How Service Design Thinking creates experiences that really work

Today, selling a good product is not enough; you have to create experiences that really engage people. Service Design Thinking is a process that can help you with this challenge. Find out what it’s all about!

The term is made up of two concepts: Service Design and Design Thinking.

• Service Design: is a process for creating optimal solutions and experiences for customers and company stakeholders (suppliers and employees).
• Design Thinking: is a people-focused approach used to solve complex problems in undefined situations by generating different ideas and hypothesis.

So Service Design Thinking is an approach that helps to design services for people by solving real problems. It is a method used to design services that are truly useful and effective for people who use them.

Service Design Thinking is based on four key principles:
#1 User-centricity: it must respond to people’s real needs.
#2 Collaborative: the process involves everyone who has an active role in the project, both professionals and users, creating solutions from confrontation.
#3 Iterative: during the process, ideas are continually tested for improvement; it is not a linear path.
#4 Visual and practical: tools are used to make the design process more concrete and clear (e.g., maps, prototypes, and storytelling).
#5 Holistic: this process considers the entire service ecosystem, from user experience to internal management, to create complete and integrated solutions.

The Service Design Thinking process has four main steps:

• Research: you have to understand the problem in a comprehensive way, talking to everyone involved in the project (customers and stakeholders), observing their behavior and collecting feedback.
• Ideation: having clarified the problem, you start generating ideas to solve it, using brainstorming and co-creation with the team and users.
• Prototyping: prototypes are built to test various solutions
• Implementation: you put the final solution into practice, continuing to gather feedback to improve the service over time

Imagine you want to improve a food delivery app. Through Service Design Thinking you can analyze the user’s journey through the app. Each touch point is evaluated and improved to make the experience smoother and easier.

This approach helps to create intuitive services that put the user at the centre. Through continuous testing during the design phase, it reduces errors and costs, resulting in greater customer satisfaction and a service that is more likely to succeed in the market.

Service Design Thinking is for everyone! Regardless of your industry, it can help you improve your service. Putting the user at the centre is always the winning move!