IXDF & Service Design

According to Cooper, Alan; Reimann, Kaye; Keezer, Leiben (2007) in About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design, Interaction Design is, "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." If we take this further into the realms of Service and Human-Centered Design, it is essentially designing these services for the benefit of the people who utilize them, through their perspective.  As Frank Spillers iterates throughout his Service Design course, which I recently completed through The IxDF Foundation, service design concepts should be both, "well-designed and well-communicated," to address customers' and stakeholders’ needs, desires, intentions and expectations, so as to ultimately deliver customer benefits and reduce service gaps while achieving their end goals.

 

Humanity-Centered (or Human-Centered) Design, which Don Norman expounds upon in his recent book, is a process in which we can begin to assess the root causes of underlying problems, which make more effective services and their larger picture Systems Design implementations desirable and inclusive. I would also advocate for HCD to include the design for all living beings in our biosystem (i.e. plants, animals, and their interrelated ecosystems), and not just solely human serving.

 

In essence, Human-Centered Design, within the context of the larger service and systems-design approach, helps answer the, “How Might We... better facilitate the journey of resolving root cause issues within a particular groups' experience within a particular system or service?"

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HCD, in the spirit of the Optimist Telescope, encourages the building backwards from a future-centric lens to better understand, design (or redesign) ineffective services within systems surrounding problem areas, both varied and complex, for communities most underserved. Poor systems design of today is a result of humans having, "invented, constructed, and developed the world around us," with little regard to their future impacts.  Our poor future-planning (in hindsight) is what is now currently being grappled with-- and climate change being chief among them. The problems of today are the result of the poor "design thinking" in our past, are systemic and complex in their nature, interdependent, and interrelated, oftentimes unaccepted, rejected, or denied at their worst. It begs us to build better, to design for future services starting with having empathy for our users.

 

In my current and previous design work, from helping implement SaaS products, to building literacy focused coalitions within the Greater Austin area, our aim has been through a Human-Centered Design oriented process to identify root causes to problems which are so embedded and complex. Many of these separate community-based orgs offer a myriad of approaches to solve complex problems resulting from systemic inequities, oftentimes very targeted and nuanced, as well as highly sensitive and underfunded.

 

Service Design is an omni-channel approach that considers the interrelated parts of a wider system... it seeks to be appropriate for the user and the business, and the processes involved.​ It is distinctive because it means creating, “an omni-channel experience that encompasses all three areas of being desirable (User Interfacing), being right (User Experience), and being accessible (Customer Experience).”

 

While Service Design is a specialized discipline for implementing a product or service, Design Thinking and Human-Centered Design are approaches to problem solving that can be incorporated within a discipline itself. Incorporating them would create beneficial long-term effects and impacts of a service delivery or product, while considering long-term business needs and the people that make up the impacted communities as a whole.​

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Companies of the future could begin with, “recogniz[ing] that for most customers, their goal is not the product itself but what the product delivers in wonderful experiences… [so], instead of focusing on just the product, companies could start providing services that enhance its value." [1]

 

"Services transform the business model from an emphasis on the reasons that people want a product." [2]

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Further Service Design Note Takeaways:

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• Service Design is at the Intersection of Customer Service, Customer Experience and User Experience (re: the total environment).

• Continuity is a key component of Service Design and delivery.

• Service Design is omni-channel, and therefore requires continual communication with accountability to the customer and within the teams themselves.

• Taking the work out of the customer experience helps with the continuity of Service Delivery and should be part of the Service Concept, which balances the customers’ needs and desires, as well as the service’s strategic intent, along with asking, “what benefits will be provided?” and “how will those benefits be provided?”  Maps and flowcharts are immensely beneficial to this end. 

• As always, developing a strategy for effectively operationalizing this concept and transitioning a service organization from its current state to its preferred future state is absolutely essential and such methods like JIRA, Dashboards, Kanban, and Agile methods are incredibly effective at carrying this out with project leadership, alongside developing a customer journey map.

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I am thankful for the Interaction Design Foundation for allowing me to expand my Service Design skillset as it relates to systems and the inequities that can be better solutioned using a Human-Centered Design approach that is inclusive to marginalized and underrepresented communities. 

 

If you have a chance, I encourage anyone to learn this skillset as well as attending DEI training if you are working in the social service sector within large cities solving problems. I also recommend the User Research: Methods & Best Practices course on the IxDF platform, to learn to proper metric implementation and evaluation of your Service Design deliverables in order to help effectively measure the success of a project implementation.

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References:

(1) "Service Design: How to Design Integrated Service Experiences." The Interaction Design Foundation. https://www.interaction-design.org/​

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Karisma Tamez is a service designer from Austin, TX, who works in the social services sector and was most recently responsible for Co-Leading the COVID Vaccine Equity Project, which brought together many Community-Based Organizations in the Greater Austin Area, and helped to workshop preexisting barriers, bottlenecks, and opportunities within the service delivery of the vaccine to the most vulnerable, minority, and at-risk populations in the Greater Austin area. The project itself took place in the summer of 2022 and design workshops culminated in city-wide mobilization efforts that were successful and far-reaching.

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