Designing for Service Experiences

Purpose: Of late, the focus of service design is moving toward emphasizing customer satisfaction and taking users' experience more seriously. In addition to the change in perspective in service design, scholars in this area are paying more attention to service design methodology and process, as well as its theory and real-world case studies. In the case of medical space, there have been few studies in attempting to apply service design methods useful for deriving user-focused results. The author of this paper believes, however, case study-oriented approaches are more needed in this area rather than ones focusing on theoretical aspects. The author hopes thereby to expand the horizon to practical application of spatial design beyond service design methodology. Methods: In order to incorporate the strengths of service design methodology that can reflect a variety of user opinions, this study will introduce diverse tools in the framework of double diamond process. In addition, it will present field cases that successfully brought about best results in medical space design. It will end with summarizing the ideal process of medical space design which is reasonable and comprehensive. Results: Medical service encompasses preventive medicine as well as treatment of existing medical conditions. A study in establishing the platform of medical service design consists of a wide range of trend research, followed by the summary of two-matrix design classification based on results of the trend research. The draft of design process is divided into five stages composed of basic tools for establishing spatial flow lines created by matching service design tools with each stage of space design processes. In all this, most important elements to consider are communication and empathy. When service design is actually applied to space design, one can see that output has reflected the users' needs very well. The service design process for user-oriented medical space can thus be established by interactions on the final outcome and feedback on the results. Implications: One can see that the service design with the hospital at its center produces the result that encompasses the user's needs best. If the user-focused service design process for medical space can be extended to other space designs, the author believes that it would enhance the level of satisfaction for users and minimize trials and errors.

Total Care Products are innovative packages consisting of hardware and services integrated to provide a complete functional provision. These types of products are becoming increasingly popular as companies strive to find new ways to ensure their business remains profitable and their products are attractive to customers. The Total Care Product creation process requires close collaboration between the customer and supplier as the two parties engage in an iterative, often time-consuming procedure involving needs, expectations and solutions exploration that ultimately leads to the creation of the functional product. This paper describes a novel design process for Total Care Product creation that seamlessly integrates hardware and service support by providing a robust design methodology and process support tool that firstly breaks down Total Care Product creation into distinct stages, and then the support structure is provided to facilitate the design and decision-making process at each stage in a rapid and simplified way. In order to be able to integrate hardware and service support design in such a manner, it is first necessary to assess how the hardware and service design processes are currently performed in their own right. The hardware design process is well documented and understood, in contrast to service design. This paper describes the service design process in detail, highlighting the similarities with hardware design and detailing how services are designed. Having described the service design process, and using knowledge of hardware design, the paper then proceeds to describe the development of a fast design process for the Total Care Product creation process that integrates both hardware and services. The numerous potential benefits of employing the fast design process are highlighted.

Fierce competition and more demanding needs for customer oriented services have been instigated service organizations to apply new approaches for service design and delivery. Private banking systems are one of the most important parts of service organizations. The efforts in grasping more financial resources by private banks versus governmental banks as well as growth in customers' needs for effective services have enforced private banking managers for using new service design and development process in Iranian private bank systems. New Service design and Development (NSD) process providing the lower cost and higher benefit methods for creation of competitive advantage in global banking systems. In this paper the effective determinants in new service development process of Iranian private Banks has been identified. The qualitative data was collected through interviews. The methodology is adapted from in-depth interviews with academic experts and managers of private banking systems until theoretical saturation state achieved. The gathered data was analyzed using axial and open coding methods. The results shows that the NSD process Iranian private banking systems is consist of four main stages and 28 axial factors and 52 secondary factors. The main factors are includes of analysis& new concept development, design, pilot and launch, development stages. Eventually, the results of this paper can be used for the new services development process in the private banking systems of a competitive environment at the other countries.

In light of product companies shifting towards services and service companies embracing service design approaches, there is a greater need for the proliferation of service design. However, organizations are still not fully ready for this shift. Notably, Information Technology (IT) service organizations provide a unique premise, where employees engage and facilitate their customers to undergo the journey of adopting service design into their service innovation processes, while they themselves are similarly undergoing the same journey. Amidst the different change management theories available, to help their employees learn, design and deliver better customer services, organizations are exploring and adopting different approaches to introduce service design. We explored an inside-out approach where we wanted the employees of IT organizations to understand, develop and experience the power of a service design-led innovation activity, understand the different complexities involved, and further become empowered to design service experiences for their customer organizations. Using iterative ‘Plan-Act-Observe-Reflect-Refine’ cycles, we explored several internal employee-centric services such as employee hiring, onboarding and integration services. We adopted the CraftChange behaviour change progression model to enable the proliferation of service design techniques and processes, by using the ‘internalizing through experiencing’ approach. Once the employees experienced the benefits of service design within their organization, they were ready to proliferate service design, in their respective customer organizations. In this paper, we share our reflections on the ‘inside-out’ service design proliferation journey within the large multi-cultural and global IT organization in which we work. We argue that our approach can aid highly pluralistic, varied-domain or cross-geography complex services to plan their service design proliferation strategies and activities effectively.

