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Service Design: How to Design Integrated Service Experiences

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Intermediate

How This Course Will Help Your Career

What You Will Learn

  • What Service Design is, where it came from and how it compares to User Experience (UX) design and Customer Experience (CX) design

  • What a Service Design process looks like and how to use it to create great service experiences

  • How the scope of Service Design encompasses customer interactions as well as behind-the-scenes business operations, and multiple delivery channels

  • What the most useful Service Design methods and approaches are, how to do them and how to avoid the most common mistakes, all with the help of examples, explanatory videos, templates and step-by-step guides

  • How to transition your career from UX Design to Service Design

  • How to build a Service Design team and then increase its skills and maturity in your organization

  • How to tackle Service Design in an agile or lean organization

Services are everywhere! When you get a new passport, order a pizza or make a reservation on AirBnB, you're engaging with services. How those services are designed is crucial to whether they provide a pleasant experience or an exasperating one. The experience of a service is essential to its success or failure no matter if your goal is to gain and retain customers for your app or to design an efficient waiting system for a doctor’s office.

In a service design process, you use an in-depth understanding of the business and its customers to ensure that all the touchpoints of your service are perfect and, just as importantly, that your organization can deliver a great service experience every time. It’s not just about designing the customer interactions; you also need to design the entire ecosystem surrounding those interactions.

In this course, you’ll learn how to go through a robust service design process and which methods to use at each step along the way. You’ll also learn how to create a service design culture in your organization and set up a service design team. We’ll provide you with lots of case studies to learn from as well as interviews with top designers in the field. For each practical method, you’ll get downloadable templates that guide you on how to use the methods in your own work.

This course contains a series of practical exercises that build on one another to create a complete service design project. The exercises are optional, but you’ll get invaluable hands-on experience with the methods you encounter in this course if you complete them, because they will teach you to take your first steps as a service designer. What’s equally important is that you can use your work as a case study for your portfolio to showcase your abilities to future employers! A portfolio is essential if you want to step into or move ahead in a career in service design.

Your primary instructor in the course is Frank Spillers. Frank is CXO of award-winning design agency Experience Dynamics and a service design expert who has consulted with companies all over the world. Much of the written learning material also comes from John Zimmerman and Jodi Forlizzi, both Professors in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University and highly influential in establishing design research as we know it today.

You’ll earn a verifiable and industry-trusted Course Certificate once you complete the course. You can highlight it on your resume, CV, LinkedIn profile or on your website.

Gain an Industry-Recognized UX Course Certificate

Use your industry-recognized Course Certificate on your resume, CV, LinkedIn profile or your website.

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Our courses and Course Certificates are trusted by these industry leaders:

Our clients: IBM, HP, Adobe, GE, Accenture, Allianz, Phillips, Deezer, Capgemin, Mcafee, SAP, Telenor, Cigna, British Parliament, State of New York

Is this course right for you?

This is an intermediate-level course for anyone who wants to learn to design services.

  • UX designers, product designers and UX researchers who want to transition into the Service Design field or expand their toolbox with methods from Service Design.
  • Product managers and project managers who want to enable their team to excel at service design.
  • Entrepreneurs interested in offering great service experiences.
  • CEOs, CTOs, COOs and CMOs who want to better position their organization within the market by putting more focus on how they design services.
  • Anyone considering making the switch to a career in service design or interested in working with services in a more structured way.

Learn and work with a global community of designers

When you take part in this course, you’ll join a global community and work together to improve your skills and career opportunities. Connect with helpful peers and make friends with like-minded individuals as you push deeper into the exciting and booming industry of creativity and design. You will have the opportunity to share ideas, learn from your fellow course participants and enjoy the social aspects afforded by our open and friendly forum.

Course Overview: What You'll Master

  • Each week, one lesson becomes available.
  • There's no time limit to finish a course. Lessons have no deadlines.
  • Estimated learning time: 21 hours 1 min spread over 7 weeks .

Lesson 0: Welcome and Introduction

Available once you start the course. Estimated time to complete: 1 hour 13 mins.

Lesson 1: What is Service Design?

Available once you start the course. Estimated time to complete: 4 hours 32 mins.

Lesson 2: How to Prepare Your Service Design Team

Available anytime after Apr 05, 2025. Estimated time to complete: 4 hours 8 mins.

Lesson 3: How to Build a Research Foundation for Your Service Design

Available anytime after Apr 12, 2025. Estimated time to complete: 3 hours 16 mins.

