Service Design
From Insight to Implementation
Service Design is an eminently practical guide to designing services that work for people. It offers powerful insights, methods, and case studies to help you design, implement, and measure multichannel service experiences with greater impact for customers, businesses, and society.
Service Design is an eminently practical guide to designing services that work for people. It offers powerful insights, methods, and case studies to help you design, implement, and measure multichannel service experiences with greater impact for customers, businesses, and society.
Testimonials
Polaine, Løvlie, and Reason provide an excellent treatment of the user experience side of service design. This valuable, practical handbook of design, provides copious examples for every step of the design process. This is a much needed, practical guide to the practice of service design.
Don Norman, Nielsen Norman Group, author of Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded
For anyone making the journey into the world of service design, this book, informed by its authors’ hard-won knowledge and field experience, should be your first stop.
Jesse James Garrett, author of The Elements of User Experience
This book is a great introduction to service design by people who shaped this approach from its early years on. It explains many established tools and methods with encouraging real-life cases. The authors succeed in generating a mix of inspiring hands-on examples that motivates the reader to instantly try some of the methods, while its content is based on well-researched scholarly literature.
Marc Stickdorn, editor and co-author of This Is Service Design Thinking
An easy-to-read introduction to service design, with great examples from one of the world’s leading service design agencies. A ‘must read’ for anyone who wants to become familiar with service design in theory, methods, and practice!
Prof. Birgit Mager, President, Service Design Network GmbH
We’ve had lots of excellent books on ‘design thinking’ in recent years, but the challenge for many readers has been to put the high-level theory into practice. Service design provides the most relevant methodology and this, surely, is the definitive book on that subject. There’s no better way to learn about service design than from those who have built it from the ground up. This is a concise, engaging, and practical guide to an important emerging field of design practice—and the authors create compelling vision about where it must go next. Required reading for private, public, and third-sector leaders alike.
Mat Hunter, Chief Design Officer, Design Council (UK)
Some 70% of economic activity in Western economies is in services—from babysitting to banking. Computer and telecommunications technologies have enabled the development of complex service systems that combine personal contact, physical artifacts, websites, and large software systems. Designing these well contributes to the well-being of citizens and to increased competitiveness and efficiency for the companies or public entities that provide them. This book, written by innovative pioneers in the field and based on their extensive experience, is an excellent description of a methodology for managing the complexity of the design of modern services to satisfy the needs of both consumers and providers.
Gillian Crampton Smith, Professor, Iuav University of Venice
Service Design provides a good balance of theory and practice with a great range of case studies to illustrate how the theory has been put into practice and the resulting difference that makes. This book is not to be missed for those with a passing interest in service design, new students of design, and old hands who can rebase their knowledge. This book takes the reader through the why, what, and how of service design. It illustrates the importance of people and their relationship with services, and showcases the collaborative approach of co-production and the value that it brings.
Dr. Lynne Maher, Director for Innovation and Design, NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Insurance Is a Service, Not a Product
Chapter 2: The Nature of Service Design
Chapter 3: Understanding People and Relationships
Chapter 4: Turning Research into Insight and Action
Chapter 5: Describing the Service Ecology
Chapter 6: Developing the Service Proposition
Chapter 7: Prototyping Service Experiences
Chapter 8: Measuring Services
Chapter 9: The Challenges Facing Service Design
FAQ
These common questions about service design and their short answers are taken from the book Service Design: From Insight to Implementation. You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.
- Is service design just customer experience, user experience, or interaction design?
No. They are close cousins to service design, but they are not the same, although work in both customer experience and user experience forms part of service design’s remit. We often use the term “user” instead of “customer” in the book, sometimes interchangeably, but sometimes because there are contexts in which a service user might not be a customer or because a service user might also be a service provider (such as a teacher or a nurse). Some projects lend themselves to different language—customers, partners, clients, patients—depending on the project context. Interaction and user experience design are often understood as design for screen-based interactions, but service design covers a broader range of channels than this. Some projects have a strong digital component, of course, so interaction and user experience design have an important part to play, but so do product design, marketing, graphic design, and business and change management.
