Service Design = Good Business Investment

Despite the fact that our readings this week were - logically - design centered, I couldn't help but continually come back to the advantages and ramifications for businesses that I picked up from the readings.

As a starting point, I would like to reference Whitney Hess' article addressing the misconceptions about user experience design. (As a side note, I will probably refer to user experience design and service design interchangeably in this post. I'm not educated enough about either area to know the precise differences. It seems that service design is more encompassing, but for this post, I feel that they are interchangeable.) I found this article to be very informative and actually pretty easy to understand which seems important considering her profession. :) The first thing that stood out for businesses was Dan Brown's comment that user experience design isn't "a discrete activity, solving all their problems with a single functional specification or a single research study. It must be an ongoing effort, a process of continually learning about users, responding to their behaviors, and evolving the product or service." Lifelong learning is an education buzzword, but a business must be committed to lifelong learning in order to remain competitive. Learning about new opportunities and technologies, new and existing customers, competition, and what is happening within your own walls must be a continual process. Obviously though, learning is useless without action. That's where the "responding" and "evolving" come in, the steps where the design in service design becomes more tangible. The point is that this process never truly ends for a company that wants to reach the top and stay there. It makes sense then for a business to build this idea of continual reevaluation into their vision, a point made in Hess' article by Livia Labate. Thinking that user experience design is the responsibility of a department or a designer "is evidence that it is not part of the organizational culture and hints to teams not having a common goal or vision for the experience they should deliver collectively," she states.

I suppose I should back up a step and define the purpose of service design for this to make sense. I liked the UK Design Council's definition, particularly the end which states that service design delivers "services that are built around the real needs of clients, that simplify complex problems and deliver solutions that are future focused and cost conscious." I've emphasized real because to me that is the essence of the entire profession, and the challenge. Sometimes it may take significant work just to discover what those real needs are, much less fulfill them. Even the customers or users may not be able to identify their real need, so it is not always as simple as asking them.

The task doesn't end with simply filling a need at a good price though. Users/customers have so many choices in every aspect of their lives now, that they are continually looking to maximize value - of which, price plays only a small role. Additionally, customers expect to "be heard" by companies, whether that involves demanding transparency of a corporation's environmental stance, requests for cleaner restrooms, or input into the company's visual identity (think Gap rebranding debacle). Customers are finding increasing value in companies that are accessible - a direct result of service design no doubt. This is really what I think Richard Buchanan was getting at in his Emergence keynote when he stated that service design is "a discipline that everybody can participate in. Everyone is affected by, and if we do it right, we increase human's access to their own rights. Economic, cultural and social rights." Empowerment, customer relations, connectivity... whatever terms is used, service design seeks to maximize the product of these relationships. Companies that don't take the time thoroughly research and reach out to customers, companies that refuse to have a Facebook page or provide easily accessible contact information, companies that are too stubborn to enlist the help of service design professionals in any capacity are headed for hard times. As Josh Porter matter-of-factly pointed out, "the biggest misconception is that companies have a choice to invest in their user's experience. To survive, they don't."