Disclaimer!!!! I am not a service designer. If you are here to find the answer to "What is service design?" you might be in the wrong place. This is just a snippet of my thoughts after taking a free service design course.💭
The world is your oyster. Free resources are very accessible nowadays. Recently, I discovered a free service design course. (here)
Working in the tech industry, we have different roles in the company: technical leads, principals, delivery managers, and designers. In the design team, we have UX designers, UI designers, researchers, and service designers. Back in the day, I spent a fair amount of time on customer experience (CX) as a strategist and product owner. We only had UX/UI designers. With all these new roles emerging and after speaking to various design professionals, I realized that service design is an area I want to gain a better understanding of. As I said, everything is at your fingertips now. 🫵🏻 I spent half a day completing this introductory course, and below are my takeaways.
Why I Like This Course
FREE:
I like free things. London is too expensive (not relevant haha).Well-structured Content:
Daniele broke down the course into several sections that are easy to follow. He always provides useful references, websites, communities, and books on relevant topics. It's easy to digest.Interactive Elements:
I liked the interactive part of the course. You can leave comments below, and he responded to every one of them.
My takeaways
Distinguishing Between UX/UI Design, CX, and Service Design:
They are in the same family but serve different purposes.
UX/UI: Common in digital projects during the development phase. UX and UI designers design the visuals and wireframes and consider user interactions with the product/design itself, such as button placement and colour schemes.
CX: Focused on the customer. It involves knowing your customer and designing a better experience for them. For example, in a CX team, the goal is to improve everything related to customers, like enhancing the in-store shopping experience or planning the customer journey for a special campaign. The work is not limited to a specific medium/channel.
Service Design: More high-level and can involve all kinds of services, not just products, as long as user interaction is involved. It is quite similar to the product manager role, in my opinion. Both aim to solve problems and understand how a solution can add value. Service designers are more hands-on, conducting research to find solutions, whereas product managers have broader responsibilities like stakeholder management and overseeing product development across the entire product cycle. Service designers are mostly involved in the discovery phase before engineers join.The Power of Service Design:
Improvement in interactions can greatly enhance the quality of a product or service. Service design resonates with my time in the customer experience team, where we believed that providing a better customer experience and improving our services could drive more sales, increase engagement, and improve retention rates. This builds a good reputation in the luxury retail industry. Service design also addresses business problems, not just customer-focused issues. It can apply to the healthcare system, transportation system, etc. The blueprint includes both users and business aspects.Design Thinking
Around five years ago, I first learned this term. It's a methodology of thinking that helps with problem-solving. Our team applied this approach in our products. Service designers also use it extensively for developing solutions. This will be the next area I aim to learn more about.
I found similarities between the roles of a product manager and a service designer. Experienced product managers have told me that we don't need to know everything to become good PMs. However, it doesn't hurt to learn more. Maybe one day, I can become a designer as well.