Dissolving Service Design
I’m starting a revision of my book Designing for Interaction. It’s about three years old now, and lots of things, including my own perspective on interaction design, have changed in the four years since I started writing it. (Just as one example, touchscreens and interactive gestures weren’t really mentioned in the earlier at all.)
One of the most radical changes to the new edition (and there are several), is the dissolution of the service design chapter. When I wrote the book, “service design” and designing services was something that was fairly new (in the US anyway). I called it “the next frontier of interaction design” or some such hyperbole.
Three years on, and the distinction between products and services in the world of iPhones, Kindles, Google Docs, Facebook, and Twitter seems arbitrary at best, and confusing at worst. And that isn’t to even get into things like ubicomp or robots, where the distinction is even more blurry. So for the second edition, I’ve decided to dissolve the service design chapter and just place the topics and tools that were once ghettoed there throughout the book. I’m not sure that, from this point out, at least for interaction designers, the distinction between products and services is a meaningful one.
I simply cannot think of a service that interaction designers would be involved in that doesn’t have some sort of product, and typically a technology product, at its center. The product might be anything from a physical object to a website to an interactive environment, but there is something there to be designed. Secondly, I can only think of very few products that interaction designers (and really, almost any designer) are designing any more that are not part of some kind of service. Bruce Sterling in Shaping Things uses the example of a bottle of wine: there’s the bottle itself, the vineyard’s website, the printed label, the metadata that goes to online winesellers, etc., etc. And that’s for a bottle of wine, much less a device that has to live in our increasingly complex ecosystem of gadgets, environment, and internet.
One hallmark of “traditional” service design is that it involves people, in real-time, to execute the service. This is still true, to varying degrees. Amazon still needs people to find your books in the warehouses and to write reviews. Netflix still needs people to open the return envelopes. And, of course, more physical services like your neighborhood restaurant and coffee shop still need people to create and serve their goods. Great people can make services great. But my point is that interaction designers aren’t designing people; we’re only designing for people, for interaction, not the interactions themselves, lest we turn people, both service providers and customers, into drone-like beings. Granted, this is a simplistic view, but I don’t see interaction designers getting involved in pure service design (things like workflow) unless there is a product involved. And thus, at least for us, the distinction between product and service is blurry, and where it isn’t (like, say, in hiring staff) is not typically our job. When it becomes our job, then perhaps we’re not doing interaction design any longer, and we’ve moved completely into the area of Service Design or human resources or business.
This state of products combined with services is the reality right now. Websites and software need to be maintained and upgraded, devices serviced and enhanced, customer service engaged. Unless you are designing stand-alone objects not connected to a network or a product that is meant to be used or executed once, it doesn’t behoove you as a designer to think of your product as anything but part of a larger service.
In a sense, this means service design is now the superset around products. But I don’t particularly like that model either, because without products, there would be almost no service design. And round and round we go.
So where then is the boundary between Service Design and Interaction Design? Interaction designers certainly do design services; we can’t help it, it’s the nature of the work. But as we move away from the product itself and get into the design of enabling the product, especially workflows to support the product, then I think we move into the realm of Service Design.
Thus the dissolution of service design in Designing for Interaction. “The next frontier of interaction design” is now (as it probably was even back in 2006) the ground beneath our feet. Stand firm.
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4 Comments
I tend to think of Service design as the intangible links between the people, physical products, and digital interfaces. (Admittedly, this is a simplification.) All of these elements go together to create the user experience.
I tend to use this term (UX) more and more to describe what I do, as Interaction designer inevitably elicts a web/software assumption, and I worry it will be difficult to disentangle ourselves from this expectation. I think User Experience could have a few advantages as an umbrella term – business people are familiar with it, and it’s clearly high-level.
I think it’s blurry because the dynamic between product and service has always been a continuum; not a binary distinction. In Lynn Shostack’s seminal paper How to Design a Service (1982) she describes a continuum between the tangible, product-dominated (something like salt, or a necktie) and the intangible, service-dominated (teaching, nursing). She considers a fast food restaurant to be balanced equally between product and services.
In any case, it makes sense to dissolve the discussion of service design given your audience, since, as you point out, interaction designers almost certainly aren’t doing service design. They’re doing interaction design. Even if they’re designing service-enabled products or product-centric services; it’s a different beast.
I echo Jeff’s opinions that interaction designers certainly are not doing service design. They are doing interaction design.
I’d like to draw attention to the words of Allan Chochinov, editor-in-chief at Core77.com: “In 2009 I think we’re going to see an explosion of Service Design around the world. Many firms are already practicing it, but it will take on a new urgency as more and more people recognize service as the new product.”
To suggest you “cannot think of a service that interactions designers would be involved in that does not have some sort of product at its centre” leads me to question how you are defining a ‘product’?
Of course, touchpoints ( both intangible and tangible) make up the service experience, but it is people who are at the heart of services. Public service designers Participle designed a service working with elders, to develop a new service that harnesses the skills and resources of older people. They also designed a service to better support young people meet their aspirations. Therefore, to suggest that no products would result in no service design is misinformed.
Perhaps the next edition of your book will reinstate service design as it would be a shame to deny interaction designers an insight in to this rapidly growing and important discipline
I’m with Lauren on this one. Product and interaction design play an enormous part in any service design, as they should. But to say product designers are service designers ignores all the other touchpoints (real people, for example) that are involved. My feeling is, too, that service design is still young enough to warrant standing on its own for a while so that those newer to it understand some of its unique mindset that, for sure, gets applied to product/interaction design.
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[...] Dissolving Service Design I’m starting a revision of my book Designing for Interaction. It’s about three years old now, and lots of things, including my own perspective on interaction design, have changed in the four years since I started writing it. (Just as one example, touchscreens and interactive gestures weren’t really mentioned in the earlier at all.) [...]
[...] Dissolving Service Design Three years on, and the distinction between products and services in the world of iPhones, Kindles, Google Docs, Facebook, and Twitter seems arbitrary at best, and confusing at worst. And that isn’t to even get into things like ubicomp or robots, where the distinction is even more blurry. So for the second edition, I’ve decided to dissolve the service design chapter and just place the topics and tools that were once ghettoed there throughout the book. I’m not sure that, from this point out, at least for interaction designers, the distinction between products and services is a meaningful one. (tags: design interactiondesign) [...]
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