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.
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 channels 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 (
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 interactions, 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 businesses (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.
You do not mention [insert your favorite method here]. Why not?
We cover many practical methods in Chapter 4, but due to space considerations 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 appropriate, 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 (
