The UXing of Service Design

I have been thinking a little on service design and the ways in which I have seen it implemented. There has been good and there have been areas that could be improved.

Now I’m not an expert at service design, but I often see problems in the way in which a practice / methodology / framework (whatever) is implemented as an external party.

Muddy Waters

Service design is becoming a little like Agile, with every shade or variation under the sun. It’s starting to become that it’s implement differently in every place I go.

There is also a very dangerous undercurrent, in the definition of what it really is. In a way it’s becoming UXified — such that no one really knows what it is, just this muddy water of practice, which has a widening scope.

Just like UX has become too focused on the artifact and the design outcome, at the loss of the true understanding of what is needed to improve the experience, the objective. So too Service Design is moving down a dangerous slope. It’s becoming too customer centric, the entire focus is moving towards solving distinct customer facing issues.

Yes I can understand that from a organization view it’s easier to internally sell a project or even practice if it is completely centered on the customer. This gives the organization at least an out on the usual “customer centric” lip service that has been happening of late. We can extend beyond the usual digital into the general improvement of the customer experience. And service design is here like a magic bullet to do this.

Sadly this type of approach is just taking the easier road. Flip HCD (human centered design) into service design. This in turn gets passed on in training junior to think that service design is just an extension of customer experience or product design.

The Shiny Black Box

We are simply ignoring most of the service.

By just looking at the customer experience we are frankly just lip-sticking the business interface. This is just like last prettying up a digital user interface at the last minute; lip stick on a pig (or black box) anyone.

We may think we have the understanding of the customer experience issues. Yes, the right research practices, deep work and a impartial team will give a fairly even chance of heading in the right direction. But there is still the prospect that although the changes will meet the business objectives and the customers appears to be responsive the design; it will fail to look at the real problem as we become blinded by confirmation bias.

However we still are only looking at the outsides of the organization. We are only examining the out layer of the black box the customer sees.

If we leave it like this, sure it will work, for a while, but like a cancerous rot, the poisonous internal service delivery will, overtime, rise up and fester on the surface, pushing all that “transformation” aside.

Build from Within

Service design is about the entire ecosystem, all the interactions, not just an extensive customer experience layer. All the people involved, internal and external to the organization. Yes this makes it complex. Yes this doesn’t make it just a few procedural and digital changes. And yes it involves the culture of the organization.

It’s here I have seen design thinking (or the like) thrown into the mix as a solution. Again this has merit, but it requires the discipline to really look at the problem to make it work. Often here our cognitive dissonance works against us.

What I see tended to happen, is design thinking is used to promote an accelerated pathway to solution ideation. This often occurs with just a group of management “SME” with very little direct reference to real world staff or customers. Again we are missing the deep understanding and become biased as soon as we think we have some glimmer of a direction. Like dunked fools we lurch towards a candle light of insights, in an endless darkened tunnel, squashing the fragile butterflies of understanding beneath our muddy steel caps.

Empowerment

It’s interesting that the core basis of lean manufacturing (not lean six sigma) isn’t just waste reduction; it’s the democratization of the work process. Allowing people, on the front line of the service delivery, to control and improve their work process and procedures. Agile is also just this but for development teams, it’s a little ironic to see this flipped and sold back into the business as Agile with a broader scope beyond software development. Even as agile service design, which is a little strange of agile is product focused not ecosystem focused.

With service design, the pinnacle of the practice would be this empowerment of the decision process with the people that the doing the doing. The improvement here is in all the experiences in the service ecosystem, the empowerment for future sustainability of the change.

Service design becomes more of a collaborative practice not with management but with the people interacting to provide the services within the ecosystem.

This degree of collaborative design allows the greater uptake of a culture shift that is also required for service design and the overall transformation to be effective. Within an organization, the solid reality is this culture shift from the Victorian industrial centric top down to bottom up driven organization is at the heart of any change. For service design to become effective it has to embrace this empowerment change over the entire echo system. Not just change in terms of the old school dictates, but change in terms of a collaborative participatory design process across the silos of the ecosystem.

The first step is to understand the ecosystem.

Related posts:

Dauntless players can compete for a variety of coveted DLC.

It overshadows our brightest aspirations and undermines the landscape of our present circumstances. It attempts to overhaul our hope. Intoxicated by it, we are left enticed to believe in our…

I began online dating four months ago and it occurred to me early on how similar the process was to the way businesses market their goods and services through social media. Maybe you only have a…