Hi! I'm John Zimmerman and I'm happy to share results of a collaboration
with Virpi Roto, Jung-joo Lee, and Effie Law. We've been exploring the overlaps and boundaries between service design
and user experience design. Today, there's an increasing overlap between these two
design disciplines: UX designers are increasingly working on systems that function as services,
in addition, service designers are increasingly working on services that have significant
digital channels. Today, there's confusion about the boundaries between these two practices and
this is what we wanted to investigate. To better understand the current landscape
and how design professionals make sense of what they do, we conducted an online survey collecting
quantitative and qualitative data from almost 200 design professionals across 31 countries.
About half reported expertise in service design and half expertise in user experience design.
21% were researchers from academia and 77% work professionally in industry.
Now I'll hand you over to Effie Law who's going to talk about our quantitative findings.
We asked the respondents a set of questions, and here we highlight three of them. The
first one is about typical scope of work that UX designer and service designer do.
There are five characteristics: designing with end users, designing with multiple actors,
designing the product or service people will use, designing the work people will do, and designing
how product or service create revenue. Among them, two show significant difference,
as shown in the diagram. Service design is characterized as designing with multiple actors.
Service design is also characterized as designing how product or service create revenue.
The second question is about the subsumptive relations between UX design and service design.
For the statement 'UX design is a subset of service design' respondents with service
design background tend to agree on it, but those with UX background tend to be neutral.
In contrast, for the statement 'service design is a subset of UX design',
the majority of the respondents disagree on it. Those with industrial background have a
significantly higher degree of disagreement than academic counterparts. But some respondents think
service design and UX design are sequential rather than subsumptive.
Third, questions about the methods and theoretical roots that service design and UX design
share or different. Majority think the methods are different
but they share the same root but it is intriguing to find out what they share in the future work.
Jung-Joo Lee: We then analyzed our qualitative comments on the reasoning behind their answers
through an inductive content analysis. As a result, we present five things.
1. Service design for holistic view, UX design for fine focus. Resonating with our quantitative
analysis, one of the most appearing comments was service design is more holistic than user
experience design. However, it doesn't mean that UX design is a part of service design. While
service design provides a holistic perspective with an understanding of an ecosystem, UX design
could go deeper in detail in the analysis and development of a specific interaction.
Secondly, what was highlighted as a common ground or a shared principle between the two practices
was the notion of experience, be it user experience,
customer experience, or stakeholder experience. As this quote here depicts,
we all make user experiences at the end of the day, according to the participants.
Next, Complementary relationship by adopting methods. The survey respondents explained how
the expertise of one practice can complement another possibly through the exchange of
methods to begin with. UX design has expertise in evaluation methods with rigor, which could be
more and more integrated in service design. In addition, user research methods from UX design
can bring more user-centeredness to a service design, preventing the service design from overly
focusing on business aspects. On the other hand, a holistic and systemic thinking from service design
can also help to position UX design in a bigger picture, helping user experience designers to
understand their product in the ecosystem of multiple stakeholders' interactions.
Our next theme is Sequential relationship. To our question on subsumption relationship,
the respondents share that service design and UX design can be actually viewed as a
sequential relationship in terms of the design process. In this view, service design could come
early in the project, set business strategies, and identify the channel or touch point where
design is needed. This can be a starting point for a design brief that can guide UX design work.
Lastly, our last theme depicts what's reality. Many respondents shared that what defines the
work scope in reality is organizational needs and legacy rather than a scholarly definition. The
definitions of the boundary here often get blurred due to the organizational context.
Thanks JJ! We have now reported the findings
of our survey on the relation between UX
design and service design.
Since the findings revealed many
controversial
results on the overlaps and boundaries
of these two practices,
I will now conclude by calling more
research
on these still unclear areas.
There is little research on the changing
practices of UX design
despite of the ongoing transformation
in industry. The first first call
for research is to clarify the currently
blurry scope of UX designers' work.
There are at least two reasons behind
the present blurriness.
First, there seems to be a trend of UX
designers branding themselves
as service designers even if the scope
of the work
would stay in UX design.
The other reason behind the blurriness
is that the scope of work seems to
adjust
by the needs of a specific project.
We also call for longitudinal research
on the future development of the two
work practices
to find out if UX design and service
design
are integrating or differentiating
over time. Some respondents
made a point that it would be
interesting to see how the newest job
role
of business designer will change
the scope of work.
The interplay of service design and UX
design has been one of our main
interests.
After this study, our understanding is
that service design starts from the
business strategies
and provides a design brief for more
detailed UX work.
On the other hand, UX design produces
more knowledge
on the end-user experiences to benefit
service design.
We look forward for more research on the
phenomenon
and strategies for synergetic interplay.
Once we know more about the overlaps and
boundaries between the two practices
we should find the means to educate
students
for these roles. Service design classes
might focus on producing UX design
briefs
as deliverable, and UX classes
might use service strategies and design
briefs
as a starting point.
Both UX and service designers are
flexibly
adopting methods from each other's
practice
and appropriating them to the given
project
circumstances. It will be interesting to
study
how the methods are adopted and
appropriated
across the boundaries. This survey
has revealed important characteristics
on the UX
design and service design practice at
the time
when the cohabitation practices of the
two design
approaches are still forming.
We hope our results and research agenda
will eventually lead to more success
stories
of research that has high impact on
design practice. Thank you very much for
listening!