Contents
Defining service design
The Nielsen Norman Group define service design as:
Service design improves the experiences of both the user and employee by designing, aligning, and optimizing an organization’s operations to better support customer journeys.
Designing great services is challenging
Often our services reflect the structure of internal departments or the needs of the business. Perhaps they consider only a single communication channel, such as a website. But we know that people all have diverse needs and can access services in different ways.
Your work may involve creating or changing transactions, products and content across both digital and offline channels provided by different parts of government.
We don’t design services, we let them happen by accident. The services we use every day, from student loans to healthcare and housing, are more likely to be the product of technological constraints, political whim and personal taste than they are the conscious decision of an individual or organisation. By not designing our services, we’re accepting that they will simply evolve to the conditions around them, regardless of whether or not that means a service meets user needs, is financially sustainable or achieves a certain outcome.
The benefits of service design
Service design takes compromise, and more importantly, it requires collaboration. But when services are designed well, they
- improve the organisation’s reputation
- make internal operations more efficient
- save money
- increase income (for those services which generate income)
A service designer purposefully and consciously looks across the entire service and designs the service with user needs embedded throughout, and not just the part you may be working on.
Read ‘What we mean by service design’ by Government Digital Service (GDS)