Service Design is a discipline of design which focuses on designing the way companies make things happen, rather than how the user experiences the things. Instead of the experience of the user, it is the experience of the employee. Rather than focussing on designing a product to use, service design focussing on creating a service blueprint, a guide for improvement within a company. This was really interesting to me as it shows service design is not just designing something for employees, but is about designing fundamental systems and services, the things the won’t notice compared to the tools they use. For me, the most interesting part of service design is the idea that this is almost invisible design, in a similar way to UX is. It’s not about creating something they’ll see and use, it’s making something that ideally after a while, they’ll forget is even there because it works so well. This invisibility of Service Design is fascinating to me and something I want to investigate into further.
To continue learning about service design, I read GOV.uk’s Service Standard’s. Gov.uk is a massive organisation which runs pretty efficiently, so felt this would be a really good resource to look at. The first idea that I found interesting from this was the idea of Success Metrics for Service Design. As I said earlier, service design is an almost invisible things while affecting a massive amount of a company, so there needs to be a lot of planning to make sure you can tell the service design is being effective. Identifying and defining success metrics to be able to measure success of service design is vital, as without it, it will be extremely hard to tell if it is working. This is something I’d be very interested in seeing how it works in the future, as I struggle to imagine how to identify a metric that can’t be influenced by other things. I’ll definitely keep an eye out for this in the future when I start placement.
The other point I found interesting was the idea of agile design. This basically means quickly iterating and testing with users, to achieve the best possible outcome. This makes a lot of sense, as service design has you working on such fundamental systems to a company, making big changes a long time apart could be disastrous if it doesn’t work. This way of working is something I want to explore in the future as I think that designer user back and forth is really interesting and something I want to develop into my own skillset.
Service Standard - Service Manual - GOV.UK
To explore service design further, I took part in a class exercise where we created a service blueprint for someone going to A&E. We began by identifying the phases of what happens during a visit to A&E, then described the Patients actions for each phase. After the Actions, we then identified the touch points for each actions. This concluded the user side of the blueprint, as this was all of the steps and touch points the user sees.
For the second part of the blueprint, we were tasked with developing just one of the steps into a full blueprint by identifying the actions of the system, support process, pain points, and opportunities.
With the draft complete, we moved the complete column into a digital template.
I found the idea of service blueprints really interesting. I’ve not had the opportunity to consider then background system in most of my projects so far, so it was interesting thinking about how they relate to the user. It works really well at getting the whole picture of what needs fixed, and while not relevant to my current projects, is definitely something I’ll try to use in the future.