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Service Design 101

July 9, 2017 2017-07-09

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In This Article:

What is a service, definition of service design , components of ‘service design’, service design vs. designing a service , benefits of service design, history of service design  , references .

Traditional economics draws a clear distinction between goods and services. Goods are tangible and consumable — pens, sunglasses, or shoes. Services are instantaneous exchanges that are intangible and do not result in ownership—medical treatment, the postal service, or public transportation. 

Today, there is no longer a clear distinction between goods and services. A continuum of goods–services exists with a plethora of combined products and services in the middle. For example, a song (an mp3 file) is a product that can be accessed via a service like Spotify or Apple Music. To the user, the difference between a product and service—owning the sound file versus streaming the song—can be close to identical while behind the scenes they are quite different.

As services grow in sophistication, so does the need to support them. Complex user experiences often break due to an internal organizational shortcoming — a weak link in the ecosystem. For example, when was the last time you called a support hotline, gave your personal information, only to be transferred to another agent asking you to repeat the exact information you had already provided? This pain point stems from an internal process flaw that was produced by a lack of service design. 

Most organizations are centered around products and delivery channels. Many of the organizations’ resources (time, budget, logistics) are spent on customer-facing outputs, and the internal processes (including the experience of the organization’s employees) are overlooked; service design focuses on these internal processes. 

Service design: The activity of planning and organizing a business’s resources (people, props, and processes) in order to (1) directly improve the employee’s experience, and (2) indirectly, the customer’s experience. 

Imagine a restaurant where there are a range of employees: hosts, servers, busboys, and chefs. Service design focuses on how the restaurant operates and delivers the food it promises—from sourcing and receiving ingredients, to on-boarding new chefs, to server-chef communication regarding a diner’s allergies. Each moving part plays a role in the food that arrives on the diner’s plate, even though it is not directly part of their experience. Service design can be mapped using a  service blueprint .  

In user experience design multiple components must be designed: visuals, features and commands, copywriting, information architecture, and more. Not only must each component be designed correctly, but they also must be integrated to create a total user experience. Service design follows the same basic idea. There are several components, each one should be designed correctly, and all of them should be integrated.

The three main components of service design are people, props, and processes.

This component includes anyone who creates or uses the service, as well as individuals who may be indirectly affected by the service. 

Examples include: 

• Fellow customers encountered throughout the service

This component refers to the physical or digital artifacts (including products) that are needed to perform the service successfully. 

• Physical space:  storefront, teller window, conference room
• Social Media
• Digital files
• Physical products

These are any workflows, procedures, or rituals performed by either the employee or the user throughout a service. 

• Withdrawing money from an ATM
• Getting an issue resolved over support
• Interviewing a new employee 
• Sharing a file

Returning to the restaurant example, people would be farmers growing the produce, restaurant managers, chefs, hosts, and servers. Props would include (amongst others): the kitchen, ingredients, POS software, and uniforms. Processes would include: employees clocking in, servers entering orders, cleaning dishes, and storing food.  

Frontstage vs. Backstage 

Service components are broken down into frontstage and backstage, depending on whether the customers see them or not. Think of a theater performance. The audience sees everything in front of the curtain: the actors, costumes, orchestra, and set. However, behind the curtain there is a whole ecosystem: the director, stage hands, lighting coordinators, and set designers. 

Though not ever seen by the audience, the backstage plays a critical part in shaping the audience’s experience. In a restaurant, what happens in the kitchen dictates what appears on your table. 

Frontstage components include: 

• Touchpoints 

Backstage components includes:

• Technology 
• Infrastructures 

Service design is not simply designing a service.

• Service design addresses how an organization gets something done— think “experience of the employee.”
• Designing a service addresses the touchpoints that create a customer’s journey — think “experience of the user.”

As a parallel, every software application has a user interface, no matter how rudimentary. However, writing code that creates an interface as a bi-product would not be called a ‘user interface design process’. Similarly, even if the user interface were created from a deliberate design process, it would not be a product of ‘user experience design’ unless the experience of the user is taken into account.

