Towards a taxonomy of service design methods and tools

Abstract

Service Design multidisciplinary heritage provides a wide array of methods and tools to practitioners. This can be overwhelming for inexperienced service designers or may present a threat to the coherence of consultancy organizations creating services for third parties. We present a reflection on the use of tools and methods in Service Design and propose a taxonomy, both to provide guidance to newcomers and enforce team coherence. By surveying ten distinct sources, both from industry and academia, we collected more than 160 methods and tools. Each method's relevance for the community was inferred from its frequency on the survey and the most relevant were clustered according to six dimensions: why, who, what, how, when and where. The resulting clusters were visualized in four quadrants charts for each dimension. Based on this proposal, practitioners can then address each problem from several perspectives, using the most appropriate tool. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.