Lab+9

**CCT333 Tutorial 9: Service Design and How Good Design Makes you Happy**

 * According to the slideshow by Sylvain Cottong, describe the tools and methods of 'service design' and...**
 * From your personal experience, what would be a scenario in which these methods would be useful?**

Service design, a human centered approach, involves a combination of design methods from product design to interaction design in designing the experience and interface of services. The aim of service design is creating experiences and interfaces the are ultimately more useful, usable and desirable for users while being more efficient, effective and valuable for the service provider. The utilization of a good customer service is becoming very beneficial to many types of businesses and organizations. Ultimately, it is the entire experience during or after the actual sale that contributes to exceptional customer satisfaction.

There are many components to the service design system. Service touch points are the tangible elements that make up the total experience of a service. Furthermore, services are provided and experienced though various systems and relationships. Most services aim to provide the best value to both the customers and the producers. Service design also relies heavily on people as services always rely on various people working together.

Specific methods of service design include ethnography and user studies which help to identify, discover and understand the context of the service as well as the users. A customer journey map illustrates how the customer perceives and experiences the service interface. Service blueprinting enables quantitative description of the important service elements such as time, logical sequences of actions and processes. Ideation, context mapping and participatory design help to uncover users' conscious and unconscious needs, experiences, hopes and expectations. Finally, service prototyping involves scenarios, storytelling, storyboards and real world experience simulation to construct the service.

I believe service blueprinting, context mapping, participatory design, and service prototyping are all extremely beneficial in designing services under any given context as such methods give the opportunity to better understand the service, the service providers and most importantly the service users. I think that in better understanding the service and its complete context, it is possible to formulate are a far more valuable service that is ultimately more useful, usable and desirable to the service users.