Service Design and UX Design how they connected with Design Thinking?
Often people get confused between three different terms: Service Design, UX Design (User Experience), and Design thinking. The first two designs are often used synonymously and create a lot of confusion among readers. This blog focuses on making things clear between the three terms and, based on their differences, will identify the applications.
Let’s briefly dive into the three terms:
What is Design Thinking?
In its simplest form, Design is all about rendering intent. Whenever a person makes a choice about how they want a particular thing to be, which is being designed if we intend to create exceptional designs, how will that intention be rendered? This is exactly the role of Design Thinking.
Design thinking is a process that is geared towards gaining a mutual understanding. Some of the best examples of Design Thinking is of an airplane which was made after spending years iterating and prototyping different designs.
Design thinking is about creating prototypes and testing them to achieve a better understanding of what doesn’t and what works.
What is UX Design?
UX Design, as mentioned earlier, is the experience that a customer or user gets every time they interact with the service provider or the business. It can be as simple as an email informing the customer regarding the delivery of a vacuum cleaner, customer service phone script, email receipt, Vaccum catalog on your doorstep. Anything that is written or graphically or digitally designed.
UX Design of a vacuum company is about designing the production price point and timescale. It is also about choosing the courier service for delivery. It also includes the type of electric rod that will be used in the vacuum, whether the battery will be rechargeable or manual. It could also be about the color and size of the vacuum.
Let’s take the example of public transport. The UX of traveling in public transport ranges from checking the train schedule, buying tickets online or checking the travel updates from the station.
Whether digital or printed, all the information related to the public transport is associated with UX Design, it is the touchpoint or moments that take place in a user’s journey. It includes every type of service that the customer receives either consciously or unconsciously.
What is Service Design?
Service design is a broader term compared to UX Design. For instance, think of an iceberg. Service Design is everything and UX design is just the tip of the iceberg. Let’s take the same example again. Service Design can impact all the service areas in the following ways:
- Which of the locations gets most trains to meet the demands?
- What the design of the busses should be like and how wide should the aisle be to make the wheelchair more accessible
- How 3rd party applications can be integrated with the data feeds
- Are the busses hybrid or fossil fuel-powered?
- How will the ticket payments be made – card, cash or biometrics?
Service Design doesn’t mean that things are always going to be good. There needs to be a balance that can only be achieved by meeting the needs of the users and delivering profits to the business in such a way that is ideally, ethically and environmentally friendly.
It is important to understand that in the real world, there are no ideal systems. It is not possible to tick all the boxes, and trade-offs are inevitable. For example, if you invest in a certain technology for your business, certain users, incapable of adapting, might end up losing a feature which they relied on in the past.
Differences and Applications
It is not so easy to grasp to get a complete understanding of the Service Design Concept compared to User Experience Design.
UX Design focuses on individual touchpoints, which are mostly digital
You have workshops, prototypes, and interviews that can give you the most typical of outcomes using the two concepts but this is as far things can be similar.
UX Design focuses on individual touchpoints, which are mostly digital. On the other hand, Service Designers focus on the complete experience (end-to-end) which can include digital touchpoints – but they also include teams, physical infrastructure, and the things teams can do (processes).
the purpose of Service Design is to organize and plan the business system in a human-centered way
UX Designers create the entire persona and prototype for the organization. Service designers, on the other hand, create things like journey maps for the customers, ecosystem and the service blueprints. The purpose of Service Design is to organize and plan the business system in a human-centered way.
Design Thinking is about thinking how to make the service more feasible for the customer based on their needs
When we talk about the difference between Design Thinking and Service Design, it is important to understand that Design Thinking is about thinking how to make the service more feasible for the customer based on their needs. It is also about how customer value can be created to increase market opportunity.
Service design involves arranging and managing all the resources that are needed to deliver the service. The prime objective is to improve the service quality and communication between customers and service providers.
Design thinking involves the initial steps that lead to developing a need-based service. Service Design is about making the service more viable and practical for the customer.
How can we help?
There is a much deeper understanding involved between the three terms, especially in the contemporary business world. This understanding is crucial for budding entrepreneurs and we can help the organization be better at Designing their services. Contact us and get your tailored service as your business needs.
If you are interested to know more about our program for design thinking, and how we can tailor it as your needs, please check our services page.
