Service Design.
Better services.
Happier customers.
Better lives.
Conquistar o consumidor entre uma infinidade de marcas, produtos e necessidades individuais se torna, cada vez mais, tarefa árdua. Para o designer que pensa o produto antes que ele chegue às prateleiras, um novo conceito ganha força: o design de serviços. De acordo com o professor e coordenador do curso de especialização em Branding da Universidade Positivo, em Curitiba (PR), Marcelo Gallina, o consumidor se descobriu um importante consultor e não apenas um comprador. “É ele quem determina o que comprar, quando e como. Dessa forma, surge um sistema integrado, no qual as empresas devem oferecer serviços completos”, afirma. Ele explica que antigamente o design tinha um fim específico focado no uso. “Hoje, o design engloba as interfaces necessárias para usufruirmos de serviços. O design passa a ser o meio”, revela.
De acordo com o designer britânico e especialista no assunto, Oliver King, o design de serviços é uma especialidade do que ajuda a desenvolver e a oferecer serviços de qualidade. Segundo ele, os projetos nessa área aperfeiçoam fatores como a facilidade do uso, a satisfação, a fidelidade e a eficiência passando diretamente por questões como o meio ambiente, a comunicação e os produtos, sem esquecer as pessoas que entregam ou ofertam o serviço.
The history of design social
In the earliest contributions on service design (Shostack 1982; Shostack 1984), the activity of designing service was considered as part of the domain of marketingand management disciplines. Shostack (Shostack 1982), for instance proposed the integrated design of material components (products) and immaterial components (services). This design process, according to Shostack, can be documented and codified using a “service blueprint” to map the sequence of events in a service and its essential functions in an objective and explicit manner.
In 1991, Service Design was first introduced as a design discipline by Prof. Dr. Michael Erlhoff at Köln International School of Design (KISD), and Prof. Birgit Mager has played an integral role for developing the study of Service Design at KISD in later days. In 2004, the Service Design Network was launched by Köln International School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, Linköpings Universitet, Politecnico di Milano and Domus Academy in order to create an international network for Service Design academics and professionals; now the network extends to service design professionals worldwide as well as design consultancies who have started offering service design.
characteristics of social 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 artefacts and other things including communication, environment and behaviours. Several authors (Eiglier 1977; Normann 2000; Morelli 2002), though, emphasise 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 the logical and its 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 insoftware 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 thefront 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.
Service design by oliver king
Service design is a design specialism that helps develop and deliver great services. Service design projects improve factors like ease of use, satisfaction, loyalty and efficiency right across areas such as environments, communications and products – and not forgetting the people who deliver the service.
Our process ( by oliver king's company )
Each client project has a slightly different service focus, for example, improving the quality of the customer experience by working with front line staff, re-designing the customer journey, developing a service vision or innovating new customer propositions.
Projects unfold in three general phases. Identify, Build and Measure. The phases break down a little further - we’ve outlined this below in the diagram and stage breakdown
Orientate and Discover
After Planning, the first phases for us are Orientate and Discover. Orientation is about getting to know the organisation we’re working with, understanding their business model and the nature of the market in which they operate. We get to ask all sorts of naive questions of very senior managers. We set up and run workshops using a variety of techniques to orientate ourselves and to allow a project team to begin to share their views about the context that has been identified.
During Discover we use a number of techniques to understand how things are working from the perspective of those who use the organisation’s services - and those that provide them.
These first two steps make up the Identify phase and provide us with an understanding of what success might look like as well as list of key issues and challenges we’ll be looking to address.
Generate
Next there’s the start of the Build phase with a systematic Generation step in which we conceptualise and explore visually many responses to the challenge. This happens at Engine, with our clients and often with their customers through the design of workshops that allow people to design their own services (a great route to customer insight as well as to out-of-the-blue service innovation).
Synthesise and Model
Prototyping is critical in reducing risk and getting the best results and this applies equally whether designing strategy, propositions or the touchpoints of a customer experience. So the next phase in Build is to model and test our ideas. As we’re designers and not management consultants this is a very visual and creative phase in which we can bring new propositions or strategic futures to life in ways that allow them to be refined collaboratively with our client team or with customers.
Ideas or propositions are refined and evaluated iteratively which happens in different ways depending on the client and the sector. For example, we worked directly with analysts at Norwich Unionto ensure that the ideas we generated for insurance services were more than just blue sky but meet the commercial requirements of the insurer. A point is reached at which we agree that we’ve got what we need. This is sometimes as far as our client needs to go before pitching a new proposition into their organisation.
Specify
We work with many clients to specify services in detail. As a multidisciplinary team we’re as comfortable specifying physical service environments - as we’ve done with Virgin Atlantic at Heathrow - as we are specifying financial or on-line services. Services are specified through a number of representations beyond written market concept documents. Our expertise is in describing the near-future experiences of a service and in detailing their content and functionality through scenarios maps, mock-ups, story-boards and so on.
Produce
Working with our clients as they move towards service production means the designing and development of the touchpoints of that service. We design websites service interiors, products and communications. We also support the training of front-line workers with the design of workshops and tools to help staff evaluate the experiences that they are delivering to customers.
Measure (with empathy)
Being able to measure efficiency and effectiveness - but also desirability, usefulness and usability of services is critical to getting the feedback needed to support on-going improvement. This step connects the start of the process with the end. In other words, to establish what customers and providers value, to design services that create this value and to be able to measure the ability to create it and inform further improvement.
Transfer and transformation
One big advantage of our approach cited in client testemonials over and over again is that often as a result of our work with them they are able to adopt new ways of working. Design-led methodologies are very accessible and therefore respond to an organisation’s objective to work more creatively and collaboratively. We’re strong on both creativity and process.
