In recent years, ‘Service Design’ has become increasingly popular. It is a growing academic field, and its implementation is said to be behind the successes of highly popular businesses that fuse online social media with offline elements, activity and retail, for example Airbnb, Uber and Ocado.
The Royal College of Art, for example, created a two-year Master’s dedicated to service design in collaboration with Imperial College London in 2012.
Source: Design Council
What is Service Design?
Service design is about shaping service experiences, “so that they really work for people. Removing the lumps and bumps that make them frustrating, and then adding some magic to make them compelling.,” according to Mat Hunter, Chief Design Officer at the Design Council.
This useful overview from Nielsen Norman Group, helps to frame a service design approach, by considering a customer (or user’s) journey, under the headings of props, people and processes:
Service Design for Neighbourhood users
The following diagram implements the above service design approach for Neighbourhood, and can be expanded upon and iterated on over time as our platform develops:
