service design strategy | Elisabeth Hubert

Service Design or User Experience Design…What’s the diff?

Published on October 3, 2012

Earlier this year I wrote a blog post about how a lack of service design got under my skin. In the article, I talked about a trip I had to a popular beauty brand’s store. A couple of months later, I found this article which details how Sephora updated their website experience to better accommodate online shoppers. But I couldn’t help but wonder, ‘what are they doing to help their in store experience?’. Enter service design.

As I mentioned in my previous article, I’m still on the fence regarding whether service design should be separate from user experience design. I think the main issue with it being this way is that user experience design gets construed as ‘designing for the mobile or web interface only’ by both UX practitioners and those that hire us. Thus, UXers begin to leave out the service part of their solution, either because they are oblivious that it is their responsibility or because their boss tells them that the service part of the solution is for the service designer to figure out. Because of this a gap in the product forms between the web and any other channel experiences. In the case of Sephora, this could be ringing true.

I would say that the solution to this problem is to stop separating service design from user experience design, but that opportunity has already passed. The title user experience designer has fallen flat, and has been misconstrued so many times that many people don’t even want it anymore. Service design provides an out in this way, and allows people to work on different types of projects besides just the interface ones. However, I do think that one solution to this problem is for all of us in this profession who design for a user’s experience with a product or service to go back to basics and really understand the pillars that this profession stands on. To me, these are the pillars of Information Architecture: users, content, context. Understanding that we design for the intersection of these three things covers most any situation one can imagine, and brings us back to our discipline’s center.

The outcome of us going back to these pillars, is that we, as service providers, become aware of what our job really is. It is to facilitate, as best as possible, a user’s experience with a product or service. No matter what we call ourselves, that will never change. And, the sooner we all become aware of this, the sooner we can stop creating and arguing about new disciplines, and just sit down and get to work.

Service Design: How a Lack of It Pissed Me Off

Published on February 23, 2012

A couple of weeks ago I went into one of my favorite, yet least favorites stores: Sephora. I love Sephora because they house every makeup product on earth. No matter what I need, I can walk in and find it all in one store. On the flip side, I hate Sephora because they didn’t think through the entirety of their service offering. Let me explain. Every time I walk into Sephora to find a product I ran out of, I realize, unless it’s a major brand, I’m unable to easily find the product again. This then forces me to try and find a sales representative to help me look through the many shelves to find a new or replacement product. Of course, I get that they want me to stay in the store longer to browse shelves, but, with the huge amount of products, this becomes frustrating instead of enjoyable. Further, there are never enough of sales representatives in the store to help me find my new or replacement product … what a mess!

Enter service design. I’m still on the fence regarding the whole service design as a separate profession thing… but I can’t deny that designing for service is part of what we do and should concentrate on. This incident at Sephora not only brought to mind the premise of service design, but it also brought to mind a very interesting Adaptive Path post on the subject: Serious Service Sag. One problem with service design from an economic standpoint, as Brandon points out, is that businesses don’t spend nearly as much money investing in service design as they do in product acquisition. Nowhere was this more evident to me than in my makeup buying story. Thus, by not focusing on the entire service, Sephora is losing a ton of money, because, as we are well aware, people will spend more money and will be more loyal to a brand if they can find the right products and have a great experience while doing so.

The solution to this issue of service design sag and lack of service design in general, is, first, to advocate and promote more about service design, and, second, to just become better at it overall. As I mentioned, I’m not yet sure where I stand on the issue of whether service design is new to our field. Most of the time, I feel that it has always been a part of what we do. But, if categorizing it as service design helps to sell it to our executives and thus acquire more funds for it, I’m all for doing so. So it looks like it’s time to really get the word out, and I know many of you have been doing so, about the importance of this “new” thing called service design.

The outcome of us advocating for service design more is that we can begin to explain and show the importance of designing the entire user experience from acquisition, to use, to forming a relationship with the brand. We now have a name for the fuzzy part of user experience, the part where we form user relationships. And having that name helps us to advocate and sell service design even better. Hopefully we’ll begin to see the success of our efforts so that the next time I walk into Sephora I can more easily find a proper concealer :-).