Service Design Thinking

We’re often contacted by clients who want our help to implement service design thinking as described in 'This is Service Design Thinking’, within their organization. The book was assembled to describe and illustrate the emerging field of service design and deals with the basic idea behind Service Design Thinking. But there’s more to it of course. Having worked on many service innovation projects such as the innovative and award-winning concept of Prorail/NS, clients experience the real value of service design thinking first-hand and learn how to apply these methods in real-life.

What do the clients like so much about service design thinking, and what value do they think it can bring to their organization? Here are our two cents on Service Design Thinking:

1. The truth about customer insights

One of the most important things when designing products or services is understanding what your customers need and want. This cannot be achieved only by thinking and making assumptions about what they might need. It is vital to actually talk to the customers and observe the context in which your products or services are going to be used. Gathering customer insights helps you to see the world, and your products & services, preventing you from spending time and money on something that seems like a good idea but isn’t actually going to be used.

2. Show, don't tell

Once you’ve gathered customer insights and generated some initial ideas, visualize them. Ideas are great but before they get onto paper (or a screen), they can be hard to convey and validate. Explaining can be difficult, especially when not everyone has the same expertise. That’s why getting your ideas out of your head and translating them into something visual will help to ensure everyone is on the same wavelength. Although it’s not possible to predict everything, visualization makes you see your ideas from a different perspective, it will enable you to see more limitations and challenges that the users might encounter. So go ahead and bring your ideas into the physical world, it will make a big difference for your business and your users.