Hi, I’m Jung-Joo Lee from National University of Singapore.
I’m very happy to present our paper, "How HCI Adopts Service Design"
co-authored with Christine Yap and Virpi Roto.
In recent years we have seen HCI’s growing interest in Service Design.
In the meantime, there have been confusions around the intersections between service design and HCI.
Isn’t Service Design similar to UX design?
Isn’t Service Design more for business?
What is Service Design, from the first place?
While there are multiple definitions of service design,
we could observe two ways of understanding service design.
A narrow perspective is to consider a service as a single service offering,
and service design in this view is to design an intangible service offering.
On the other hand, a broader view to service is considering service as logic.
In this view, service design is to develop new value co-creation platforms.
Each view could lead to different design outcomes.
For example, McDonald e-kiosk service is a design outcome from a narrower view
whereas Adobe creative cloud can be a design outcome from a broader view.
There are four dimensions of service design that are commonly mentioned.
First, the customer experience level,
Secondly, the backstage work process level.
Thirdly, the collaborative network level involving multiple stakeholders,
And lastly, the ecosystem and infrastructure level.
Observing the co-existence of interests and confusions of service design in HCI, we aim to explore;
How HCI has interpreted Service Design?
What are future directions for Service Design and HCI to create synergies?
We conducted a systematic literature review on 179 HCI publications
that claimed to use service design in their work.
You can find these papers in the supplementary material.
We firstly analyzed annual volumes of service design publications in HCI.
Since 2004 when the first publication was found, there’s no clear pattern of increase
only except in 2020 when there was a remarkable increase, mostly from Chinese universities.
From our analysis, we also found 26% of the papers used service design loosely,
without mentioning how their work used service design.
Those studies regarded their approach as service design just because they dealt with digital services.
As you see, there’s no pattern of decrease of such work till recent.
This might indicate that the understanding of service design
as a distinct discipline is not fully established yet in HCI.
For an in-depth understanding of what scopes of Service Design have been adopted in HCI,
we conducted an inductive content analysis.
16 codes emerged under the three categories.
This table presents the codes for each category in the order of frequency.
We found that “user journey” was the most addressed design scope.
This might be the result of HCI’s prevailing focus on end-users.
In fact, a good number of papers had a main focus on UI/UX features.
In the meantime, we also observed the expansion of HCI’s design scope
into backstage work process involving employees,
and collaborative networks involving multiple stakeholders.
And, about 8 percent of the papers dealt with business models.
Those studies discussed new business models around new economies,
such as a sharing economy or a platform economy.
And stressed that technology companies need to think of products
as “platforms for all sorts of upgrades and value-added services”.
At the same time, there was a considerable number of studies that focus on end-user experiences.
Interestingly, we found that service design informed new design strategies for those studies.
For example, customers of end-users and users as service providers.
Or human-robot interaction design, based on the concept of service recovery.
We also analyzed how service design is used for designing for emerging technologies,
as envisioned by Zimmerman and Forlizzi.
Our first set of findings focuses on service design scopes
for social computing and crowdsourcing technologies.
Among the 28 papers that deal with these technologies,
collaborative networks involving multiple roles was the most appearing code,
followed by value exchange and value co-creation.
We also found that half of the papers addressing business models in the entire set of data
are actually about social computing and crowdsourcing technologies.
The second set of findings focuses on service design scopes and AI-related technologies,
including machine learning, chatbot, autonomous vehicle and blockchain.
Among the 12 papers in this category,
scopes of journey perspective, backstage work process and collaborative networks
were equivalently addressed.
The papers addressing collaborative networks proposed new collaborative relationships
enabled by big data and AI-based services or
value conflicts of various stakeholders around automated technologies
So, what does this mean?
While we saw the expansions of the design scope,
we also found a strong product-centric view in the service design work in HCI.
Our findings demonstrate that HCI’s current perception of service design seems to remain
closer to the interaction-level dimensions, than the system level.
On the other hand, our analysis revealed that the HCI studies dealing with emerging technologies
are nearest to the system level dimensions.
We believe future studies with those technologies can largely benefit from service design
to deal with multiple actors with political and economic concerns
and new conceptualizations of system behaviors.
For example, the methodic understanding of ecologies of value-in-use will benefit
data-based technologies that require continuous participation from users.
Service design can also help consider ethics of AI algorithm
by sensemaking the complexity of stakeholders
and prototyping ethics.
Designing with autonomous vehicles, as a platform for data and value constellation,
would be a promising area for system-level service design as well.
Considering value constellation and business models might require a substantial leap
in disciplinary expertise for many HCI designers.
We believe service design can offer a valuable stepping stone.
Thank you for listening.