Service Design & User Experience – Spot the difference
We use Service Design’s inherently holistic approach with the specificity of UX to create effective wayfinding in any built environment.
Two terms have risen to prominence in recent years in the design realm: Service Design and User Experience (UX).
Both impact and guide our work in slightly different ways.
We use both to ensure every wayfinding system we create provides users with a complete, high-quality and seamless experience.
Why? Because Service Design and User Experience form the building blocks of effective wayfinding.
What is Service Design?
At its core, Service Design is a user-centred system design.
Emphasising a customer-centric perspective, Service Design focuses on understanding user needs, pain points, and expectations throughout an entire process or experience.
Service Design employs a combination of extensive research, design thinking and collaboration with a central aim to optimise and enhance the entire user journey with a service.
As a methodology, Service Design can help designers to craft more comprehensive service blueprints and design strategies.
Service Design and Wayfinding
As we see it, Service Design is a fundamental pillar of functional and beautiful wayfinding.
In our day-to-day work, Service Design aligns with many of the core processes, principles and factors of wayfinding. For one, both are concerned with four key factors – people, environment, process and tools.
As with wayfinding, the Service Design process includes exploration, creation, implementation and reflection. Similarly, Service Design is not a linear but rather an iterative process.
Service Design is also concerned with aligning various touchpoints and elements within a service ecosystem to ensure a seamless and satisfying experience. From the first digital interaction or welcome at reception, to the parking navigability, it’s all part of Service Design.
Let’s compare this with User Experience.
Defining User Experience (UX)
Where Service Design concerns itself with holistic interactions with a service, User Experience has a slightly different focus.
UX encompasses the emotional, physical and practical dimensions of a user’s engagement. From the wireframing to testing and prototyping, the central focus is the user’s emotions and attitudes towards a product.
A meticulous process, optimisation with UX is achieved through consideration of multiple and potentially conflicting factors such as usability, accessibility, visual design and information architecture.
Service Design versus UX
It’s important for designers to recognise that Service Design and UX are not mutually exclusive – they can be interdependent and even synergistic.
In terms of scope and scale, we turn to Service Design to help us imagine the end-to-end interactions across an entire service ecosystem, from stakeholders to processes. In contrast, UX allows us to zero in on a specific interface or interaction, for example, a touchpoint at a hospital reception desk.
We need Service Design thinking to help us plan long-term and think strategically about changes in services and their impact. UX is all about agility, shorter time-frames and iterative refinement in rapid succession.
It’s not a matter of one mode being superior to the other. We need both to design systems that are effective and efficient, meet user needs, and align with business goals.
It should also balance beauty and functionality – you can leave that part to us.
Achieving collaboration & synergy
Service Design and User Experience both contribute immensely to creating valuable and seamless experiences for users.
Effective Service Design benefits from outstanding UX, just as user-friendly and seamless interfaces contribute to an overall positive service experience.
We’re fortunate at ID-LAB to have this wide range of expertise at our fingertips, especially as our places become more complex, our technology more expansive, and our need for accessibility and functionality more acute than ever before.