CHAPTER 9

What Is Service Design, and Why Is It Suddenly Sexy?

What Is Service Design?

Have you ever noticed that people who sell tangible products—such as cars or even clothes—focus on the intangibles or services their products will deliver, whereas people who sell services such as banks, often call their offerings products? In the continuum between products and services, almost every so-called product or service falls somewhere in the middle. Each offering, say a mortgage or a physiotherapy, is a product, in that it has some structure—by way of a price point, a benefit, a mode of delivery an underlying technology or principle, and a form—physical or digital. But every product is also a service—seen as the lifetime of value it delivers every time you use it. An electric iron provides the service of pressed clothes, and a saucepan provides the service of cooking—admittedly not by themselves, but you expect to extract that service over the lifetime of the product. In case of an actual service—this is easy to understand—if you’re eating a meal at a restaurant or taking a train ride. For a product, this is a little harder to visualize and model. One way of looking at this service model is that the service is the sum total of your experiences with the product, and incorporates everything from how the product is initiated, used, consumed, updated, and even discarded.

Some of these words such as initiated and updated sound a bit like software terms. They are simply my convenient terms for which you’re welcome to use alternatives. Before you actually use an item of furniture you may need to get it home, set it up or assemble it, move it around, and discard the packaging. A packet of sugar may require unsealing, transfer to a container, or resealing. As products go more digital—they will require to be connected to the power socket or charged, set up—which may include a Wi-Fi connection, and some initial instructions. All of this is the initiation—increasingly significant for digital products. And likewise, all products need an update from time to time—which may include cleaning, repair, maintenance work, but for digital, this could be software updates, and for complex products, it could involve replacement of parts.

Once you start thinking of products through their life cycle, you can understand why the idea of a layer of service applies to everything—from hotel rooms, to fountain pens. And when you think about designing—this brings to the forefront the notion of service design. When you apply it to products—you start to consider the entire set of life cycle experiences the product offers. When you apply it to services, you consider all the components that are responsible, including human interactions, infrastructure, computers, and physical environments. As a designer, when you take ownership of the experience, you take on a bigger task than simply focusing on the narrow product or service definition. When Lenny Riggio, the CEO of Barnes and Noble, suggested that one of his better decisions was to put toilets in his stores, he was inadvertently thinking service design. He wasn’t just thinking about how people buy books—he was thinking of the entire experience of book browsing, and recognizing that often the call of nature is what would curtail a book browsing experience.

So, Why Is Service Design Suddenly So Hot?

“Software is Eating the World.” This quote by Marc Andreessen rings true, no matter what industry you look at. Every product and service we use, from health to automobiles is getting smarter. And increasingly, the value of the product or service is delivered by the software and code rather than the physical infrastructure. Everything is also getting connected. And the combination of smart and connected can fundamentally reshape our interactions.

Technology Brings the Physical World to Life

The digital world is bringing our experiences to life in different and unique ways. What used to be just a poster or a hoarding for a coffee shop in an airport can now allow us to scan a coupon and get a discount if we use it within the next 30 minutes. So, instead of just noting the hoarding, we can actually engage with its message. A smart weighing scale not only tells us our weight but keeps a record of previous readings, shows us trends, perhaps identifies patterns in our weight that can be inferred by us, by the machine or by our doctors, who may be sent the data directly by the weighing scale. As you can see, these smarter products are reshaping our experience model. And we talked earlier about the service model being a sum of our experiences with a product. The onus is on us to design these experiences.

Use, Not Own

One of the outcomes of digital models is the emergence of the sharing economy. As with everything else, there is probably more hype than reality about what can be shared. But we’ve already seen examples of how we can start to rent assets to each other in more meaningful ways. Spare rooms and second homes can be put on Airbnb (or even your own home if you’re away for a week, as many do). You can rent your car parking space, or rent yourself along with your car. Conversely, you can use a car without buying it via car clubs, to the extent that car companies are actively experimenting with this model including Daimler, Audi, BMW, and GM. (We also call these XaaS models, later in the book.)

These changes bring new challenges. Creating new service wrappers around existing products; adding entirely new layers of value and complexity; enabling new behaviors that have no reference or benchmark but need to be intuitive to use; and managing the complex life cycle of these products and services across multiple interfaces, touch points, and data considerations. It’s impossible to think of solving for all of this without service design principles being followed.

How Does Service Design Work?

