Oliver King is the co-founder and director of Engine, a service design consultancy based in London, UK. Engine has been around since 2000, and engages in projects for both the private and public sector.

According to Oliver, Engine’s approach to service design develops from the following points:

Service is the act of helping somebody to do something, while design is the process of making something better for somebody. Translation is the challenge of connecting strategy and implementation. Engine operates in this “translation space”, figuring out how to get to implementation from strategy.

While service design is new to designers, its not new to service providers. After all, service have been around for a long, long time (just think of hotels and restaurants), and it’s foolish to think that, with service design, designers have stumbled onto something never before seen. However, what designers do bring to the table are skills and perspectives which can help innovate services.

Three perspectives of note:

Usership: we need to dematerialize the world and take out the stuff which isn’t necessary. Does everyone need a car, or can we share them?

Assistance: we need to help people cope. The amount of information we have to handle doubles every 11 months. Can we help people make sense of this influx?

Innovation: we need to help people view things at a system level. So-called Wicked Problems demand a systemic approach.

Of course, words such as “better” and “help” are relative, qualitative terms which are difficult measurements of success. By way of clarification, Oliver offered the following as a meaning of “better”:

• consumers
• convenient
• usable
• desirable
• consistent

When describing the providers of better services, they typically encompass the following characteristics:

• efficient
• efffective
• sustainable

(The scrabble players among us will realize that combining the first letter of each word spells out “succeed”.)

In terms of an approach to service design, Oliver described three key skills:

Look and feel: A focus on craft and aesthetics is just as necessary in service design as in other traditional design disciplines, such as product design. Service touch points are artifacts and traditional design goals such as sparking desire in users still apply.

Users: Services demand an understanding of people. New services which strive to change user behavior must have an intimate understanding of their customers to have any chance of success. And existing services can gain much from re-examining their assumptions and perspective of their customers.

Operations: Service design also requires knowledge of how to make services. The building blocks of a service include not only the user experience and the infrastructure needed for successful service delivery, but also the business model, which is not traditionally the domain of design. While Mikkel Rasmussen would no doubt argue that designers should stick to what they know and let the business people handle the business requirements of a service, it still makes sense for designers to have some exposure and understanding of business needs and requirements so they can better perform their job.

Oliver’s five fundamental of services:

Systems: adopt a systems view. Solutions may not be a touch point (that is, a physical object or manifestation), but how a service recruits, or incentivizes, or changes what they do.

Value: Understand how customer judge companies and make sure their values align with company values.

Journeys: Customers engage with services as journeys, which means they experience multiple touch points over a period of time.

People: Who are your customers?

Propositions: The service proposition needs to stand alone in the market and be easily understood. (This is one place where familiarity with the business bits can come in handy.)

Oliver’s twelve tips about service design:

1. Be use-centric - always view the situation from your customer’s perspective
2. Have principles - innovate within a robust creative framework
3. Co-design - bring stakeholders into the process
4. Mapping journeys
5. Visualize (biggest USP of designers) - bring ideas to life to engage and solicit input from those around you (show service journey)
6. Back stage - innovate throughout the whole system
7. Design measurables - ensure staff measures and incentives support a delightful customer experience - how is employee performance measured?
8. Everyone serves - everyone in the organization is a service provider - because everyone’s actions impact on the customer’s experience
9. Prototype - over and over and over and over and over again - can be desktop or “real life”
10. Evidence - designing in evidence of service - create tengible evidence of the service in action - minicabs sending text messages to connect with custmers (car is on the way, driver phone numebr)
11. Join the dots - make the experience as seamless as possible for the user - help the company understand the complete customer journey
12. Work with designers

And, finally, five lessons for designers:

1. Lose the “I” in design: co-create and facilitate - we require teams to design, and the role of designer is facilitation
2. Do your own empathic research - you have to engage with the process, have to be part of the research and develop tacit knowledge of the situation
3. Systems before symptoms - understand root causes
4. Visualize - it’s your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)
5. Prototype, prototype, prototype

One of Oliver’s answers during the question session at the end of his talk stands out in my mind because it serves to remind us that services are ever-evolving: as we become more familiar with services, the delivery signals become less important and significant, but they are reassurances that the service is being delivered.

Up next: Toke Barter of Radarstation