J.F. e Cunha, M. Snene, and H. Nóvoa (Eds.): IESS 2013, LNBIP 143, pp. 215–229, 2013. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013

Towards a Taxonomy of Service Design Methods and Tools

Rui Alves1 and Nuno Jardim Nunes1,2

1 Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Polo Científico e Tecnológico da Madeira, 2nd floor, Caminho da Penteada

9020-105 Funchal, Madeira, Portugal 2 Universidade da Madeira, Campus Universitário da Penteada,

9020-105 Funchal, Madeira, Portugal rui.alves@m-iti.org, njn@uma.pt

Abstract. Service Design multidisciplinary heritage provides a wide array of methods and tools to practitioners. This can be overwhelming for inexperienced service designers or may present a threat to the coherence of consultancy organizations creating services for third parties. We present a reflection on the use of tools and methods in Service Design and propose a taxonomy, both to provide guidance to newcomers and enforce team coherence. By surveying ten distinct sources, both from industry and academia, we collected more than 160 methods and tools. Each method’s relevance for the community was inferred from its frequency on the survey and the most relevant were clustered according to six dimensions: why, who, what, how, when and where. The resulting clusters were visualized in four quadrants charts for each dimension. Based on this proposal, practitioners can then address each problem from several perspectives, using the most appropriate tool.

Keywords: Service Design, Design Methods, Design Tools.

1 Introduction

Services are increasingly important in modern economies [16]. This greater relevance demands deeper understanding and study, specially bearing in mind that services involve complex experiences, include multiple stakeholders and therefore require a multidisciplinary approach [20]. Thus, Service Science, Management, Engineering and Design (SSMED) is emerging as a discipline aimed at understanding innovating service systems [25]. SSMED brings together many different disciplines supporting service management, marketing, engineering, delivery, design and innovation.

Within this context, Service Design (SD) is described as the outside-in perspective on service development [19], more specifically it is defined as applying design methods and techniques to the design of services [17]. Coming from the tradition of human-computer interaction (HCI) methods, SD builds on a user/customer-centric perspective to specify a service from the systematic application of ethnographic research, human-centered models and iterative design based on continuous evaluation with end users/customers.

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SD’s multidisciplinary populated this field with a myriad of methods and tools. This richness provides a wide range of options to SD practitioners, but such diversity presents some risks, namely: new practitioners’ learning curve, and coherence maintenance in consultancy organizations creating services for third parties.

As today service domains and interactions become vastly more complex, designers are required to communicate their ideas more effectively, depending on different organizations, channels, contexts, platforms and devices. Here, we argue that for an effective communication of design ideas to service development and engineering a common modeling framework, needs to emerge, capturing the important common elements required to model and convey the design details.

Here we provide a first attempt to create a taxonomy of SD methods and tools. Based in a study of ten distinct sources, both from industry and academia, this paper presents a guide to the most relevant SD methods and tools. We reviewed 164 methods and tools and categorized them into different clusters.

In order to ground and clarify the scope of SD, we present a brief explanation of the basic concepts as well as the service, SSMED, SD, experience economy and then the experience cycle. We then derive a discussion of design process from the concepts related to service and service design. Finally we present the definitions for most relevant SD tools and methods and propose the classification as taxonomy.

2 Foundation

According to Edvardsson, a service is “a chain of (sequential, parallel, overlapping and/or recurrent) value creating activities or events, which form a process. In this process, the customer often takes part by performing different elements in interaction with the employees (other customers or equipment) for the purpose of achieving a particular result” [12]. Therefore, services are activities or events that form a process to achieve a particular added value. This process is fundamentally different from what underlies products. Services deal largely with intangibles and the provision is hard to separate from consumption [20]. It is said to happen at the point of delivery, it cannot be stored or owned [20]. Besides the fact that services are intangible, it encompasses complex experiences and their quality is difficult to measure [20]. Services comprise different components, products and space [20], which customers interact with. Customers’ total experience is made up from their perception across these different service touchpoints [20]. Thus, organizations providing services need to address research, innovation and development in a new way. This is where SD and SSMED come in [20]. Here we present a definition of this paper ground concepts.