Lesson 4: How to Prototype for Service Design

Available anytime after Apr 19, 2025. Estimated time to complete: 4 hours 20 mins.

Lesson 5: How to Build Service Design Maturity

Available anytime after Apr 26, 2025. Estimated time to complete: 3 hours 32 mins.

Lesson 6: Course Certificate, Final Networking, and Course Wrap-up

Available anytime after May 03, 2025.

How Others Have Benefited

Christine Were

Christine Were, Kenya

“The course gave real-world examples and on-the-job experience. It also explained how to use the templates. This was really amazing.”

Sandra Labastie

Sandra Labastie, France

“I liked the technical aspect of that course. Also, the honesty of the teacher about how complex it is. It's clearer to me the differences between UX design and service design. Great course!”

spencer newman

spencer newman, Australia

“The course reflects the instructor's real-world experience and holistic approach to frameworks and methodologies across the UX and service design spectrum. FS is an amazing teacher!”

See other reviews

How It Works

  1. Take online courses by industry experts

    Lessons are self-paced so you'll never be late for class or miss a deadline.

  2. Get a Course Certificate

    Your answers are graded by experts, not machines. Get an industry-recognized Course Certificate to prove your skills.

  3. Advance your career

    Use your new skills in your existing job or to get a new job in UX design. Get help from our community.

Start Advancing Your Career Now

Join us to take “Service Design: How to Design Integrated Service Experiences”. Take other courses at no additional cost. Make a concrete step forward in your career path today.

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Service Design: How to Design Integrated Service Experiences
Closes in
14
hrs
25
mins
21
secs
88% booked

Service Design: How to Design Integrated Service Experiences

1.6 - Understand the Service Design Process

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  1. 00:00:00 --> 00:00:32

    Let's take a look at service design from a wide overview perspective. In the beginning of the process, you've got user research happening. And that's ethnography – right, to be clear: user research meaning "field studies" – ethnographic field studies. It's where personas come out of and journey maps come out of. And the reason you're doing that is you need to do that deep listening: What are the pain points? If the service design project is internally focused,

  2. 00:00:32 --> 00:01:01

    then that means service design interviews with stakeholders as well as subject-matter experts. You're going to also then have that *workshop* – that *stakeholder engagement piece* that we talked about. And so that stuff is happening up-front. From there, you're going to have the use of the template business model canvas, the value proposition canvas – those two canvases. And, to me, bringing the realistic inputs to those canvases, you can do it in a couple of hours: one hour, two hours even. If you have the right people in the room, you could even sit down.

  3. 00:01:01 --> 00:01:30

    You can do it across the whole process, too, by the way. You don't have to just do – the business model canvas is done up-front, yeah, in that first bit. But you can go back and do it again with another stakeholder. Like, for example, I've had so many projects where we're all the way to the testing phase and they bring in a new product manager or a new person to manage the whole – a program manager. And it's like those people *don't know*. So, going back and doing the business model canvas with them could be a good idea. From there, then you move into prototyping.

  4. 00:01:30 --> 00:02:01

    Now, when you do agile service design, you might do some quick prototyping up-front, – right off of those journey maps, right off of the user research. Traditionally, what you do is you take that journey map, though, and you move into the blueprint stage. So, you've got your business model, value proposition defined. Now, map it out in the service blueprint. That's where co-creation comes in – so, with stakeholders again. All the stakeholders are working on that blueprint together.

  5. 00:02:01 --> 00:02:32

    And you might also *map the ecosystem*. So, what's happening in the ecosystem that everyone needs to be aware of? And it's at that stage then you kick up into *service prototyping*. So, then you'll start building these actual prototypes. They might include UX design of apps or websites. That's fine. They might include physical, tangible theatrical acted-out, hands-on "fun stuff" – you know. And that's where we have the testing – think of it as user testing: *service user testing*.

  6. 00:02:32 --> 00:03:02

    And then, finally, once you've done that refinement, you're going to roll it out, roll out the service. And, of course, you're going to measure the service. You're going to do that initially with like a survey or you're going to use other tools from UX design or depending on what's appropriate. So, there may be web analytics, there may be exit surveys or you might do a *diary study*, which is a technique for user research you can use to assess the service. So, whatever the technique that's appropriate based on what you're building

  7. 00:03:02 --> 00:03:30

    – again, you know, depending on what you're building will determine the technique. But you want to get that feedback immediately, to find out. It may just be going into the environment and doing a service safari on your own service. So, that's an overview of the whole process, and key points there: user research up-front; stakeholder engagement throughout as well as some early iterations or loops of that if you're in an agile service design environment,

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    as well as remember the measurement.

