What are the 4 elements of service design?

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Design

From the Press Room

Service design is a human-centered approach that starts with an obsession about customer experience and the ability to deliver quality as a key value of success.

For many organizations, service design focuses on evolving product-focused businesses into service-oriented ones through the use of effective design and superior customer experience.

Core Elements of Successful Service Design 1

1. Understanding the customer’s needs: definition of possible service scenarios, verifying use cases, and sequences of actions and actors’ roles in order to define the requirements for the service and its logical and organizational structure.
2. Building a defensible, customer-driven business case to evangelize the concept and gain buy in.
3. Understanding current people, process, practices and systems including physical elements, interactions, logical links and temporal sequences.
4. Visualizing the desired customer experience. Building an execution/implementation plan to deliver quick results.

Service Design Definitions

• The application of established design process and skills to the development of services. It is a creative and practical way to improve existing services and innovate new ones. (Stefan Moritz)
• A form of conceptual design that involves the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its customers. (Wikipedia)

Statistics

• Mobile devices now account for nearly 2 of every 3 minutes spent online. (comScore)
• 51% of people think “thorough contact information” is the most important element missing from many company websites. (KoMarketing)
• Once on a company’s homepage, 86% of visitors want to see information about that company’s products/services. (KoMarketing)
• Once on a company’s homepage, 64% of visitors want to see the company’s contact information. (KoMarketing)
• After reaching a company’s website via a referral site, 50% of visitors will use the navigation menu to orient themselves. (KoMarketing)

Takeaways

• Develop a design culture. Consideration for employee competencies and an environment that assists to enhance innovation and a language rooted in customer experiences and needs is critical to successful service design thinking.
• Candidly assess your internal capabilities and partner to augment needed service design skills. Organizations need to know their internal strengths and consider alliances to deepen competencies and bring their service design solutions to fruition.
• Be nimble. Creating new and improving existing services that are useful and in demand requires effective and efficient design.Remain focused on flexibility and agility in your service design philosophy and approach.

Additional community resource: Service Design Network (SDN) / Manifesto

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Here’s a list of NN/g’s most useful introductory articles and videos about service design and related topics. Within each section, the resources are in recommended reading order. 

For hands-on training, check out our full-day course on service blueprinting. 

Service Design: An Overview 

Service design focuses on how an organization creates and delivers users’ experience. 

Definition: Service design is the activity of planning and organizing business resources (people, props, and processes) in order to improve (1) directly,  the employees’ experience and (2) indirectly, the customers’ experience. 

Service design aims to optimize the interplay between the customers’ journey and the internal business processes that support it.  

There are 3 key components of service design: people, props, and processes. We need to  consider each to deliver the experience we intend. 

1. People. This component includes anyone who creates or uses the service, as well as individuals who may be indirectly affected by the service. 
2. Props. This component refers to the physical or digital artifacts (including products) that are needed to perform the service successfully. 
3. Processes. These are any workflows, procedures, or rituals performed by either the employee or the user throughout a service. 

Each component can be broken down into frontstage and backstage (a key delineation in service design), depending on whether the customers directly interact with it. 

If you’re new to service design, we recommend you explore the following resources in order, from top to bottom. 

Number	Link	Format	Description
1	Service Design 101	Article	Definition of service design
2	Service Design 101	Video
3	UX vs. Service Design	Article	How UX and service design differ
4	UX vs. Service Design	Video
5	Why Service Design	Video	Benefits of service design

Service Blueprinting

A service blueprint is the primary visual representing service design. 

Definition: A service blueprint is a diagram that visualizes the relationships between different service components — people, props (physical or digital evidence), and processes — that are directly tied to touchpoints in a specific customer journey. 

Think of service blueprints as a part two to creating customer-journey maps. Blueprinting is an ideal approach for experiences that are omnichannel, involve multiple touchpoints, or require a crossfunctional effort (that is, coordination of multiple departments).

Number	Link	Format	Description
1	Service Blueprints: Definition	Article	Definition of service blueprints and their components
2	4 Key Components of Service Blueprints	Video
3	The 5 Steps to Service Blueprinting	Article	How to create service blueprints
4	The 5 Steps to Service Blueprinting	Video
5	Service Blueprinting: A Digital Template for Remote Teams	Digital Template	Downloadable spreadsheet template for a service blueprint
6	Service Blueprinting: Top Questions Answered	Article	Answers to the most common service-blueprinting questions received in our full-day course
7	Service Blueprinting FAQ	Video
8	Service Blueprinting in Practice: Who, When, What	Article	Practitioners’ tips for who to include in a service-blueprinting workshop, when to blueprint, and how to define the scope of a blueprint
9	When and Why UX Practitioners Use Service Blueprints	Video
10	Service Blueprinting: Fails and Fixes	Article	How to avoid common blueprinting mistakes
11	A Guide to Service-Blueprinting Workshops	Article	Checklist and suggested agenda for service-blueprinting workshops
12	Service Blueprints: How to Choose What Experience to Visualize	Article	How to choose a blueprint scope

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