2.1 Service Science, Management, Engineering and Design

Arguing for a designers’ view of SSMED Evenson illustrates the role that design plays in support of service science, management and engineering [14]. Collaboration

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between SD and service science lies in the social understanding of expectations and expectation setting, how these vary across cultures and impact how people perceive and understand dynamic information at the point of need. The overlap between design and management lays in the area of value creation and brand management, in particular the effect of co-creation in the perception of value and the challenge of managing emergent behavior as people participate in the design process [14]. At the intersection with engineering is the development of service platforms and architectures that designers employ to fuel adoption and use, requiring a design level understanding of how these elements can be reflected and updated seamlessly [14].

Since the lack of a common set of references, language and tools is the main challenge in supporting cooperation between these disciplines, models play a critical role to overcome it. As services account four times more jobs than manufacturing, is key to provide an effective communication between design and engineering in order to answer to the rising demand for design in service development.

2.2 Service Design

Because services are often associated with immaterial, living and complex objects manufactures at the point of delivery, they are seldom considered an “object of design”. Still, since early 80s Shostack [27] proposed service blueprinting as an approach to design services, many started looking at SD as a systematic process, similar to product and interaction design. Since then many schools (KISD and Ivrea) focus on SD (introduced as an academic field in the 1990s [11], p. 354]), in a more conscious and systematic practice, based on a deep understanding of the person’s context, the delivering organization and their market strategies.

Although there is no common definition of SD, existing ones fall in the academic or industry [26] category. The Design Dictionary states that SD addresses the functionality and form of services from customers’ perspective. It aims at ensuring that service interfaces are useful, usable, and desirable from their point of view and effective, efficient, and distinctive from the supplier’s perspective [11], p. 355.

SD as a discipline is complementary to service development and engineering and is mostly concerned with visualizing and expressing complex human to human, human to machine and machine to machine interactions that define a customer journey that simultaneously builds value, utility and delight [14], [29], [33]. Customers’ perceive their experience across the multiple service touchpoints, which is analyzed next.

2.3 Experience Cycle

There is a growing emphasis in business practice on creating meaningful and memorable customer experiences [22]. This trend denotes a paradigm shift known as the experience economy: a transition from selling services to selling experiences [22]. This involves allowing the designer to think of the design problem in terms of designing an integrated experience, perceived holistically by people [2], as opposed to designing one or more specific artifacts.

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Dubberly and Evenson decomposed and visualized the experience cycle in five stages [11]: i) connect and attract, ii) orient, iii) interact, iv) extend and retain, and v) advocate. This model describes the steps people go through in building a relationship with a service. According to it, a good product or service experience is: compelling (it captures the user’s imagination), orienting (it helps users navigate the product and the world), embedded (it becomes a part of users’ lives), generative (it unfolds, growing as users’ skills increase) and it should be reverberating (it delights so much that users tell other people about it, they advocate) [11].

2.4 Design Process

A design process, in the context of SD, is a collection of activities that takes one or more types of input and creates an output that is of value to the customer [16]. Back in 2004, Dubberly surveyed over 100 descriptions of design and development processes from several fields [10]. In this paper, the taxonomy presented is rooted in the four stages model (discover, reframe, envision and create) [19], which is analogous to the Analysis-Synthesis Bridge Model [9]. In Mendel’s model, discover is about understanding the current situation. Reframe understands the current “as is” in non-obvious ways. Envision is to explore potential solutions and create is about designing the future [19]. The next section aims at providing guidance to newcomers and to enhance team coherence, from the SD process perspective.

