Experiences in applying service design to digital services

Abstract

An increasing number of services is mainly provided through digital channels and thus, implemented as software. Nevertheless, many companies struggle with developing digital services that are considered valuable by the users. Recently, service design has emerged as an approach to design better customer experience for services. We describe our experiences with a service design approach, and specifically prototyping, to explore user needs for a digital meeting scheduling service (MSS). We created an interactive prototype and paper prototypes and used them in a prototype test session with potential users to explore different design alternatives. The experiences include the peculiarities of service design for digital services as well as challenges in prototyping. The results indicate service design as a promising approach to develop digital services that better meet user needs. However, challenges exist on a practical level, such as operationalizing the value-in-use concept, applying service design for digital services, and lack of practical guidelines for prototyping.