A variety of healthcare robots for elderly care have been developed. However, as the elderly and caregivers experience psychological resistance towards not only new technologies but specifically to robots, the adoption of healthcare robots has scarcely progressed. This article aims to develop a service design method, which consists of a design process including design tools to identify jobs in an elderly care facility and to reveal what kinds of jobs to assign to service robots and to caregivers. This article develops a design method which is composed of six steps and adopts original design tools to identify jobs needed in elderly care facilities and assign them to human and non-human actors, including service robots. The tools include an actor map to visualize the Actor to Actor (A2A) network, a current jobs to be done (JTBD) worksheet to visualize existing jobs, a new JTBD worksheet to visualize new jobs, and an actor worksheet to summarize information about each actor including their philosophy. With this design method, we conducted a series of workshops with the aim to develop a service fulfilled by humans and non-humans at an elderly care facility in Shizuoka prefecture in Japan. The results of questionnaires administered to the workshop participants demonstrated the effectiveness of all the tools except the new JTBD worksheet. Also, the results of interviews with employees in the elderly care facility indicated the effectiveness of the approach, which reveals visible and invisible regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive elements through interviews with human actors, and embeds them in the service design process. The design method including the original design tools proposed in this article contribute to a service design method for the use of robots in elderly care facilities by allocating jobs to human actors and non-human actors appropriately, and it also contributes to the issue of psychological resistance to the adoption of service robots in these facilities, which brings efficiencies to society. The contribution of this article is to reframe the issue of resistance to the adoption of service robots in elderly care facilities to the issue of what kinds of jobs in an elderly care facility should be assigned to service robots or caregivers, and the development of a service design process including original design tools.

As we have previously seen, the field of science models (FOSM) provides the theoretical and practical foundations of a collective operational imagination process called community informatics design. It is nothing less than an exploratory voyage through several thinking and action modes relying on transdisciplinarity. We will now see that these thinking modes are a very concrete way of operationalizing the community informatics design thinking by seven thinking modes (Burnette 2009; Ranjan 2007) likely to help the uninitiated or social and communication science students start a design process. These seven thinking modes constitute an operational model that can intervene at different stages of the FOSM, a life cycle or a design project. Each thinking mode is articulated in several natural or specialized languages and takes into account a different aspect of the FOSM (foundations, theories, methodology or the several applications). Each contains characteristics that allow to provide specific information and knowledge appropriate to each of the instances, procedures or actions related to the FOSM. Concretely, it means that each thinking mode allows to operationalize the different users’/designers’ intentions, their behaviours, the norms, the architectures, the role distribution, the resources, the management modes, etc. These thinking modes conciliate material thinking modes (hard) and software (soft). Let us examine how these thinking modes allow to explore “imaginary territories” of an innovation culture suggested by the FOSM.

Over the past 20 years there has been an increase in post-secondary visual communication education in Australia while the growth of the industry itself has been low, meaning an increasing number of graduates compete for a limited pool of jobs . The use of visualisation in human centered and service design approaches provides alternative employment opportunities for these graduates. This paper presents a case study of a visual communication honors research project that is indicative of those opportunities and the potential benefits of having highly skilled visual practitioners involved in human centered and service design processes. Furthermore, we argue that a consideration of the aesthetics of the visualisation methods used in this context is essential and that visual aesthetics should be a significant part of the service design skillset.

The scale and process of Service Design are expanding and evolving as the emerging challenges they face become increasingly complex and uncertain. In order to cope with the systemic complexity and uncertainty of future changes when designing service (eco)systems, more holistic and speculative dimensions are needed to be considered. In the field of design, Systemic Design and Speculative Design are considered to have the capacities to deal with systemic complexity and critically consider future uncertainty. Therefore, this study aims to explore from the theoretical level to the operational level to understand if and how Systemic Design and Speculative Design can help to expand the Systemic and Speculative dimensions into Service Design. Through literature review and expert interviews, this paper presents the theoretical relationships between these three approaches and discusses the opportunities and criticalities of approach integration. In the end, we propose three future research directions and open up open questions about Service Design evolution in Systemic and Speculative dimensions.