3 Analysis of SD Tools and Methods

We have analyzed different sources [1], [26], [29], [31], [32], [33], [34], [35], [36], [37] for tools and methods related to SD (for further detail, please refer to the appendix). From these sources we have extracted a list of 164 tools and methods used in SD, which in turn were classified by frequency. The relative relevance to the SD community is visualized in Fig. 2, where the bigger the relevance, the bigger the font size. A methodology is a set or system of methods, principles, and rules for regulating a given discipline. A Method is an established, habitual, logical, or prescribed practice or systematic process of achieving certain ends with accuracy and efficiency, usually in an ordered sequence of fixed steps. A tool is anything used as a means of accomplishing a task or purpose whereas a technique is a systematic procedure, formula, or routine by which a task is accomplished.

Upon analyzing the data gathered, and in line with Segelstrom’s findings [25], it seems to exist evidence that there is a set of basic techniques, which are almost universally used, as well as a long tail of techniques only used by a few companies. The numbers are self-explanatory: 71% of surveyed methods and tools were upheld by one single source.

In our analysis, aiming at providing guidance to newcomers and enhancing team coherence, we decided to focus on methods and tools that gathered at least three or more references. This accounts for 25 methods or tools, 15% of this study sample.

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Fig. 1. Word cloud of all 164 methods and tools analyzed

3.1 Selected Methods and Tools

In this section we present the selected methods and tools (Fig. 3), and provide a short description of each one.

Fig. 2. Word cloud of selected methods and tools

Affinity Diagram. A creative process to gather and organize large amounts of data, ideas or insights [37], evidencing data’s natural correlations [29]. Can be used to analyze findings from field studies or usability evaluation [37].

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Blueprint (Service Blueprint). A visual schematic incorporating users’ and service providers’ perspectives, as well as other relevant parties [26], p. 204. This model details the service interaction nature and characteristics, with enough detail to verify, implement and maintain the service [29].

Brainstorming. A problem-solving technique applied by a group of people, who contributes with ideas spontaneously. This is an uncensored activity. Whiteboards and post-its are the favored recording media for these sessions [13], p. 49.

Character Profiles. Used to create a shared knowledge, inside the team, about the service users [29]. Succinct ways of summarizing the key characteristics and experiences of an individual - usually someone you have met during user research [34]. They can also help justifying innovations to stakeholders in the project [31].

Conjoint Analysis. A form of quantitative research offering powerful insight into customer preferences, from a simple set of questions [33].

Contextual Interview. Interviews conducted in the context in which the service occurs. This ethnographic technique allows interviewers to both observe and probe the behavior they are interested in [26], p. 162. It paves the way for understanding the reality of people and avoids working on assumptions [33].

Customer Journey Map. It is a visualization of customer experiences over time and space required to accomplish a certain goal [17]. The touchpoints where users interact with the service are used to construct a “journey” [26], p. 158. This model allows designers to see what parts of the service work for the user (magic moments) and what parts might need improving (pain points) [31].

Cultural Probes. Used to gather insights about the daily life of communities [36]. The probes are usually given to participants for a prolonged period of time, during which they can produce richly engaging material for design inspiration [26], p. 168.

Documentaries. Is a visual method to discover what matters to people, what they value. This tool informs and inspires the design processes at early stages [34]. It is believed that film captures human expressivity and emotion in ways that other purely observational studies cannot [36].

Empathy Tools/Probes. Enables designers to break out of the trap of designing for themselves and to see the challenge from the end user stand point [33]. These tools can help finding out not just what people are saying and doing, but also what they are thinking and feeling (people do not always do, think or feel what they tell you) [33].

Ethnographic User Research. The purpose of user research is to gain a thorough understanding of users, to unlock the reasons why users do the things they do (drivers) and the reasons why they do not do things (hurdles). This unveils patterns of behavior in a real context [33].

Experience Prototype. A simulation of the service experience that foresees some of its performances through the usage of the specific physical touchpoints involved [29]. The experiential aspect of whatever representations are needed to successfully (re)live or convey an experience with a product, space or system [4].

