Hasta La Ideas

Woman shopping for groceries in South Korea at a HomePlus display using her mobile phone

Earlier this month, Adaptive Path held the Service Experience conference in San Francisco, CA. The conference invited designers and business leaders who are out there ‘in the trenches’ to share insights, tips, and methods from their case studies in service design.

Service Design is an emergent area of design thinking that’s been percolating in design circles for many years. Though corporate brands like Apple, Nike, P&G and Starbucks have built their success on the principles of good service design, it’s an approach getting more serious consideration in countries like the U.S. after years of being developed in Europe.

Service Design, Service Experience, or Consumer Experience is a design approach that understands that the process by which a product is made and the organization that produces it, not only affects the product, but also defines the experience of the product. Service Design is made up of many ecosystems, including a company’s own internal culture, their approach to production and development, as well as the context of the product as it exists in the day to day life of the users. Think about how Apple represents not only the product, but also customer service combined with the branded architectural experience of the Apple store. Or how Tesla motors is not only considering the product (an electric vehicle) but also mapping out a plan for a network of electric charging stations in California.

Service Design is a holistic system that takes into consideration the end to end experience of a product, whether it be a car, a computer, a trip, or a book. It is invested in creating the infrastructure that supports and empathizes with human needs by prioritizing people and experiences over technology during the design process. Service design is a design approach that can be applied across fields.

Swimming in Culture

A key perspective of Service Design is the ability to grasp organizational culture. Ever wonder why you had a great time working for one company and another company, not so much? Maybe it’s not all ‘in your head’: According to keynote speaker David Gray of Limnl, culture is a summation of the habits of a group, and that “people swim in culture the way fish swim in water,” using the analogy of dolphins and sharks.

Illustration from David Gray’s presentation. (People may prefer to self-identify as a dolphin rather than a shark.)

In order to change culture, one must be able to find its foundation first. Ask dumb questions, talk to the newbies, gather evidence, and the evidence (what you see) usually leads to levers (how and why decisions are made and the protocol used) which leads to the company values (the underlying priorities and what’s considered important) that uncover foundational assumptions (how they view the way the world works and what is the reasoning behind those values).

Sketchnote courtesy of Kate Rutter / intelleto.com

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