Service Design: How to Design Integrated Service Experiences

3.5 - How to Use Role-Based Personas

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  1. 00:00:00 --> 00:00:32

    In addition to customer or user journey maps, the bread-and-butter component that goes into your service strategy is *personas*. Personas are interesting because, like the journey map, I want to introduce to you a template and share with you how I use personas and how I've been using them over the last couple of decades.

  2. 00:00:32 --> 00:01:02

    And I would consider this best practice. This is kind of directly from Alan Cooper, who is considered one of the originators of the persona concept, working closely with a colleague of his who refined the personas. So, this is what we call the *role-based* approach to personas. There are two persona distinctions basically. There are *design personas* – which are role-based –

  3. 00:01:02 --> 00:01:30

    and there are *marketing personas* – which are for use with segmentation and marketing. If you're doing marketing personas, they're not really going to help you from an experience design, UX or a service design perspective. Marketing personas are useful to market researchers to understand segments and who your audience is. But design personas take us down into the *behavioral* level, which is the most critical area that we need in order to understand

  4. 00:01:30 --> 00:02:01

    how to influence and shape user behavior. Role-based personas design *intention* – as opposed to marketing. They're really narratives that explain the problem-solving context. That's what personas are. Think of them as the hats that users wear to solve their problems. They are based on contextual interviewing or ethnography. They should be. That's where you get the real point of understanding your users. They should also capture tools and artifacts.

  5. 00:02:01 --> 00:02:30

    They should capture quotes and user verbatim and also capture issues and recommendations. Brenda Laurel is one of the "Grandmothers" of virtual reality and a usability pioneer. She says that if your personas don't have pain points in them, they're garbage. So, personas should have pain in them. Let's take a look at a template here. And you'll see a narrative there.

  6. 00:02:30 --> 00:03:01

    Now, this is a technique that Whitney Quesenberry recommends, and I really like it. I've been using it for the last 2 or 3 years. It's writing your narrative in the *first person*. For years, I wrote – you know: "The user does this, and the user does that, and the user does this." – and describing that behavior. But now, changing it to a first-person narrative, it seems to be more powerful. It's easier to write, too. And it's because "I do this. I do this. I do this. And then I do this. I do this." – you know. So,

  7. 00:03:01 --> 00:03:31

    I think maybe it's easier because we're so used to saying "I do this." – and we reference our *own* behavior as if we're the user. And we're not. So, it's important to do your outside-in, do your user research, bring those outside pain points, and then you can— You should be able to speak confidently and narrate with the "I": "I do this for this reason (blah blah blah)." This should be based on *behavior*. And the behavior is the jobs or the tasks that are over here.

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    You should have the *context of the behavior* and the *use / usage scenario* – if you will – the user scenario, the environment and also the *motivations*. In here as well, you have *artifacts*. These are those service artifacts or physical artifacts that go along with it. There might be *resources* that the user relies on, that they use, and the *pains* or the *problem areas*. So, those should also be in the narrative – but you might want to list them out and even put them on a separate screen,

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    separate page of your template. And I keep adjusting my persona templates; I don't have just one template. I think I've updated my persona templates maybe 4 or 5 times over a period of like 15 years. So, I'm always like adjusting and updating them, trying to make them a *better deliverable* for the teams that are looking at them – who are not usually UX people, but they're working with the UX process. So, remember – this isn't just for you; this is for your *team*

  10. 00:04:32 --> 00:05:00

    because remember – you're *co-creating* with service design. Typically, you have 5 or 6 personas. If you have like 20 or 30 or 50 personas, then you're in a *segmentation model* or then you're *in a person*. A persona should be a *representation*, like a *composite* of target user behaviors. And really it's users that you want to go after. You know – the fans are OK, but the users that you really need to reach

  11. 00:05:00 --> 00:05:30

    that are *not* being engaged, those are usually high targets. So, you have to decide and prioritize. There's some prioritization weighting that Microsoft developed that you can read about in Pruitt and Adlin's *The Persona Lifecycle* book, the prioritization weighting that Microsoft uses. Basically, you give a priority to a persona and then you can see how much influence it's going to have. This part I wanted to mention up here – this is that role.

