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Discipline

Service design

Designs complete services so they create value for those who use them and those who provide them, coordinating each touchpoint with the people, processes, and systems behind it.

In Spanish
Diseño de servicios
Origin
Born in services marketing with Shostack (1977, 1984); in design, the first European professorship in Cologne (1995) and the first consultancies (Livework, 2001); consolidated by Stickdorn and Schneider (2010)

What it deals with

A service is experienced over time and passes through channels, people, and departments that usually work separately within an organization. If each department designs only its own part, the person suffers the gaps between them; service design designs the whole.

Principles

  • Human-centered

    Considers everyone the service touches, not only the customer: also the staff who provide it and everyone else involved.

  • Collaborative

    People from different departments, and from outside the organization, take part in the design and share the decisions.

  • Iterative

    Moves forward in cycles of exploring, testing, and adjusting; early failed attempts are part of the process.

  • Sequential

    The service is thought of as a sequence of related moments, before, during, and after use, with its own pace.

  • Real

    Research and prototyping happen in the service’s real conditions, not only in the meeting room.

  • Holistic

    Takes the whole service environment into account, including channels and parts the organization does not control.

Applications in design

  • Use it like this

    Before redesigning a screen or a counter, map the whole service: what happens before, during, and after, and what happens behind the scenes.

  • Avoid

    Changing only what the person sees and leaving the processes and systems behind it unchanged: the failure comes back.

  • Don’t fall for it

    Include staff from the start: they live the service every day, know where it breaks, and are the ones who will have to deliver it differently.

Especialidades

Specialty

Service innovation

Creates new services or deeply changes existing ones, with methods from design and management.

Specialty

Service design research

Researches how customers, employees and other actors experience a service, in order to redesign it.

Models and concepts

  • ConceptTouchpointEvery moment a person meets the service, through another person, an object, or a screen.
  • ConceptFrontstage and backstageWhat the person sees of the service, and everything that happens behind it to make it work.
  • ModelGood services principlesFifteen traits shared by services that work, for reviewing one from end to end.

Methods and tools

  • MethodBodystormingIdeating in the real place, acting out with your body how the idea would be used.
  • ApproachCo-designDesigning together with the people who will live with the result, with tools so they can create too.
  • ProcessDouble DiamondOpen up and narrow down twice: first to find the right problem, then the solution.
  • MethodJourney mapA map of a person's path through a service, with what they do, use and feel at each step.
  • MethodStakeholder mapDrawing who can influence a project or be affected by it, and how they relate to each other.
  • MethodEcosystem mapDrawing all the actors in a service and what they exchange, to see the whole system.
  • MethodExperience prototypingLiving firsthand what it would be like to use something, with a simple setup, before building it.
  • ArtifactService blueprintA map of the service that shows both what the person experiences and what makes it possible.
  • MethodService safariGoing out to experience services firsthand to observe what works and what does not.
  • MethodShadowingFollowing a person like their shadow for a while to observe what they do.

Connections

Builds on

Related to

Authors and works

  1. 1977, 1984

    G. Lynn Shostack

    Argued from marketing that services need their own approach, distinct from products, and proposed the service blueprint to design them.

  2. 1995

    Birgit Mager

    Held Europe’s first professorship in service design, created in 1995 at the Köln International School of Design.

  3. 2001

    Chris Downs, Lavrans Løvlie, and Ben Reason

    Founded Livework in London, which presents itself as the first consultancy dedicated to service design.

  4. 2008

    Mary Jo Bitner, Amy Ostrom, and Felicia Morgan

    Turned the blueprint into a practical technique for service innovation.

  5. 2010

    Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider

    Brought together the discipline’s principles and tools in This Is Service Design Thinking.

  6. 2018

    Marc Stickdorn, Markus Hormess, Adam Lawrence, and Jakob Schneider

    Revised the principles in This Is Service Design Doing: they moved from “user-centered” to “human-centered” and added “iterative” and “real.”

Sources

Original sources

  • Shostack, G. L. (1977). Breaking free from product marketing. Journal of Marketing, 41(2), 73–80. View source: Shostack, G. L. (1977)
  • Shostack, G. L. (1984). Designing services that deliver. Harvard Business Review, 62(1), 133–139. View source: Shostack, G. L. (1984)
  • Stickdorn, M., Hormess, M. E., Lawrence, A., & Schneider, J. (2018). This is service design doing: Applying service design thinking in the real world. O'Reilly Media.

Academic reviews

Secondary sources

Last reviewed: