What Is Service Design?

Service design is a process of design focused on how employees will offer a service and how customers will use a product. This includes thinking about the people, props, and processes involved in providing the service and applying service design principles to optimize for efficiency and enjoyable customer experiences. 

Explore how service design can help you reduce organizational silos, release products your customers will love, and add value to your brand in terms of the customers’ experience. 

What is service design?

Service design is a framework that focuses on the people's experience using the object or space that provides the service. Other design frameworks, such as user experience (UX) design, look at customers' entire experience while interacting with the product or space. Service design adheres to the same basic principles when designing and integrating components. Ultimately, service design looks at design through the perspective of the customers and employees who use the service.

Importance of service design example

If you own a restaurant, this is one example of a place where service design is essential. While the front of the house design establishes a particular experience for the customer, the service design in the back of the house allows a team of people to work efficiently to create a food menu. Not only is service design critical in the space and layout of the kitchen, but service design is also important while developing the tools the staff will use, such as sinks, refrigerators, ovens, and small appliances. 

Read more: UI vs. UX Design: What’s the Difference?

Components of service design 

The three main components of service design are the following: 

• People: While this can refer to anyone who uses or benefits from the service, service design usually refers to the people creating the service or using the object to carry out a service. In the restaurant example, the kitchen staff working in the space would be essential in the service. At the same time, the dining room staff and customers would also be affected by the service design in the kitchen. 

• Props are the tools used to deliver the service. Restaurants require different props, such as appliances, cookware, plates and cups, cutlery, napkins, and more, to offer their services. 

• Processes: Also known as workflows, processes describe how people do things and the rules employees operate under. Continuing our restaurant example, processes can refer to how employees prep, cook, store, or even communicate with coworkers while working. 

Who uses service design?

Service design applies to any service-related industry, such as health care offices, public transportation, retail, finance, and many more. Product designers can also use service design when considering how service professionals will use the objects they are designing to provide a service, such as an app for a person working in the food delivery industry or a salon chair for a hairstylist. 

Service design is an important component of many careers in design, such as: 

• Service designer

• UX designer

• UI designer

• Interaction designer

• Customer experience manager

• Design strategist

• UX researcher

• Design director

• Innovation manager

1. Service designer

Average annual salary (US): $86,146 [1]

Job outlook (projected growth from 2022 to 2032): 16 percent [2]

Education requirements: Service designers typically have a bachelor's degree. Since service design covers a range of industries, your degree might be in industrial design, IT, psychology, graphic design, business administration, or a related subject.

As a service designer, you'll research customer needs and behavior and assist in design processes that will help customers and employees have optimal experiences. You'll use a blend of your technical skills and creativity to carry out your duties and work with a diverse team of other professionals toward the same goal.

2. UX designer

Average annual salary (US): $79,703 [3]

Job outlook (projected growth from 2022 to 2032): 16 percent [2]

Education requirements: The most common degree for a user experience designer is a bachelor’s degree in graphic design. 

As a user experience designer, you will design digital products focusing on the end user's experience. In this role, you will consider your customers' needs and help deliver a product they will use and enjoy. User experience designers lead a holistic design process that seeks input from all stakeholders, making communication skills essential. 

Read more: 9 Essential Skills for UX Designers

3. UI designer

Average annual salary (US): $74,178 [4]

Job outlook (projected growth from 2022 to 2032): 16 percent [2]

Education requirements: The most common degree for a user interface designer is a bachelor’s degree, typically in graphic design. 

As a user interface designer, you will work on websites and web applications to ensure a seamless user experience that meets your client's needs. In this role, you will look at each point the customer makes contact with within the digital interface to make these touch points enjoyable for the user and effective for the client. In this role, you will work with other developers and designers in a team setting. 

Read more: What Is a User Interface (UI) Designer?

4. Interaction designer

Average annual salary (US): $96,542 [5]

Job outlook (projected growth from 2022 to 2032): 16 percent [2]

Education requirements: Employers tend to prefer a candidate with a bachelor’s degree in interaction design, graphic design, or web design.

An interaction designer ensures that the company’s digital product functions as intended when the customer uses it. In this role, you will utilize technology and the hallmarks of effective communication to develop the desired user experience. You will likely work with the development team and other designers to craft interactivity that makes the user's experience more enjoyable. 

