It’s important to remember that service design is a collaborative process that leverages errors to find better long-term solutions. Great service design techniques focus on understanding people’s issues and requirements, exploring as many ideas as possible, and detecting obstacles early to learn & improve from them.

Service Design Definition: The practice of designing and structuring a business’ resources (people, props, and processes) to directly improve the employee experience and indirectly improve the customer experience.

This procedure is usually divided into four phases: Align, Research, Ideation, and Prototype. Throughout this article, we will dive in and explore each of these points in detail.

Keep in mind: This is not a straightforward process. You may beed to shift between activities. If a prototype fails, you may need to return to the research phase to better understand the problem.

Phase 1: Align

We advise you to first prioritize alignment before focusing on possible solutions. It’s essential to comprehend why you are undertaking this project to ensure that other stakeholders do as well. This is a great way of bringing representatives together from various teams to map out the current state of service delivery.

Stakeholder interviews, seminars, and early service plans are among the things to do with your customers. We begin this project by engaging with key stakeholders to discover how they function, what members require, and in which areas they want to see change. 

Phase 2: Research

Service design encompasses a lot of how a business works, so in order to improve the design for a service we would need to research and understand how a business currently operates.

User research helps us understand the users. This understanding allows us to empathize and design with them in mind. Researching usage trends, human behavior, and their conditions and requirements enables service designers to develop more effectively. User research is occasionally referred to as ‘customer insights’ since it gathers information on how consumers think and behave.

This step involves conducting audience interviews, doing surveys, conducting field research, creating an experience/ journey map, developing experience principles, or creating personas. You’re likely to select the most appropriate approaches from that list based on the context and objectives of your research.

Phase 3: Ideation

Developing new ideas is an essential component of service design. However, it is not as crucial as many people believe. In the end, ideas are just the beginning of a larger evolutionary process. 

To achieve long-term solutions, it is critical to practice co-design by involving all of a service’s major stakeholders in its development. To do this effectively, teams should be formed, that include customers, employees, management, as well as engineers, designers, and other key stakeholders who can offer unique perspectives.

During the ideation phase, you will have the opportunity to explore and generate as many ideas as possible. Some of these suggestions will become viable solutions to your design issue, while others will be discarded. At this stage, the emphasis is on quantity rather than the quality of ideas. It is critical for the sake of innovation and creativity that the ideation phase is conducted in a “judgment-free zone.” The primary objective of an ideation session is to identify and explore new perspectives and avenues, in simple terms – to think creatively.

From brainstorming & mind-mapping to bodystorming (role-play scenarios) and provocation – these all require an extreme lateral-thinking approach that encourages designers to question existing assumptions to explore new possibilities and alternatives. At the end of the conclusion of the brainstorming process, you’ll have narrowed it down to a few viable options.

Phase 4: Prototypes

Prototypes are frequently used in the final testing phase of service design processes to determine how users interact with them, reveal new solutions to a problem, or assess the success of implemented solutions. They are then used to redefine one or more of the earlier project problems and to build a more robust understanding of the problems users may face when interacting with the product in its intended environment.

Here is a brief guide to service prototypes provided by UX Planet – a one-stop resource for everything related to user experience. To help with some techniques that can be used to prototype services. Also briefly touch upon the techniques that can be used to test these prototypes. 

It’s possible to test whether or not a design (or revisions) would work the way you expect it to before they are deployed out into the market to be placed in the hands of your users through prototyping.

It’s important to test a product prototypes before releasing it onto the market to ensure that it performs as planned. A few questions to ask yourself are:

• Is it able to solve the user’s problem in the manner it was intended? 
• Is it easy to use and straightforward to navigate?

Ideally, you’ll find out about these issues before investing significant time and resources into building the final product.