Ten years on - reflections on Service Design: From Insight to Implementation

By: Ben Reason, Lavrans L?vlie & Andy Polaine

Our book Service Design: From Insight to Implementation (Polaine, L?vlie & Reason) published by Rosenfeld Media is ten years old. It has sold over 22,000? copies and we are always delighted to hear when it is on the reading list for students or distributed to executives on business away-days. We like to think that the intent of the book, which was to inspire others to adopt or study service design, has been a success.?

Milestones are milestones and they provoke reflection. Ten years on from publication we had a little review of what has happened since and what we could add to the book were we to write it again today.?

Success/proof?

Service design was still very niche and in the early adopter market when we wrote the book. Now, whilst not ubiquitous, service design has developed into a much more common discipline with two key developments.?

First the sheer number of service designers out there working for organisations that see value. Secondly the range of industries doing so. A scratch survey showed an expected large number of service designers in healthcare and financial services but also service designers in fashion, manufacturing and NGOs. Service Design in the government and public service sector has grown enormously, too. Organisations such as Government Digital Services in the UK and 18F in the USA have not only built many a government service, but also created comprehensive design guides and systems to help others in government do the same and to a coherent standard.

Second, we have the proof of value. Ten years ago we were confident in our work and had seen results from these early clients, but we did not have the level of proof we have now. Proof at many levels from pure ROI to share price impact to cost savings in healthcare and public services. We also see many examples of organisational value in terms of more productive businesses and teams.

We would love to hear more success stories from beyond our networks.?

Fundamentals

In our discussion we noted that in our book we took time and space to state what we felt were the fundamentals of service design. Simply put these are both the design method but also the service perspective. In truth it is about how these two things come together.?

We felt that in some ways the fundamentals need re-stating. That in the development and scale of service design application some of the first principles have got muddied. This is most apparent in the ongoing debate / confusion over the differences between a number of design terms - from UX to Experience via Product and Human Centred Design. We feel that the fact that we are designing for service needs bold type. That at the core it is about designing for the relationships between parties and how they co-create value in the service encounter.

We are curious if others share this perspective?

Product

Digital product design, now mostly known simply as Product, has had a meteoric rise in prominence in the last 10 years since its emergence about 15 years ago. It has brought Lean and Agile practices, rituals and frameworks into many companies and organisations, transforming the way they work. In many cases this has been for the better, but it has also re-introduced industrial language and ways of thinking—products, shipping code, feature factories. In many cases, design has been relegated to a form of assembly line work devoid of any strategic thinking. Feature teams or squads also re-create silos all over again the result being that user experiences are disjointed and lack coherence across touchpoints. As we wrote in the book, “services created in silos are experienced in bits.”?

Service designers are often brought into those organisations to try and get an overview and glue those parts back together. Yet where do they now live in a product-led organisation and what is their mandate? Is this a different kind of service design altogether or the same discipline applied in a different context? We would like to take the opportunity to explore this new constellation and role.

Organisations?

This book marked in some way the end of the beginning of service design. The goal was to establish that designing the interactions between people and organisations in services was valuable. The book focuses on why that is important and then how to do it.?

What we did not cover in any way the depth required is that delivering on these designs requires organisational change. Since publication many of us and the service design community have been engaging in this challenge.?

We now have ten years of experience and examples of what is required of service design to effectively engage organisations in the process of implementation and change.?

The debate here is often how far design steps out of the traditional shaping role into more orchestration. We would love to hear what others think.

Methodological evolution

Finally, things don’t stand still. As the adoption and practice of service design has expanded so have the methods. In many ways. From the use of digital tools in the service design process, the evolution of business design,? to the adoption of methods from other disciplines such as system thinking and behavioural psychology.

On the one hand, the penetration of design thinking into the everyday parlance and practice of business has meant that methods such as journey mapping, ideation,? contextual interviewing, and clickable prototypes no longer need deep explanation. In fact, we’ve decided that this is a section of the book we would radically edit.

On the other hand, there are still methods that are pertinent to service design’s approach, such as blueprinting, and approaches that ensure the ecosystem view and the human element of services remains central to the design of services.

What has changed significantly is the rise of Product and all of the thinking, tools and frameworks that its rise has driven, along with the problems mentioned above. The tools and platforms for spinning up mock-up and micropilots of, at least, digital or physical touchpoints have advanced so much that it’s possible to build a high-fidelity prototype or demo of a website, an associated app, all connected to some APIs for, say, a voice-assistant, with minimal effort compared to ten years ago.

Ongoing challenge

Finally,we set out the challenge for service design to have economic, social and environmental impact. As we have said above there is now strong evidence for the impact of service design on the performance of service both economically and in terms of creating social value through better outcomes for people. On the ecological side progress has been frustratingly slow and, whilst there are examples we do not feel that service design has lived up to our hopes - but then our wider systemic ability to respond to this imperative is also lagging what is necessary.?

There are clearly steps to take to increase the economic and social value of service design and the state of the art in both these areas has moved on significantly since publication.?

On the environmental side there is a lot more debate and a lot more ideas and experimentation for how design can play its part in the transition to a sustainable future. This is going to be more and more central to all organisations in a way that digital transformation has been over the last 25 years. The challenge of our times.?