We'll get into defining Service Design and seeing where it's being applied. So, what is service design? And, probably more importantly, what *isn't* service design? So, service design is about designing an experience from a service orientation. So, it's like user experience design
– where you're designing for the UX usually of a digital product – but in this case the service may touch many, many other places – you know, "omni-channel" as it's called: different channels. So, the user might start out on the web and they might go to the phone and they might go to the store or they might go to a location or to a form. They might pick up a brochure; back onto their mobile phone. And however that whole service is being delivered – you know – sometimes you *have to* go to a different channel
in order to continue with the journey. And so, that's what service design is. It's a *wider kind of view* – stepping *back* from UX. I like to think of it from a *systems thinking perspective*. And by 'systems thinking', I'm talking about the engineering discipline, not systems as in database systems. Though systems are actually really important in service designs
because – you know – you have computer systems, database systems, you've got business processes and logic. So, service designs think about *everything* – not just what's happening on the screen. And they think about what the smoothest ways are to deliver that – but not just from the consumer's perspective; they think about *how* to deliver the service experience
in a way that's *appropriate* for the *user* and for the *business* and for the *systems* that are going to support that – the processes and all the back-end stuff. They're about being *exact* about that because – you know – it's *very* very apparent when there's a service experience failure. So, service design has to be *feasible*. It means it has to work again from a business perspective. And it has to be *scalable*
so that you can't just come up with a great idea but then it doesn't work for rolling it out to 10 million people. The other thing is *financial viability* is really important. And I think that's part of scale. So, there's engineering scale. But there's also "Is this going to work?" – you know. If it's a free service, for example, is freemium – that model – going to work? Or are you going to have to change the model and therefore maybe jeopardize your users?