Service design involves applying the same design principles of observation, empathy, detail, and completeness to a service experience. By definition, it forms a kind of cocreation between the designer and the user. A service design map may chart out the entire journey a user makes in consuming a service. In this case, a service could mean using the TV you just bought, using an app to get directions, or depositing money at a bank. It needs to be contextual and take into account the environmental factors and emotional state of the user. Often it also involves creating an ecosystem of people and entities involved in delivering and consuming the service.

Service design methods can expose the fallacy of our ingrained assumptions as well as provide fundamental insights. When my team was working at a major airport, we conducted a detailed user journey analysis as a part of a service design exercise. We constructed a set of personas: for example, a family with two kids, a backpacker, an executive traveler, and so on. We looked at every step and interaction from passport control to baggage X-ray, to gate and boarding. One of the biggest insights I remember the team came up with from this exercise was that people didn’t really care about the airport. The airport team was keen to curate a great experience and brand message. But for most travelers, the airport is incidental. Perhaps a good analogy is the referee in a football game. If the referee is doing a good job, you don’t notice him. In the same way, travelers were focused on their destination, and the airport would be doing its job well if they didn’t notice the airport. This changed the entire design of the app to refocus the experience on the destination, rather than the airport.

What Is a “Good” Service Design?

Designers shooting for usable is like a chef shooting for edible.

—@Ky4ep (Twitter)

Usability should be the very entry criteria for any design effort. Yet you can see examples all around that fall short of this. Packaging that won’t open, a cap that once open won’t close. A pen with a bad grip, a confusing website, we see this stuff every day. But service design fails are also those that haven’t thought through the entire life cycle of the product experience. You may have a great app, but it takes 20 minutes to download over Wi-Fi. Or an amazing device, but it takes a PhD in computer science to set up. The actual implementation of good service design can be achieved through all aspects of the service—including software, hardware, design, infrastructure, materials used, and more. Every time a complex thing is made easy—like navigating the London Underground using Harry Beck’s famous 1931 design—you know you’ve achieved good service design.

Figure 9.1 London Tube Map, 1931, by Harry Beck

Simplicity—A Fiendishly Difficult Problem

The holy grail of almost every product and service is simplicity. After all, nobody sets out to create a complicated experience. Yet, it remains beyond the reach of many. There are many definitions for simplicity. Mostly, they revolve around being basic, or easy to use, or intuitive, doing things that bring calm. In the Indian mythological epic Mahabharata, Yudhishthir was so named because he could be calm (shthir), in battle (yudh). We find simplicity easy to recognize. Whether it’s a home-cooked meal, or the joy of a sunset, our favorite beverage consumed in our favorite chair. In products, intuitiveness is a good test—that is, something that does not require education, training, or a manual. In their own ways, both Nokia and iPhone have displayed this kind of intuitive simplicity. The commercial power of simplicity is also obvious. Simplicity drives acceptance and adoption. It is the reason why soccer is the world’s favorite game, or why the World Wide Web is indeed worldwide. Simplicity for many people is a deeply held philosophy.

The next time when you switch on your TV set at the end of a long week and settle in to watch prime time sports, all you’ll need to do is switch on the TV, the set top box, and find the right channel. But for the broadcaster, the process may have started almost a year before. In fact, considering the complexity of a broadcast operation—including all the scheduling, planning, program acquisition, ad-sales operations, the movement of physical and digital media, transcoding, automation and transmission, compliance and legal, and other areas, it is an everyday miracle that you switch the TV on and there’s something there to watch. (And this is without even considering the effort and challenge of producing the show, manufacturing the TV set, and getting the signal into your living room.)

Think of some of your other simple examples—withdrawing money from an ATM, receiving the newspaper at your door in the morning, turning the ignition key in your car; each of these and a hundred more simple tasks often mask an ocean of complexity that goes on unnoticed behind the scenes. As digital products combine technology, data, and experiences in more and more sophisticated ways, this is the fundamental lesson of simplicity. Often, to make something simple, especially for an end user of a product or process, you have to take on and resolve an enormous amount of complexity. Nothing annoys me more than managers who cut short a complex discussion around a difficult problem with “we need to make this simple.” Complexity doesn’t vanish, it gets resolved, in great detail, by somebody else, and kept under the hood, so you can just turn a key or press a button to start a car. After all, as the writer HL Mencken said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”