Why do we need to care about service design and the “experience of the employee” as UX Designers? An organization’s backstage processes (how we do things internally) have as much, if not more, impact on the overall user experience as the visible points of interaction that users encounter. If a server does not successfully communicate allergies to the chef, a diner could consume food with severe consequences. If a restaurant is overcrowded, but has a systematic process for clearing tables and assigning seating, customers never have to wait or know its overcrowded in the first place.

Most organizations’ resources (time, budget, logistics) are spent on customer-facing outputs, while internal processes (including the experience of the organization’s employees) are overlooked. This disconnect triggers a common, widespread sentiment that one hand does not know what the other is doing.

Service design bridges such organizational gaps by: 

• Surfacing conflicts:  Business models and service-design models are often in conflict because business models do not always align with the service that the organization delivers. Service design triggers thought and provides context around systems that need to be in place in order to adequately provide a service throughout the entire product’s life cycle (and in some cases, beyond).
• Fostering hard conversations:  Focused discussion on procedures and policies exposes weak links and misalignment and enables organizations to devise collaborative and crossfunctional solutions.
• Reducing redundancies with a bird’s-eye view:  Mapping out the whole cycle of internal service processes gives companies a bird’s-eye view of their service ecosystem, whether within one large offering, or across multiple subofferings. This process helps pinpoint where duplicate efforts occur, likely causing employee frustration and wasted resources. Eliminating redundancies conserves energy, improves employees’ efficiency, and reduces costs.
• Forming relationships:  Service design helps align internal service provisions like roles, backstage actors, processes, and workflows to the equivalent frontstage personnel. To come back to our initial example, with service design, information provided to one agent should be available to all other agents who interact with the same customer. 

The term “service design” was coined by Lynn Shostack in 1982. Shostack proposed that organizations develop an understanding of how behind-the-scenes processes interact with each other because “leaving services to individual talent and managing the pieces rather than the whole make a company more vulnerable and creates a service that reacts slowly to market needs and opportunities.” 

This is still true today, but the responsibility does not fall on only operations and management, as it did twenty years ago. Practicing service design is the responsibility of the organization as a whole.

Kalbach, Jim. “Mapping Experiences.” O’Reilly Media, Inc, 2016.

Shostack, Lynn. “Designing Services that Deliver.” Harvard Business Review, 1984.

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What Is Service Design? How To Implement Service Design Processes

It’s easy to think of design in terms of tangible objects, like a smartphone or a chair, or in terms of digital products, like a website or an app.

But what about those experiences we can’t touch or see?

This is where service design comes in. Just like UX , service design is all about creating a first-class experience for the customer — whether they’re buying a coffee, going for a beauty treatment or using public transport.

Let’s take a closer look at what service design is and the processes involved.

What is service design?

The main difference between service design and product design is that services are intangible. Essentially, a service designer tries to make a company’s services better than its competitors by following a service design methodology. The aim is to improve how the service works in order to improve the customer experience.

Take your favourite coffee shop.

There are probably other coffee shops you could go to, so what makes you choose this one? Perhaps you enjoy the friendly service, the smiley face on the receipt, the fact that they use fair trade coffee beans, or the plugs they have to power your phone. It might just be something small, like you never have cash on you and one doesn’t take your card.

Well, that’s service design in a nutshell!

Wikipedia explains it like this: Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its customers. Service design may function as a way to inform changes to an existing service or create a new service entirely.

Service design: Consistent vs. unique experiences

Companies like Starbucks and McDonald’s go to great lengths to make sure you experience the same service from San Francisco to Saint Petersburg.

Fast forward and times change. Today’s customers are looking for unique experiences, which throws up a whole host of opportunities and challenges. The hotel industry has definitely felt the impact of Airbnb, and traditional hotels are now striving to create unique experiences or unique rooms to win back their customers.

Of course, companies still face the ultimate challenge (and cost!) of delivering a unique experience on a mass scale.

