UX Design vs. Service Design: What's the difference?

The field of design is fluid and flexible. It adapts to changes in forms and habits of use and consumption, and reflects cultural and political trends.

In the case of interaction design, there is a constant process of reflection on the scope of the discipline.

How far does interaction and user experience design go? Isn't the way in which they serve you in a bank, or the distribution of spaces and services in a shopping center, not part of the user experience?

 But first: Are you interested in Interaction Design? Let us help you and show you how you can improve your business with UX Design!! 

What is Service Design?

Service Design, or service design, is a user-centered design discipline. Its objective is to organize the equipment, infrastructure, processes, interactions and components of a service to ensure that they are adapted to the needs of people.

The design of services as a discipline has its origin in management theories of the 1980s. Within the world of design, it is in 1991 when the Köln International School of Design incorporates it into its studies as a discipline of its own.

Adam Lawrence, Jakob Schneider, Marc Stickdorn, and Markus Edgar Hormess are the authors of This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World.

In this book they list the six basic principles of service design:

• Focused on people. The central element is the experience of all the people who have a relationship with the service. Not only from users or customers, but also from suppliers and workers.
• Collaborative. It is a job in which different functions and departments collaborate.
• Iterative. The design approach is exploratory and experimental, seeking to find the best version through solutions that are constantly tested, implemented and adapted.
• Sequential. The design of services is visualized through a series of actions over time.
• Real. People's needs have to be investigated and therefore be based on reality. In the same way, the prototypes and the different versions of the service have to be tested in real situations.
• Holistic. The design of services takes into account the tangibles and intangibles of the service and all the possible points of contact through the different uses that people make of it.

What is the difference between Service Design and UX Design?

Reading this definition of service design, we can already intuit that there is a certain overlap between this discipline and user experience design.

Although there is no clear border, there is an obvious difference in the scope of the two disciplines.

UX designers typically solve design problems focused on a specific product and in a specific context. For example, the purchase process in the mobile application of a food delivery service.

Although technically UX design could be applied to any point of contact with the user, such as a physical store, when we talk about UX we usually refer to the experience of use on a website or an application.

Instead, service design includes the entire business process, including all possible points of contact for users and any other person who participates in or is affected by the service.

For example, in the case of food delivery service, the design of services does not only include the web and the applications through which users order food. It also takes into account the restaurants that provide food and the couriers who deliver it.

For example, you can make decisions about how the food is to be distributed, whether by motorcycle or bicycle or both. You can decide how the deliveries are distributed among the available couriers, whether they are to be uniformed or not, or how they are addressed to the end customer.

While a user experience designer will focus on a specific touch point, a service designer will consider the system as a whole.

You will examine how these touch points are connected and what the traffic is like between them, both for end users and for providers and others who participate in or affect the service.

Many of the service design tools will be familiar to a UX designer: user personas, empathy maps, customer journey maps, prototypes, or user stories are design tools used in both disciplines. Others, such as the service blueprint, a diagram that collects the entire process of a service from beginning to end with all the stakeholders involved, is a service design tool itself.

They are therefore two disciplines that could work in parallel and collaboratively at different levels. The common objective is to achieve that services and companies that are better adapted to their users to be more useful and more effective.

 Are you interested in Interaction Design? Let us help you and show you how you can improve your business with UX Design!!