tions, but service design covers a broader range of channels than this. Some projects have a strong digital component, of course, so interaction and user experience design have an important part to play, but so do product design, marketing, graphic design, and business and change management. Chapters 2, 5, 6, and 7 reveal the key differences. Is service design “design thinking”? Service design does, ideally, work at the strategic business level, connecting business propositions with the details of how they will be delivered. It also champions the idea of designing with people and not just for them (see Chapter 3). This may mean the use of terms such as “co-production” or methods that include multiple stakeholders within an organization, such as management and frontline staff. We see service design as distinct from design thinking in that it is also about doing design and implementation. It also makes use of designers’ abilities to visualize and make abstract ideas tangible. Why are there so many case studies from live|work? The most obvious answer to this question is that Ben and Lavrans are co-founders of live|work and thus have access to these projects from their own professional experience. The less obvious reason is that many service design projects are about innovation. The results of these projects filter into the public domain through new services or improvements to existing ones, but many companies want to keep their internal activities confidential. On the one hand, this is a good sign that service design adds real value to busi- nesses (see Chapter 8). On the other hand, finding examples not covered by nondisclosure agreements is difficult. This is also the reason why there are few images of behind-the-scenes, in-process project work in the book. vii You do not mention [insert your favorite method here]. Why not? We cover many practical methods in Chapter 4, but due to space consider- ations we left out several methods that are common to all forms of design, concentrating instead on those specific to service design. Where are your references and sources? We have provided footnotes for the key references in the book, where appro- priate, but we did not want to turn the book into an academic text. That is not to say our arguments are not robust or rigorously researched. We have hundreds of papers and references in our personal libraries. If there is something we should have credited or that is plain wrong, contact us on the book’s website ( www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/service-design/) and we will try to make amends, either on the site or in future editions. The Service Design Network (www.service-design-network.org) and Jeff Howard’s excellent sites—Service Design Books (www.servicedesignbooks.org) and Service Design Research (http://howardesign.com/exp/service/index.php)—are good places to find service design resources. What is the best way to convince management to spend money on service design? This is the million-dollar question. In Chapter 8 we discuss strategies for measuring the return on investment in service design and how to think about measurement not just in terms of profits but also by considering other metrics in the triple bottom line of economic, social, and ecological benefits. Are you saying that service design can do everything? Service design is both broad and deep and necessarily covers many areas and disciplines, but as we argue in Chapter 9, we are not design superheroes who can do it all. Service design works best when designers collaborate with professionals from the disciplines appropriate to the project in hand. viii Frequently Asked Questions contentS How to Use This Book iv Frequently Asked Questions vii Foreword xiii Chapter 1 Insurance Is a Service, Not a product 1 Consumer Insights 3 Company Insights 6 Putting Insights into Practice 10 Experience Prototyping the Service 11 The End Is Just the Beginning 14 Chapter 2 the Nature of Service Design 17 Why Do Services Need Designing? 18 How Services Differ from Products 19 Services Created in Silos Are Experienced in Bits 22 Services Are Co-produced by People 23 A New Technological Landscape: The Network 24 The Service Economy 28 Core Service Values 28 Making the Invisible Visible 31 The Performance of Service 31 Unite the Experience 33 Summary 34 Chapter 3 Understanding people and relationships 35 People Are the Heart of Services 36 Insights versus Numbers 38 Summary 46 ix