Service Design - Ideal Service Design Methodology

Ideal Service Design Methodology

Together with the most traditional methods used for product design, service design requires methods and tools to control new elements of the design process, such as the time and the interaction between actors. An overview of the methodologies for designing services is proposed by (Morelli 2006), who proposes three main directions:

• Identification of the actors involved in the definition of the service, using appropriate analytical tools

• Definition of possible service scenarios, verifying use cases, sequences of actions and actors’ role, in order to define the requirements for the service and its logical and organizational structure

• Representation of the service, using techniques that illustrate all the components of the service, including physical elements, interactions, logical links and temporal sequences

Analytical tools refer to anthropology, social studies, ethnography and social construction of technology. Appropriate elaborations of those tools have been proposed with video-ethnography (Buur, Binder et al. 2000; Buur and Soendergaard 2000), and different observation techniques to gather data about users’ behaviour (Kumar 2004) . Other methods, such as cultural probes, have been developed in the design discipline, which aim at capturing information on customers in their context of use (Gaver, Dunne et al. 1999; Lindsay and Rocchi 2003).

Design tools aim at producing a blueprint of the service, which describes the nature and characteristics of the interaction in the service. Design tools include service scenarios (which describe the interaction) and use cases (which illustrate the detail of time sequences in a service encounter). Both techniques are already used in software and systems engineering to capture the functional requirements of a system. However, when used in service design, they have been adequately adapted, in order to include more information, concerning material and immaterial component of a service, time sequences and physical flows (Morelli 2006). Other techniques, such as IDEF0, just in time and Total quality management are used to produce functional models of the service system and to control its processes. Such tools, though, may prove too rigid to describe services in which customers are supposed to have an active role, because of the high level of uncertainty related to the customer’s behaviour.

Representation techniques are critical in service design, because of the need to communicate the inner mechanisms of services to actors, such as final users, which are not supposed to be familiar with any technical language or representation technique. For this reason storyboards are often used to illustrate the interaction on the front office. Other representation techniques have been used to illustrate the system of interactions or a “platform” in a service (Manzini, Collina et al. 2004). Recently, video sketching and video prototypes have also been used to produce quick and effective tools to stimulate customers’ participation in the development of the service and their involvement in the value production process.