The Goal of Service Designers

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
— Steve Jobs, co-founder, Apple

Many service designers, who primarily focus on creating worthwhile user experiences, fail to realize the need to satisfy business requirements.

An article on the SDN Website. https://shorturl.at/cqwE5. The Evidence of Design 2.0 — An Impactful Service Identity Designed with AI, offered that empathy and caring are hallmarks of a good design. The International Service Design Institute, the service training organization I co-founded, has run multiple surveys asking service designers to name key attributes of a service designer. The terms caring and empathy are consistently among the top vote-getters.

We argue that there may be aspects of creating a service that benefits from a more humanistic, softer side. Yet creating the user experience must be secondary to ensuring the business requirements are met. If a user reports a horrible experience getting a license, a government permit, or a required certificate, for example, the service doesn’t fail. It only fails when the business or organization is unable to meet its requirements, which regardless, requires the skills of a service designer.

The value of a service designer is integrating business requirements with users’ needs. Through the integration, understanding users’ behavior becomes critical.

Courtesy of ISDI, Inc., www.internationalservicedesigninstitute.com. Training Service Designers