  12. 00:05:30 --> 00:06:02

    When I said *role*, what do I mean by 'role'? It's the hat the user wears. In this example, it's 'Evidence Evan'. I had my 'Tech-specs Tina'. 'Tech-specs Tina' was someone who liked to look at the tech specs on a car. That was for car buying in that scenario. You can have the segment under here, too. So, this could be like: 'Moms 30–40' or something, if that's the marketing segment, so that, again, the rest of the team can understand who you're talking about. If you have

  13. 00:06:02 --> 00:06:31

    the name of the person – like Tim or Tina or Suzy or Tom or whatever, it's a lot harder to use the persona – it's a lot more *confusing* to use the persona. I was once in a product manager's office at Microsoft, and he had a huge poster with like 30 personas, and they were all called Bob, Suzy, Ravi, Jamie – the name of the person. And he was like, 'I'm having trouble understanding these, Frank, like these personas

  14. 00:06:31 --> 00:07:00

    – there are too many.' I explained to him role-based personas and seeing your persona as a composite. Yes, we use the picture of the person. And it's really just because we're basically saying to your brain: "Empathy – it's a human empathy." But really it's a misrepresentation. It really should be a *hat*. It really should be a hat because role-based personas are *way* more powerful than personas that you just use

  15. 00:07:00 --> 00:07:12

    – some corny name with a corny picture. It's better to try and embody the realism of the actual person that or the target group of behaviors – I should say – of.

Service Design: How to Design Integrated Service Experiences

4.7 - Test your Service Design with Service Staging

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  1. 00:00:00 --> 00:00:32

    So, as you prototype your service, this is your chance to put it all to the test and to see if everything is functioning frontstage to backstage. Now, service prototyping is a little bit like the role you're going to be taking in usability testing when you're ready to stage the thing. You've got a *moderator* or this is a *staging facilitator*.

  2. 00:00:32 --> 00:01:02

    The staging facilitator is going to direct the participation and the script of this physical – usually it's a physical experience. *Why* is it physical? It's because the scale of your interactions or experience need to be mapped out. You know – if you have a countertop, you need a *countertop*; if it's this high and it's for someone in a wheelchair that's not able to see that, that's a problem.

  3. 00:01:02 --> 00:01:31

    Or if it's for a child and it's this high, for example. So, you need to – you know – bring a box, whatever it is that you have handy. Take just basic furniture and repurpose it and turn it into the physical experience. Think of this as preparation, like you would for user testing where you're building mock-ups on the fly. And then, just make sure you document findings and the results just like with your usability testing.

  4. 00:01:31 --> 00:02:00

    So, basically you're going to user test your prototype. But I think that in order to do this really well, you need to embrace not only just a fun mindset – because this is very playful and fun – and remember, though, you're testing very serious business rules that are going to impact the overall service delivery. And I think to do this well, you need to *embrace role-playing*

  5. 00:02:00 --> 00:02:32

    and *storytelling* as well as the *theatrical walkthrough* – kind of the same skills we use when designing immersive media: VR and AR. We walk through our prototypes to get a sense of scale, to get a sense of space, to see how those interactions – you know: Are you too close to the customer? Does the customer have privacy? Imagine testing privacy just on paper. Privacy is like a felt sense in the real world. So, you need to – you know – put the curtains here; put the curtain here.

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    If the desk is here, put the desk here. If the computer comes up to here, simulate that so the user can see that. And if you are using VR and AR, then prototype in that. You can do some some walkthroughs in VR, and you can use some very basic builder tools to throw together some prototypes. But also make sure you do the improv in the real world because your team's involvement is going to be critical. So, finally, user test your prototype.

  7. 00:03:04 --> 00:03:33

    Start with a pilot. Find out what's disconnected. Are expectations being set? You know – is everything clear on the frontstage? Does that carry back to the employees and to the backstage area? Is everything completely lined up that needs to be there? Are there problems or break points or issues? And also bring customers in at this point. When you start doing your service staging, it's kind of a little more serious.

  8. 00:03:33 --> 00:04:01

    So, you can start bringing in customers. Definitely *prototype internally* and then bring in customers just like you would with a normal user test. And make sure you simulate as easily as possible, as conveniently as possible, those *systems*. So, if there's a message coming from – some action from a server, you know – drop the message. Maybe put it / paste it on the screen with a Post-it note.

  9. 00:04:01 --> 00:04:10

    The same kind of paper prototyping techniques that you might already know from usability testing apply to service design.

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