Design thinking and service design

Design thinking is less a technique than an order of operations. Before anyone proposes an answer, the team studies the people who have the problem, agrees what the problem really is, and only then generates and tests options. The Interaction Design Foundation credits the five-stage version most people learn to the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, known as the d.school, and insists that the stages are modes a team moves between as the evidence demands, not a corridor it walks once.

The five modes

1. Empathise: watch and interview the people involved; UX research supplies the methods.
2. Define: turn what was observed into a sharp statement of the need, often phrased as a question the team can work on.
3. Ideate: produce many options before judging any, then pick a few worth making.
4. Prototype: make each option concrete enough to react to, as cheaply as possible; see prototyping.
5. Test: put the prototypes in front of real people and let what happens send the team back to whichever mode needs another round.

Google's UX programme devotes its second course to the first three modes, a fair indication of how the method reaches newcomers: as the front end of a product design process, before anything is drawn in earnest.

From a screen to a whole service

Service design widens the frame from one product to everything that has to happen for a customer to be served: staff, places, objects, partner organisations and internal procedures. SFIA's customer experience skill covers the same ground from the employer's side, quality across every touchpoint and channel. The signature artefact is the service blueprint, which Nielsen Norman Group treats as a map linking people, props and processes to what the customer meets. Its lanes supply most of the vocabulary.

The line of visibility between frontstage and backstage is where most service failures hide: a friendly app promising a delivery date that the warehouse system never agreed to. A customer journey map shows only the top lane; the blueprint shows why the journey breaks. In that sense a service resembles a design system, a set of parts whose consistency rests on agreements nobody outside sees.

People who practise both disciplines move into service designer, customer experience and innovation roles, and into product management, where framing the problem fills much of the working week. The design hub shows how these roles sit beside research and interaction design.