Customer experience has emerged as the leading arena for competition, being suggested as the main path to the development of competitive advantages in the global market (Gentile et al. 2007). As the notion that the experience is the brand has grown, Service Design has attracted attention for its ability to design superior customer experiences. Yet, little has been said about the role the brand plays in the Service Design process, and in the management of the customer experience.

The Ritz‐Carlton has evolved by implementing rigorous self‐analysis based on institutional structures, working in tandem with creative customer‐experience management. The hotel began reevaluating its service design in 2001, well before the global recession in the latter half of 2008 made its full impact. There were several moments that served as catalysts, prompting The Ritz‐Carlton to shift from its status as a formally structured organization with a centralized hierarchy and delivery of consistently high‐quality operations. Instead, it became an emergent organization that extended those systems to encourage self‐organizing among employees, as well as customized hotel design. One way of understanding emergent properties and adaptive systems is through chaordic systems thinking, or CST. The chaordic view of an organization studies the balance and flow between the firm’s structures and frameworks (order) and the emergent creative self‐organizing among employees (chaos). Viewed through the lens of chaordic systems thinking, the qualitative research undertaken for this article examines The Ritz‐Carlton as an evolving organization that has re‐evaluated its service design processes in order to deliver more experientially‐based employee and customer engagement.

The importance of the quality of user experience in service encounter has been acknowledged in different disciplines, including Service Management, Marketing, and Design. However, the focus has been on tangible elements of a service, such as touchpoints, service evidence [21], servicescapes [4]. This paper argues that interpersonal interaction in service encounter plays a significant role in the quality of user experience, therefore should be taken into account into service design process. In particular, this paper pays attention on collaborative services where final users are actively involved, and assume the role of service co-producers.To examine elements that facilitate interpersonal interaction in service, case studies on carpooling service were carried out. Based on a framework for sociability developed in interaction design discipline, 12 carpooling services in Europe and United States were analyzed. As opposed to managerial perspective, this paper suggests that the heterogeneity in the service performance, caused by the interaction between participants, is not a threat to the quality of user experience, but an opportunity to make the experience more unique, and special.

Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach for building distributed systems that deliver application functionality as a set of business-aligned services with well-defined and discoverable contracts. This paper presents typical a service design process along with a set of service design principles and guidelines for systematically identifying services, designing them and deciding the service granularity and layering. The advocated principles stem from our experiences in designing services for a realistic Securities Trading application. Best practices and lessons learned during this exercise are also discussed.KeywordsBusiness ProcessBusiness ServiceService Orient ArchitectureService DesignService InterfaceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The "Better Outcomes in Labor Difficulty" (BOLD) project used a service design process to design a set of tools to improve quality of care during childbirth by strengthening linkages between communities and health facilities in Nigeria and Uganda. This paper describes the Passport to Safer Birth concept and the tools developed as a result. Service design methods were used to identify facilitators and barriers to quality care, and to develop human-centered solutions. The service design process had three phases: Research for Design, Concept Design, and Detail Design, undertaken in eight hospitals and catchment communities. The service concept "Better Beginnings" comprises three tools. The "Pregnancy Purse" provides educational information to women throughout pregnancy. The "Birth Board" is a visual communication tool that presents the labor and childbirth process. The "Family Pass" is a set of wearable passes for the woman and her supporter to facilitate communication of care preferences. The Better Beginnings service concept and tools form the basis for the promotion of access to information and knowledge acquisition, and could improve communication between the healthcare provider, the woman, and her family during childbirth.

This chapter explores the use of service offering as a material for service design. The service offering is defined as the functional, usable, emotional, social, idealistic and self-identity benefits that are promised, expected and/or gained from a service. The offering is a multi-faceted construct related to the value that lies in use of the service and is key to value in use. It is also difficult to describe and represent directly. The chapter explains that the offering has three spheres: the projected offering, the perceived offering, and the experienced offering. The designer has a strong influence on the projected offering, and through the service design process, the designer forms elements that suggest functional, usable, emotional, social, idealistic and self-identity benefits that together are synthesized into the projected offering. The chapter concludes by discussing the material transformation or forming of the service offering.

Concept generation in the architectural design process: A suggested hybrid model of vertical and lateral thinking approaches