The four approaches to customization

Source:  Harvard Business Review

Apple is a great example of outstanding service design.

Have a problem with your iPhone? Just go to the genius bar and they will help you fix it and get it back up and running for you.

It’s personal, builds the brand and generates loyalty. As a customer, knowing that if anything goes wrong you can quickly get it solved is a huge benefit.

The service design process is similar to UX!

Designers seek to understand the needs and desires of the people who will use a product or service by spending time with them. This approach ensures solutions are both fit for purpose and desirable to the people who will use them. By focusing on human stories and insights, designers build empathy for users , and ensure that the ideas they develop are wholly relevant.

Here is an overview of a typical service design methodology:

• Framing:  Get your objectives and outcomes for the project and determine how you will measure your success. Use this template from Service Design Toolkit.
• User insights:  From surveys and interviews to user shadowing, you need to get some qualitative data from people. A key aspect of this is asking unbiased questions that get to the bottom of your service design challenge.
• Personas:  The persona you build is made up from the research of user insights and data from any customer information you have. It can help you to recognise that various individuals have different demands, behaviours and assumptions, and it can also help you to identify with the individual you’re designing for.Remember: Creating a business for everyone, creates a business for no one! Your persona helps you to come up with ideas and set up experiences to appeal to a specific target group. Check out this guide .
• Ideation: Using the information that came up in the research phase: what ideas/hypotheses have emerged that are worth exploring further? Working in a group and spending time on this section pays off. Having thinking time is underrated in today’s world. Another common failure is to study the competition. Don’t study the competition, study the winners in other industries and draw ideas from a wide range of sources
• Service blueprint: The service plan is a strategy originally used for service design and advancement, but has additionally found applications in identifying problems with operational effectiveness. The method was first described by G. Lynn Shostack, a bank exec, in the Harvard Business Review in 1984. A service blueprint is different from a customer journey map . A blueprint works on the business back-end on how a service works, how it will be delivered, and where it fits into the customer experience.
• Prototype and test:  Validate with prototyping , and be aware of biases that might be introduced into this part of the project. Different factors affect the prototypes: people (not limited to the customer, including yourself, the business owner, and staff), location, and timing. Have a list of what to observe and what is important to gather in the testing. The main priority is getting out there and trying things out.

Service design examples

Let’s bring to life the service design which is all around us with some real-world examples.

Organ donation

If you live in an ‘opt-in’ country, then people have to take the time to actively register to donate their organs. The ‘opt-in rate’ is always a struggle for countries to meet and requires heavy marketing and an army of volunteers to remind people. The intent from people is that it’s “something they’ll get around to doing” — but we all know the outcome of that.

Social psychologists Shai Davidai, Tom Gilovich, and Lee Ross set out to understand the psychology behind these different organ donation rates.

In Austria, your organs are donated unless you ‘opt-out’. 90% of the population are registered organ donors.

The average for an opt-in country is 15%. That’s a huge difference!

Davidai, Gilovich and Ross found that people who were already opted in found it to be an ethically trivial and inconsequential action.

In this example, service design and the operations behind it have a huge impact on organ donations — ultimately saving lives.

This example has become a Design 101 case study around the world. Airbnb uses a platform to create a unique customer experience that previously wasn’t so widely available. People wanted to feel free in an apartment and have a unique experience without feeling held hostage in a hotel room.

They started by storyboarding 45 different realistic emotional moments for Airbnb hosts.

They studied the consumer journeys to understand their feelings and pain points.

According to Airbnb’s Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy, Chip Conley, the experience of staying in an Airbnb is the core of its customer strategy, and they work towards creating the experiences that would match with a customer’s desires.

To further this, they released Airbnb Plus which features homes vetted by Airbnb staff around the world to build further trust.

As you can see, service design and UX design have much in common. To learn more about design thinking and creating user-centric experiences, try our free 7-day UX design short course . And if you want to learn more about design in general, here are a few guide you’ll find helpful:

• The ultimate UX design glossary
• Psychology principles that will make you a better designer
• What’s the difference between inclusive design and universal design?