Service design process 

The primary component of the service design process is creating a service blueprint, a visual diagram describing the people, props, and processes involved in delivering quality services. Developing the service blueprint requires establishing a vision of how components connect, conducting research, and creating customer journey maps.

Vision

The first step of the service design process is to understand the design's vision. What values are essential to the company, and what short—and long-term goals drive business decisions? In this step, you’ll identify the project stakeholders and connect to understand what success looks like from multiple perspectives. If you are improving the design of an existing service, this part of the process will include mapping the service in its current state.

Research

Next, you’ll research to understand the people who will be using the service. It can be helpful to create personas, or profiles, of customers to understand their unique needs and experiences. For example, a young mother entering a waiting room with two small children will have a different experience than an older adult with a vision impairment. You can use personas to help you consider your service from unique perspectives. 

With existing services, you can conduct research using actual customer experiences by asking for feedback. Other examples of research include field testing, audience interviews, and surveys.   

Mapping

The next step of service design typically involves journey mapping, which involves creating a flowchart of each step of the customer journey. The customer journey is the process a customer goes through from the first moment they hear about your product until they make a purchase. 

You can use a customer journey map to identify your customer’s goals, how they interact with your brand before they make a purchase, and how they feel about their interactions. You can also identify the obstacles standing between your customer and their goal. You can create a unique journey map for the persona you made in the research step. 

Service blueprint

Lastly, you create the service blueprint from the customer journey map. The service blueprint is like a backstage guide describing all the company activities corresponding to the customer journey.

For example, the first stage of the customer journey might involve visiting your website. Your service blueprint will include technical support to assist customers while using your page and answer any questions they have. The next stage may involve your customer walking into your store's physical location. Your service blueprint might include a greeter by the door to welcome them. 

Your service blueprint will include information about the customer's actions, how the frontstage or customer-facing associates will respond, the backstage or behind-the-scenes supporting actions, and the processes that link these components. It will also help you define front and backstage processes or what the customers can see versus what happens behind closed doors.

Benefits of service design

Service design can help you:

• Release products you are confident will succeed: The iterative nature of the service design process lets you change your design based on feedback from people who will use the product. By the time you are ready to go to market, you will already have gathered feedback to help you understand whether customers will like the product. 

• Reduce organizational silos: The service design process helps you work collaboratively across departments while considering every touchpoint of the customer journey, increasing organizational harmony, reducing redundancies, and creating relationships between coworkers. 

• Encourage customer-centered core values: Service design and user experience design emphasize the core value of improving the experience for the customer. When the design process revolves around the customer, it encourages other processes to both expand and become more efficient.

Service design principles

To deliver the best service design, you’ll need to understand your customer’s journey and find ways to improve and enhance their experience. The principles of service design help define the central goal and focus of service design. 

• Focus on user needs: Who is using your product, and how will they use it? Every service design decision needs to add value to the user experience. 

• Collaborative design: Service design requires involving all stakeholders in the design process so that everyone can share their unique perspectives. 

• Sequence customer journeys: Service design considers all touchpoints between a customer and the designed object as a sequence of actions. 

• Visual communication: Evidencing, or creating visual communications like charts and graphs, allows you to create clarity for the team members regarding where the customer is regarding their journey with the service. 

• Holistic design: Service design encourages you to examine the bigger picture of the environment in which your object exists and continually assess what works and what needs improvement. 

How to get started in service design

If you’d like to begin a career in service design or bring service design principles into your design process, you’ll find a few different paths for gaining the education you’ll need. You can earn a bachelor’s degree in design management, design for sustainability, or industrial design. Alternatively, you can take a professional program to help you gain service design skills as a working designer. 

Next steps on Coursera

Service design, or the process of designing an object that will ultimately help another worker complete their job, asks you to think about how end users will experience the service you’re designing. By focusing on user needs, holistic design, visual communication, and collaborative design, you can develop customer-centered design processes that lead to services your customers will love. 

Take the next step and earn your Google UX Design Professional Certificate on Coursera. With this course, discover skills like user experience, UX research, user experience design, Figma, usability testing, and more. Upon completion, gain a shareable Professional Certificate to include in your resume, CV, or LinkedIn profile.