Today I attended a presentation at the Dutch Design Week by Marcel Zwiers from 31volts about Service Design. It’s a subject I’ve become more and more interested in over the last few months. If we take so much time designing products, what about services? And what value could it add? Especially for healthcare I suspect there might be significant gains in exploring the methods used. I will do a post on that later, first I’ll list my key take-aways about service design in general.
Don’t evolve. Design.
A service consists of technology + business + people. Service design focuses on the people. Important principles are design thinking, a holistic approach and people centeredness. So more buzzwords – what will that help us? It makes us think, that’s what I believe is most imporant. Evolving services is the normal route. If it’s not what or how the customer wants it – we’ll change it later. That’s a major FAIL.
Services are far too often becoming patchwork. While their are tools and techniques available that help to build a service that connects better to both the user and the provider. Service design as Marcel explained takes two important things at heart: create value (for the user) and use a design process.
It’s not what you think it is.
Service design is like solving crosswords. Or a visual illusion for that matter. It’s seeing one thing, but knowing that there’s something more – a deeper layer. Rijkswaterstaat is not about laying tarmac, it’s about giving the people the opportunity to meet and connect. Staatsbosbeheer (Dutch Forest Reserves) looks like being about trees, but owns the countries’ largest fitness space. Think twice. What’s it you’re offering to your users? How can you do that? Take a look at the presentation below for an idea of what a service designer does.
Service designs need a business case.
When you have a company interested in doing a service design project you’re lucky (often heard response: “it’s always been okay, hasn’t it? why change it?”). But the key take away I got from the presentation – and some of the articles in SDN Touchpoint – is that these designs are in need of a good business case. There are different levels these ideas/designs need to be communicated and rightfully so someone is going to ask the question what value does it serve – is service going up, is it going to make more people use the service, will they light up green and do a happy dance? And you better have an answer, if you want to go beyond sketches, visualizations and ideas. That’s where designers and strategies can meet. There’s a good article about that in SDN Touchpoint issue, by James Moed (business strategist, IDEO) and Fran Samalionis (head of Service Design, IDEO).
Crippling?
Service design is no panacea in any form, but it gets a lot of things right. We must not let it cripple in what direction we can improve services, let alone saying that it is the way to go. @fackeldeyfinds stated that well in a Twitter discussion: let people think again. Service design can be one the ways we can help that along.
Oh and yes, we need to think about more titles like Chief Customer Officer. Or Chief Patient Officer :-)
I’ll write some more on this in future posts – I’d love to hear your thoughts! Thanks to @marcfonteijn for inviting me to attend the presentation!
Service Design door Marcel Zwiers – Dutch Design Week 2009 from 31Volts on Vimeo.