Focus Group. A forum of selected people controlled by an impartial moderator to give feedback to design ideas [36]. Helps service designers get a broad overview of users' reactions to, and ideas about, a topic [31].

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Immersion (workshop). Also known as empathic research or role-playing, provides deep information, not obtainable by observational research. It allows the designer to understand not just the physical use of products and spaces, but how the individual feels emotionally and socially in situations and tasks [1].

Observations. Used to identify problems about an existing situation or a prototype design, which can arise when people interact with services [31].

Personas. Archetypes built after a preceding exhaustive observation of the potential users [29]. They represent a “character” with which client and design teams can engage [26], p. 178. There should be a correct balance between contextual and holistic insight, concerning emotional, qualitative and lifestyle issues [8]. The narrative can become complicated by potentially distracting details [23], p. 505.

Prototyping. The service prototype is a tool for testing the service by observing the interaction of the user with a prototype of the service put in the place, situation and condition where the service will actually exist [29]. Intended to test the function and performance of a new design before it goes into production [13], p. 317.

Questionnaire/Survey. Used to provide statistics to inform the project direction [31].

Role Play. Also referred as service enacting, is a method for designing services that amounts to a new form of rapid prototyping: acting out service situations very quickly clarifies the direction the SD process should take [13], p. 356. Role-playing means physically acting out what happens where users interact with products or services [31]. The implied condition is thinking that the service really exists and then building a potential journey through some of its functionalities [29].

Scenarios. Design scenarios are essentially hypothetical stories, created with sufficient detail to meaningfully explore a particular aspect of a service [26], p. 184. Either written or drawn, scenarios are useful to design, or communicate, services and experiences, where multiple interactions will happen over a period of time [34]. User’s needs could be anticipated and demonstrated trough this [13], p. 226.

Service Prototype. Simulates a service experience. These simulations can range from being informal “role-play” style conversations, to more detailed full-scale recreations involving active user participation, props, and physical touchpoints [26], p. 192. They can generate deeper understanding than written descriptions or visual depictions, which do not deal as well with the time-related and intangible aspects of services [33].

Shadowing. Researchers immerse themselves in customers’ lives, front-line staff, or people behind the scenes in order to observe their behavior and experiences [26], p. 156. It offers a vital advantage over traditional forms of research like surveys or focus groups: they let you spot the real moments when problems occur as well as situations where people say one thing but actually do something quite different [33].

Stakeholders Map. A model with a visual representation of staff, customers, partner organizations and other stakeholders involved in a particular service. Allows the interplay between these various groups to be charted and analyzed [26], p. 150.

Storyboarding. A representation of use cases, put together in a narrative sequence [29]. It is a series of drawings, or pictures, used to visualize a sequence of events, either for a situation where a service is used, or the hypothetical implementation of a

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new service prototype [26],interaction takes place, preactions and things people ar

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5 Discussion

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6 Conclusion and

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Future Work

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226 R. Alves and N.J. Nunes

practitioners to address each problem from several perspectives, using the most appropriate tool or method(s) for a specific case. The proposed taxonomy includes six dimensions that cover distinct facets: 1) the motivation to use the tool, 2) the audience, 3) the targeted content, 4) the representations used, 5) the activities in the design process, and 6) the location where the method or tool likely takes place.

Future work includes activities ranging from a practitioner point of view to a scientific approach. Regarding practitioners, our goal is to build a tool where several parameters of a project are inputted and the tool will suggest which set of tools is more likely to fit best that specific project needs. This tool could be used to log methods and tools usage, further extending our knowledge on real world usage of existing tools and methods. From a scientific standpoint, on top of researching on the questions presented on the discussion section, each method internal and external validity should be analyzed, as well as the output data generated by each method or tool (either subjective or objective), as proposed by Cherubini and Oliver [6].

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Appendix: Methods and Tools Grid

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