Service design is a process that involves many different design disciplines in delivering an end result. For instance, graphic designers may ultimately help a service organisation better communicate how much they cost and what they deliver, but service designers will help that organisation understand that it needs to better communicate with its customers.
These case studies of service design projects are organised by the type of design work undertaken.
Design research
BALTIC
The BALTIC centre for contemporary arts worked with service design agency live|work to improve their customer service and increase the number of return visitors. The designers involved BALTIC staff in analysing the centre’s problems and helped them share their ideas for solutions by giving them disposable cameras and sending them out to experience other local services and experiences, like visiting the zoo or the hairdresser or a local cafe, to find out what’s good and what’s bad.
The team at BALTIC have now put into practice a number of improvements such as gallery signage and better café service. They also introduced new ideas, such as a history tour of the building. Collectively, these small ideas have enriched and transformed the visitor experience.
Make it Work
The City of Sunderland spends up to £62,000 getting the average person on incapacity benefit back into the world of work. A pilot service design project brought this down to just £5,000 per person.
live|work's Northern Way Worklessness pilot, in conjunction with One NorthEast, looked at how the long-term unemployed interact with employment services and developed some innovative ways to reach and support people back into work.
'Our research showed that hard to reach unemployed people tend not to volunteer themselves for government employment programmes. They need to be engaged in their local communities by people who understand their situations,' says live|work director Ben Reason. 'The Northern Way Worklessness Pilot – Make it Work, brings together a number of specialist community organisations covering mental health, drug rehabilitation and carers, in a coordinated approach to worklessness. Make it Work partners ensure that their clients are well and socially stable before promoting them into mainstream training, and then into jobs.'
More than 280 practitioners, employers and clients contributed to the design of the Make it Work service that has trialled a number of new service propositions. To date the scheme has provided support to more than 800 people, 200 of whom have already found employment. The project is now a two-year and £5,000,000 Working Neighbourhood Fund service for Sunderland City Council.
Graphic and brand design
The Geek Squad
'Advertising is a tax for having an unremarkable product' says Robert Stephens, Founder and Chief Inspector of the Geek Squad, an IT and technology support service. Stephens started a computer repair business in 1994 in Minneapolis and has transformed it into a multi-national company that has partnered with Carphone Warehouse in the UK.
Every bit of the Geek Squad experience has been designed to maximise impact and create word-of-mouth advertising. The name and logo were inspired by TV cop shows, employees are called agents, their uniforms, black clip on ties, white socks and a FBI like badge make clients smile and feel reassured. Their slogan - 'You didn't see me. I wasn't here' - means clients don't have to worry about admitting to having problems with technical things in their life. Even agents' shoes are designed. They have a cut out Geek Squad logo on the soles so that branded footprints are left behind.
Elmwood Chairman Jonathan Sands says about Geek Squad: 'Now if you wanted people to come and wire up your television or your computer wouldn’t it be great to see somebody who is agent 391 and he has got a badge like the FBI, he has got black trousers that are deliberately short so you see his white socks, and their tag line is ‘You never saw us, we were never here’. Because they know that guys do not want to admit that they can not wire these things up, so they say ‘Call us when your wife or girlfriend is out, we will come and sort it out and you never saw us, we were never here’. For me design strategy is about making people smile, feel safe, is having a purpose beyond price which is an emotional connection and not a rational one.'
Find out more about the Geek Squad on its website
HMRC
In collaboration with the in-house Customer Information Team, information design agency Boag Associates improved HMRC’s Self Assessment reminders, which increased payments by 33% compared with the same six week period in the previous year. With no prompts or additional advertising, just a better designed form, Boag helped HMRC increase it's revenue by £300million.
See more about this story and others on the Boag website
Product design
ScooterMAN
Everybody knows that you shouldn’t drink and drive, but sometimes you'll have driven out and still had something to drink. ScooterMAN is a franchised service that fills a real niche in the market. It provides fully insured chauffeurs to drive customers home in their own cars.
