If you Google(apparently now a verb) the very question posed above, you'll get a pretty clear answer from the service design network (yes there's a network!)which goes like this; A working definition "Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people,infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers." What’s a Service? When we say 'service', what are we actually talking about? My preferred definition of a service is ‘a defined outcome of value, received from a service provider, where the service receiver does not own the resources required to produce the service’. So decoded - a service can be thought of as a journey to a destination without the passenger owning the means of transport or an agreement to do something of value for someone where the recipient does not own the resources to do it themself. A note on Products . Products differ from services in that products can be purchased by customer and ownership transferred, this applies to physical products and digital products (subject to licencing conditions). Products themselves deliver the outcomes mentioned above but the key difference is that the purchaser takes on the ownership of the resource that delivers the outcome. Services design also applies to products because many products have services associated with them, such as warranty or future discounts and these facets need to be designed to ensure success. How many times do we hear of products that have had their value impaired by poor service! So far so good(hopefully)... some pretty reasonable definitions.....but how do you go about designing services why should you go about it at all? You may be already doing Service Design! The inception of Service Design is often attributed to Lynn Shostack , who realised that she had become an accidental service designer and subsequently decided to become a deliberates ervice designer. If you have created or managed a product or a service then it is likely that you have already done some service design without even being aware that it has a name(and that some people even specialise in it). If you recognise any of the activities from the working definition above and you realise that you've already done service design, you'll likely also realise that it's not massively difficult to do. If on the other hand, you've introduced new products or services (or had them introduced upon you to manage) without much consideration to their wider usage context e.g. can we cope with how many users will use our service, or what do we do when things go wrong with the service? then it's likely that you've already realised that even though service design is not that difficult, the lack of it can cause considerable downstream cost and pain. A Suggested (40,000 feet) Approach to Service Design . Essentially, service design is about predicting scenarios related to the use of your product or service once in the wild, and then based on your predictions put a 'service wrapper' around it to ensure (at least a minimum) viability of use and continuous improvement. All very well, but what does that mean in practical terms (and what's a service wrapper anyway)? In terms of practicalities, I'm minded of a general management proposition; the Demming Cycle, a process cycle of steps - Plan, Do, Check, Act. Proposed by the great management thinker W. Edwards Demming. Service Design when done well, typically follows the Demming cycle (as do mostthings where stuff needs to get done IMHO). We plan, in that we pre-consider (design) how our service will be used and what the service scenarios and risks are; We Do, in that we implement our service along with processes and risk mitigations to support the service ( service wrapper ); We Check, in that we monitor how our service is performing (usually against service targets that we have designed-in up-front) and finally; We Act, in that we implement continuous improvement to our design as part of an evolutionary cycle i.e. "no plan (or design) stands first contact with the enemy", there will always be things to fix or improve. In practical terms this means considering the users' journey through our service from awareness,to on-boarding, to use to exit, and depending on a few factors; the size of the service (how many users), how much money you've got to spend, and what else needs money spent on it, how much competition you face, especially in industries where service can be a critical differentiator, we determine what organisational elements (people,infrastructure, communication and material components) we are going to wraparound ( service wrapper ) each point in the user journey. The service design will consider touch-points where users knowingly interact with the service e.g. a support desk, online help, or a local service support person and also discreet elements of the service that users are not aware of,such as automated IT provisioning to accommodate increased service demand. The service design must also consider how to change the service without breaking it, and while we're on the subject, we of course must consider what happens when the service breaks and design-in the processes, people and tooling to mitigate that risk. How much Service Design? All of the above is often considered in context of service criticality, which may reasonably be judged on the cost to be without the service, and from there we can typically budget for how much we need to spend on our service wrapper and still remain in the black. Not only that, if we have more than one service we also need to prioritise how we optimally distribute our efforts and finances across a service portfolio. As is often the case the cost vs. benefit continuum applies and service design can be a quite extensive and sophisticated endeavour or it can be almost completely ignored (at least until something goes badly wrong). As a minimum I'd say that just doing some service design based on a several basic (journey focused) scenarios and documenting and rehearsing what to do,will put you and your users or customers in a massively better position that doing nothing at all. What’s Next? In my following posts, I will expand on the value of service design and the risk of not doing it.