It has, of course, got to go off to reviewers and editors and changes will need to be made. We also have plenty of work ahead of us putting together the final diagrams and images for the book, but we could not be more thrilled for now. The last three months have been a big push – it is not easy trying to coordinate writing between three authors based in three different countries. The process of handling that probably warrants a post in itself at some point.
We really think we have written a book that a lot of people will find useful and engaging, we hope you do too. Over the coming months we should be able to update the description and table of contents on this site to reflect the actual content of the book (it's changed quite a bit, but in a good way) and start releasing some sneak previews of key parts of the text and images.
So, keep and eye out for it and follow either @rosenfeldmedia, @apolaine, @lavranslovlie or @breasy on Twitter for updates.
In the meantime, we need to think of a hashtag – any suggestions?
The conference is hosted and organized by Netlife Research, a leading Norwegian user experience consultancy and has had some pretty rocking speakers in the past, including Dan Roam, Jared Spool, Aarron Walter, Gerry McGovern, Stephen Anderson, Brian Sollis, and BJ Fogg. This year I'll be in the company of Oliver Reichenstein, Des Traynor, Angela Morelli among others.
Web and UX design has championed the user-experience over the past decade or so, but the domain in which they have been working is largely screen-based. Users and customers do not use these websites, applications and devices in a vacuum, but in the context of messy, complicated lives and service ecosystems. A well-built car-sharing website and smartphone app is only part of the challenge, for example. If the car is a pain to unlock in the rain or there are no designated parking spaces in the city, the service will suffer or fail.
We instantly recognise the design craft and appeal of an iPhone or a Porsche, but why are our experiences with telcos, insurance companies, airlines, etc. so poor? The answer is usually that they have just happened and have not been deliberately designed. Service design is the design for experiences that reach people through many different touch-points, and that happen over time, not just screens. It provides a powerful set of methods that help map out the entire service ecosystem and people's journeys through it in order to design a coherent experience. Web and UX designers have an opportunity to expand on their existing skills to push upwards into designing with people instead of just for them.
The differences between service design and UX [or web design?] are best understood by trying to do it. This workshop introduces participants to the main principles and methods of service design through a practical, hands-on approach. Using a surprise theme as a starting point, participants will go out and do some quick and dirty insights research, bring their results back to the studio and map them out in a service blueprint. Having spotted the potential failures and opportunities, they will have to sketch up service propositions and touchpoints before presenting it all as a coherent experience by the end of the day. It will be fast-paced and jam-packed, but by the end participants will have designed a service or died trying.
If any readers are going to be there, please let us know. It would be nice to connect with those of you who have been patiently waiting for the book!
]]>Dave writes about the argument and mindset from both cultural and business change perspectives – what we've been calling the "moral philosophy" of service design as a shorthand between ourselves recently. It mirrors much of what we've written in the opening chapter of our book and nods at some of the things we'll be talking about in the conclusion. Accompanied by some of Dave's seemingly effortless but excellent drawings, it really is well worth a read. A stand out sentence for me – clearly very American in context – was in the section where he talks about cars: "If a car can be a service, anything can."
Gamestorming now has an iPhone app, which just goes to show that books are services too (if Rosenfeld's publishing approach hadn't already convinced you of that - don't forget, "Our authors are brilliant, but write at their own unique, unpredictable paces." Ahem).
]]>Why does this matter to service design? It matters because it's about trust. When you're not buying a product that you can hold in your hand, can't point to the broken parts. It's the classic pig in a poke problem. What's worse, it's not just that the thing in the sack you are buying might not be a pig but a puppy, but the contents of the bag can magically change without you knowing about it. From artificially low lending interest rates that suddenly balloon (and we know where that got the finance sector) to insurance premiums that jump up year by year without explanation of why or informing customers that there are new tariffs available, practices that erode trust are an enormous problem for all industries.
We are sold cheese that isn't cheese, sold horrifically tortured animal products as if they were healthy and responsible, and ripped off all the time by insurance companies, telcos and banks. The problem with those latter service industries is that they're like the factory slaughterhouses of the former – there's no way to see the workings inside the box.
But transparency has long-term value. When I caught my insurance company trying to get away with charging me too much they offered the cheaper, new tariff. They did the right thing, but now I despise them. In the end, like factory farming, its and unsustainable way to run a business.
I'd be happy to hear of more examples of this in the service sector – most people have had some kind of similar experience. Please get in touch if you do or comment below.
]]>If you are someone involved in UX, IxD, IA or another trendy acronym, what would you like to see in this section?
]]>It's definitely worth a read if this is new to you, but for us the element of people is what is critical. The key is hidden in one sentence in Megan's piece: "It means that every one of a company’s employees understands that customer care is an integral part of the job". Service design is designing with people and not just for them and it's in that subtle distinction that service design differs, often, from UX, CX, marketing and IxD. With public services, in particular, there may be no "customer" as such, or we might not be designing for them. Healthcare is a situation in which we might be have a project working with nurses, for example. What are they – customers or service providers? The answer is both. They provide services to patients and doctors, but they also use services within the hospital. In most other ways of dealing with user/human-centred design, regardless of discipline, designers are either on one side of the fence or the other. Service design tries to take in the whole ecosystem.
The main reason from blogging this here, though, is because of the comments to Megan's piece. Margot Bloomstein and John W Lewis (whose comment turned into a blog post) both raised eyebrows at the possibility of service design doing everything it claims to do. There is obviously a need to clear up some skepticism and that's part of the goal of our book. Service design does deal with a holistic approach to uncovering complex relationships and working to design a coherent whole. This process is pretty hard to describe in a single blog post, hence the book. It's also easier to understand when you have a case study in to look at rather than in the abstract. We find most people get their "Aha!" moment at this point.
So, our question to you is, "What are your questions?" We know there is skepticism about the breadth and depth of service design, but we also know we have worked on projects that cover this breadth and depth (one of which will be in the book). As a professional from UX, IA, IxD, CX or marketing (or others?), what do you feel you need us to explain or prove the case of?
]]>We aim to create the book that moves the understanding of Service Design on from a rather scattered, if lively, debate towards a clear marker that helps people understand what it is and, more importantly, how to do it and what impact it can have.
We want it to be practical rather than an academic textbook. We know through running Service Design projects and trying to teach Service Design to students that it can be complex—services themselves are complex which is why so many services are awful. We believe Service Design brings clarity to that complexity and want to bring clarity to the book. We think the best way to describe service design and service thinking is in the context of whole projects, so the book we have planned will connect the methods to case studies based on live|work's long experience in the area. It's the book we wish we already had, so we decided to write it ourselves.
This is the working site for the book and we'll post thoughts, questions, updates and news about events as we go and continue once the book is finished and published (but there's a lot of writing to do between now and then!). Naturally, we have the book fairly well planned out, but if you have any ideas, insights, methods or case studies that you think we should hear about, or any other thoughts about what should go into the book, let us know.
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