Service Design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure,

communication and material components of a service, in order to improve its quality, the
interaction between service provider and customers and the customer's experience. For
example, a restaurant may choose to have a Service Design agency change the way its menu
is set out, or change the layout of the restaurant to improve the customer's experience.
Customers can mean paying patrons, but also can be within an organization, so long as they
are the direct recipients of a service e.g. an organization implements a new payroll interface
for its staff - therefore the staff are effectively 'customers' of the payroll interface. To do this,
Service Design methodologies are used to plan and organize people, infrastructure,
communication and material components used in a service. The increasing importance and
size of the service sector, both in terms of people employed and economic importance,
requires services to be accurately designed in order for service providers to remain
competitive and to continue to attract customers.

The design (or redesign) of a service may involve re-organizing the activities performed by
the service provider (Back office), e.g. how letters from customers are processed internally;
and/or the redesign of interfaces and interactions that customers use to contact the service
provider (Front office) e.g. website, in person, telephone, blog etc.

Service Design is increasingly used by blue-chip private and public sector organizations as a
means of creating the step change their customers require in terms of service experience.
Service Design agencies apply design tools, techniques and thinking to service challenges,
either to improve existing services or to create new ones. Typically, the work is based upon
deep insights gathered by shadowing service users. This technique produces more accurate
insights into the usability of a service than traditional remote surveys because what people
say they do is frequently different to what they actually do. Concepts and ideas generated are
captured in sketches or in service prototypes. The strong visual element, combined with the
opportunity to test and rapidly change services and interfaces, delivers real value in today's
competitive markets.

Characteristics of Service Design

Service design is the specification and construction of technologically networked social
practices that deliver valuable capacities for action to a particular customer. Capacity for
action in Information Services has the basic form of assertions. In Health Services, it has the
basic form of diagnostic assessments and prescriptions (commands). In Educational Services,
it has the form of a promise to produce a new capacity for the customer to make new
promises. In a fundamental way, services are unambiguously tangible. Companies such as
eBay, or collectives such as Wikipedia or Sourceforge are rich and sophisticated
combinations of basic linguistic deliverables that expand customers' capacities to act and
produce value for themselves and for others. In an abstract sense, services are networked
intelligence. Service design can be both tangible and intangible. It can involve artifacts and
other things including communication, environment and behaviours. Several authors (Eiglier
1977; Normann 2000; Morelli 2002), though, emphasize that, unlike products, which are
created and “exist” before being purchased and used, service come to existence at the same
moment they are being provided and used. While a designer can prescribe the exact
configuration of a product, s/he cannot prescribe in the same way the result of the interaction
between customers and service providers, nor can s/he prescribe the form and characteristics
of any emotional value produced by the service. Consequently, service design is an activity
that suggests behavioural patterns or “scripts” to the actors interacting in the service, leaving
a higher level of freedom to the customers’ behaviour.

Service Design Methodology

Together with the most traditional methods used for product design, service design requires
methods and tools to control new elements of the design process, such as the time and the
interaction between actors. An overview of the methodologies for designing services is
proposed by (Morelli 2006), who proposes three main directions:

• Identification of the actors involved in the definition of the service, using appropriate
analytical tools

• Definition of possible service scenarios, verifying use cases, sequences of actions and
actors’ role, in order to define the requirements for the service and its logical and
organisational structure

• Representation of the service, using techniques that illustrate all the components of the
service, including physical elements, interactions, logical links and temporal sequences

Analytical tools refer to anthropology, social studies, ethnography and social construction of
technology. Appropriate elaborations of those tools have been proposed with video-
ethnography (Buur, Binder et al. 2000; Buur and Soendergaard 2000), and different
observation techniques to gather data about users’ behaviour (Kumar 2004) . Other methods,
such as cultural probes, have been developed in the design discipline, which aim at capturing
information on customers in their context of use (Gaver, Dunne et al. 1999; Lindsay and
Rocchi 2003).

Design tools aim at producing a blueprint of the service, which describes the nature and
characteristics of the interaction in the service. Design tools include service scenarios (which
describe the interaction) and use cases (which illustrate the detail of time sequences in a
service encounter). Both techniques are already used in in software and systems engineering
to capture the functional requirements of a system. However, when used in service design,
they have been adequately adapted, in order to include more information, concerning material
and immaterial component of a service, time sequences and physical flows (Morelli 2006).
Other techniques, such as IDEF0 , just in time and Total quality management are used to
produce functional models of the service system and to control its processes. Such tools,
though, may prove too rigid to describe services in which customers are supposed to have an
active role, because of the high level of uncertainty related to the customer’s behaviour.

Representation techniques are critical in service design, because of the need to communicate
the inner mechanisms of services to actors, such as final users, which are not supposed to be
familiar with any technical language or representation technique. For this reason storyboards
are often used to illustrate the interaction on the front office. Other representation techniques
have been used to illustrate the system of interactions or a “platform” in a service (Manzini,
Collina et al. 2004). Recently, video sketching and video prototypes have also been used to
produce quick and effective tools to stimulate customers’ participation in the development of
the service and their involvement in the value production process.
[edit] Service Design in Marketing and Management
The active participation of customers and other actors traditionally considered as external to a
firm’s boundary emphasize the need for a proper design activity that organizes the interaction
among those actors, thus planning sequences of events, material and information flows.
Furthermore the involvement of “non technical “ actors, such as customers, implies that the
activity of service design be analyzed not only from a functional perspective (with the aim of
optimizing flows and resources and reducing time of operations) but also from the emotional
perspective (creating meaningful events, motivating customers, communicating the service).
Because of those considerations service design became the focus of studies and research in
the discipline of design, initially as part of the activities related to web design and Interaction
Design, and later as an autonomous professional and research area.