This is how it works: Customers have to become members of the ScooterMAN scheme. Then they can call up whenever they've had a drink and don't want to drive and a qualified and insured driver will be dispatched on a small scooter to pick them up. The scooter is small enough to put into a sealed bag and placed in the boot of the customer’s car. The ScooterMAN chauffer will then take the customer back to their own home in their own car.
The company claim that the service is cheaper than paying for a black cab for two journeys and, also, that they can answer ‘emergency’ call outs within 30 minutes.
The service is currently available in Greater London and the Manchester, Cardiff and Bristol areas and the eventual aim is to develop a nationwide franchise network to deliver the service across the UK
When the service was first thought of, the company found that there wasn’t a suitable scooter available on the market. So they have designed a fold away model and the bag into which it can be placed and they now sell this, perhaps to people who wish to park their car outside the congestion zone and continue their journey by scooter. It is often said that many services ride on the back of products. This is a product that resulted from a service.
Find out more about ScooterMAN on its website
Oyster Card
The Oyster Card, developed as part of the £1.2billion Private Finance Initiative, was introduced for three reasons: first, to reduce queuing at ticket offices during peak periods; second, to make better use of staff; and third, to reduce fraud. Transport for London placed the contract with Transys, a consortium of specialist firms, for the provision of an advanced ticketing system. It was hoped that the Oyster Card would eventually replace most paper tickets.
Fraud, estimated to be running at £43million per year, was the main driver of the project. The main loss of revenue stemmed from customers either travelling without tickets or using tickets not valid for the whole journey.
The Oyster Card not only speeds up the travel process for customers, it also makes it easy to check if the card is being used correctly through a portable hand-held machine used by ticket inspectors.
The advantages for the customer have been the speed and ease with which they can get through barriers and on to the station, and also in the savings that they make through using the Oyster Card. It can currently be used on the London Underground, London buses and trams, Docklands Light Railway and National Rail Services in London, providing 'seamless journeys across London'.
In future, the Oyster Card will be linked to the provision of other services including shopping. This is a great example of advances in technology being applied to improve customer experience.
Web and digital design
Federal Express
FedEx knew that its customers wanted to know where their packages were at every stage of their journey. By adding web tracking of packages to its information systems FedEx saved itself money - an estimated $4million per year in answering telephone queries - and improved customer satisfaction. FedEx customers are automatically emailed to inform them of a package in transit, and the tracking number supplied enables the package to be tracked via the web if required.
Interior design
Umpqua
Umpqua bank’s flagship experience is part boutique hotel lobby, part retail, with a little bit of coffee shop sprinkled in thanks to Ziba design.
The first week the store was open it generated a record $1million in deposits. Nine months into the first year Umpqua’s new store had a record $50 million in deposits. Since then, Umpqua has rolled out the new bank concept to all of its 162 stores. Umpqua’s new stores create 2.25 times higher deposits, two times average deposit balances, two times average loan balances and significantly higher cross sells with these customers. Umpqua also reports that recruiting people to work in these stores is easier. They feel the new store experience also helped Umpqua become one of Fortune magazine’s 100 Best Companies to work for three years in a row.
Find out more about the service design project on the Ziba website
Design and Sexual Health
A new sexual health service opened in Gateshead in July 2008 using many of the design recommendations made by a team of service designers employed during Dott07, a year of community design projects held in the North East.
The Dott07 project had revealed that sexual health clinic users felt ill at ease in a clinic that looked and felt too medical or institutional. The more comfortable and attractive the surroundings, the more relaxed and positive users were likely to feel about their experience. It made recommendations on interior design techniques that could be used to help improve a visitor's experience of a sexual health clinic and the Gateshead service took up these recommendations. The new sexual health service has performed well, consistently hitting its 48 hour access target and more than 50% of users attend as a result of a friend's recommendation.
Read more about the Dott07 Design and Sexual Health project