By Stefano Maffei, Elena Pacenti, Beatrice Villari

Good Idea + Good Design

= Good Service?
Learning How to Evaluate Service Design
from the ADI INDEX Case

Earlier this year, members of the Service Design Thematic ics of the service must be tangibly
expressed, and measurable qualities
Commission began an open discussion about the evaluation of
go beyond price attributes and in-
Service-Design projects in terms of innovation from a social, clude a subtle definition of customer
economic and technical perspective for an important Italian satisfaction.
design prize: ADI’s Compasso d’Oro1. The members of the
A good service concept
board faced the challenge of defining an effective approach for • offers a meaningful new op-
assessing the quality of Service-Design cases, as well as thinking tion for users with respect to the
about the value of design for services. existing and opens new potential
market positions (its originality is
related to a determined social and
Setting the basic requirements for added value for users that makes economic context);
collecting examples of good Service the difference, and Service Design • uses supply/production/delivery
Designs was the starting point. can better illustrate its potential. processes that comply with the
idea of sustainability and pro-
A definition of the borders of the But the most challenging aspect motes socially and environmen-
category was needed to clarify that of the criteria development was to tally conscious behaviours;
the design of services (as perfor- establish the evaluation approach to • reflects the changes of technologi-
mances offered by organisations for be used to judge what good Service cal and economical paradigms by
the benefit of people, and/or medi- Design is. The first statement is experimenting with new service
ated by technology) is different that good Service Design can only models, delivery platforms or
from the design of digital artefacts be evaluated using a dual comple- interaction modalities.
or physical touch-points or other mentary perspective: the design’s
kinds of initiatives and temporary perspective and the company’s Good Service Design:
events often associated with ser- perspective. The first one seeks to • has a clear and well designed
vices, even though these boundar- facilitate positive user experience identity that expresses and makes
ies are very often questionable. and interactions; the second seeks to visible its values and potential,
achieve good market results. coherently supports users’ under-
To facilitate the scouting of good Merging the two perspectives standing, interaction and par-
examples, we chose to focus on means finding a Service-Design ticipation and also fosters a clear
services for final users, considering ‘evaluation grammar’, where brand positioning, awareness and
first those services where it is the qualitative aspects and the aesthet- diffusion for the company;

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• provides a user interaction with
the service that is consistent and
pleasurable: the effectiveness of
the encounter and customer satis-
faction are based on friendliness,
transparency and the coherent
design of the touchpoints;
• demonstrates a certain adoption
and acceptance not only expressed
through the number of clients
but also through evidences and
feedbacks from a wider public;
• is scalable and reproducible and
the service model can be poten-
tially applied to other business or
welfare projects.
Due to the prize’s nature, the work
on the evaluation of good Service
Design has considered only the offer
side of the service. But is it sufficient
to measure the value of a service?
A step further towards the evalu-
ation of the innovation of Service-
exploring service design
BikeMi – a good Service?
BikeMi is not just a bike rental
service, but a complete system
of public transport to use for
short hauls as an alternative
or in addition to the traditional
means of public transport.
Design projects can only be done by
including the demand-side evalua-
tion and by developing knowledge
in this direction2. To move from
good design to good service evalu-
ations, the new grammar has to
include criteria to actually consider Beatrice Villari,
the impact a service has on the Researcher at the Politecnico di Milano,
Italy
business or social contexts, on con-
sumption behaviours and on social Elena Pacenti,
and environmental ecologies. That Director, Master in Service Design,
Domus Academy, Italy
can only be judged with time. • Stefano Maffei ,
Associate Professor at the Design Faculty,
1
Commission members: Co-ordinator Stefano
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Maffei, Luca De Biase, Giordana Ferri, Ezio
Manzini, Elena Pacenti, Beatrice Villari.
Compasso d’Oro is the most important and
established design award for product design
in Italy, promoted by ADI (Associazione per il
Disegno Industriale). The ADI INDEX selection
takes place annually; every three years the
COMPASSO D’ORO Design Prize is awarded.
ADI included (from the end of 2008) Service
Design among the categories of projects aspiring
at the prize.
2
Bessant and Davies, DTI Innovation in Services,
Occasional Paper, June 2007
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