Service design incorporates a lot of disciplines, including consumer research, interaction design, product design, industrial design, marketing, and even corporate strategy. It sounds a lot like UX design, but it’s not quite the same thing: UX may be built on the concepts of experience and context, but it’s primarily about creating products and apps. Service design, on the other hand, takes more of a macro view of user/customer experience.
This is especially relevant for libraries now. Though libraries have traditionally facilitated access to information and offered reference and research services to patrons, providing quality physical and digital services is even more important because most people are satisfying their information needs online. Library catalog results in Google searches are great, but they’re probably not making a big impression on people or creating experiences (much less “Disney magic“) that give people a reason to remember the library.
A great place to start exploring service design is the annual Service Experience Conference. The 2015 conference, set for Nov 16-17 in San Francisco, describes itself as focusing on “the design of end-to-end service experiences across touchpoints, from definition to modeling to service delivery. It is for people who are passionate about creating great service experiences while also delivering value to the organizations that deliver them.” Although early bird registration is already open, the specific schedule has yet to be announced. Still, there’s a lot to be gleaned from the 2014 conference.
One of the more illuminating talks comes from Erik Flowers of Intuit, who describes his odyssey to build a service design culture at an organization that doesn’t fit the usual mold of a service-based business. Flowers, the first service experience designer at Intuit, discusses the process of introducing, designing, and implementing service design in a company that is already design-led, but wasn’t necessarily thinking about services in addition to products. He immediately distinguishes his role from that of UX design, and points out that Intuit already had hundreds of UX and IxD designers when they decided they needed someone to think about service design in a broader context. One of the ways that Flowers attempted to cultivate a service-design-thinking sentiment early on was through a service design workshop. Flowers’ workshop provided materials, scenarios, personas, and instructions for people who don’t generally participate in the design process, but who do work in various service roles. They quickly picked up the process and were able to create plenty of service blueprints. Not all (or even most) of them were feasible, desirable, or viable, but the point of the workshop wasn’t to create workable service blueprints, but rather enable a wider group of people—particularly the ones who deal in services on a day to day basis—to bring their own perspectives to the service design process.
The rest of the presentations from 2014 and 2013 are also available to watch on the SX conference site, including one on Sprig, an app for “eating well by design” and a particularly relevant presentation by Melanie Huggins on bringing user-focused service experience design to the forefront of the library.
Librarians aren’t new to the service game, but libraries do tend to foster little silos and departments that operate in isolation from each other. Circulation, interlibrary loan, collection development, reference, cataloging: these departments tend to develop their own policies and workflows, which are then presented and shared with the rest of the departments as faits accomplis. (Even our integrated library systems tend to compartmentalize roles and tasks into separate modules, and access to the modules is often restricted by department.) User assessment tends to come after the individual departments’ services are already in place. Service design, however, can take a macro approach to the library; if we look at the “seemingly disparate services as a whole entity and from users’ perspectives” (Marquez & Downey, 2015), we can better evaluate and assess the whole library ecology to deliver better user services in all contexts.
Further Reading:
This is Service Design Thinking: Basics, Tools, Cases
Service Design: From Insight to Implementation
Service Design: An Introduction to a Holistic Assessment Methodology of Library Services
Reinventing the Academic Library and Its Mission: Service Design in Three Merged Finnish Libraries