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• Frequently asked questions

Service Design

What is service design.

Service design is a process where designers create sustainable solutions and optimal experiences for both customers in unique contexts and any service providers involved. Designers break services into sections and adapt fine-tuned solutions to suit all users’ needs in context—based on actors, location and other factors.

“When you have two coffee shops right next to each other, and each sells the exact same coffee at the exact same price, service design is what makes you walk into one and not the other.” — 31Volts Service Design Studio

See how effective service design can result in more delightful experiences.

• Transcript loading…

Service Design is about Designing for the Biggest Picture

Users don’t access brands in a vacuum, but within complex chains of interactions. For example, a car is a product, but in service design terms it’s a tool when an elderly customer wants to book an Uber ride to visit a friend in hospital. There’s much to consider in such contexts. This user might be accessing Uber on a smartphone, which she’s still learning to use. Perhaps she’s infirm, too, lives in an assisted living facility and must inform the driver about her specific needs. Also, she’s not the only user involved here. Other users are any service providers attached to her user experience. For example, the driver that customer books also uses Uber—but experiences a different aspect of it. To cater to various users’ and customers’ contexts as a designer, you must understand these sorts of relations between service receivers and service providers and the far-reaching aspects of their contexts from start to finish. Only then can you ideate towards solutions for these users’/customers’ specific ecosystems while you ensure brands can deliver on expectations optimally and sustainably .

In service design, you work within a broad scope including user experience (UX) design and customer experience (CX) design . To design for everyone concerned, you must appreciate the macro- and micro-level factors that affect their realities.

A service design experience often involves multiple channels, contexts and products.

Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider, authors of This is Service Design Thinking , identify five key principles—for service design to be:

User-centered – Use qualitative research to design focusing on all users.

Co-creative – Include all relevant stakeholders in the design process.

Sequencing – Break a complex service into separate processes and user journey sections.

Evidencing – Envision service experiences to make them tangible for users to understand and trust brands.

Holistic – Design for all touchpoints throughout experiences, across networks of users and interactions.

Designers increasingly work more around services than around physical products—e.g., SaaS (software as a service). Meanwhile, with advances in digital technology continually redefining what users can expect whenever they proceed towards goals, brands focus on maximizing convenience and removing barriers for their users . A digital example is Square, which unbundles point-of-sale systems from cash registers and rebundles smartphones as potential point-of-sale systems.

How to Do Service Design Best

First, identify these vital parts of any service encounter:

Actors (e.g., employees delivering the service)

Location (e.g., a virtual environment where customers receive the service)

Props (e.g., objects used during service delivery)

Associates (other organizations involved in providing the service – e.g., logistics)

Processes (e.g., workflows used to deliver the service)

You’ll need to define problems, iterate and address all dimensions of the customers’, users’ and business needs best in a holistic design . To begin, you must empathize with all relevant users/customers. These are some of the most common tools:

Customer journey maps (to find the customers’ touchpoints, barriers and critical moments)

Personas (to help envision target users)

Service blueprints (elevated forms of customer journey maps that help reveal the full spectrum of situations where users/customers can interact with brands)

You should use these to help leverage insights to account for such vital areas as accessibility and customer reengagement.

Service blueprints are an important tool in the service design process.

Do Service Design for the Complete Experience

Remember to design for the complete experience. That means you should accommodate your users’/customers’ environment/s and the various barriers, motivations and feelings they’ll have. Here are some core considerations:

Understand your brand’s purpose, the demand for it and the ability of all associated service providers to deliver on promises.

The customers’ needs come ahead of the brand’s internal ones .

Focus on delivering unified and efficient services holistically —as opposed to taking a component-by-component approach.

Include input from users .

Streamline work processes to maximize efficiency .

Co-creation sessions are vital to prototyping .

Eliminate anything (e.g., features, work processes) that fails to add value for customers.

Use agile development to adapt to ever-changing customer needs.

Service design applies both to not-so-tangible areas (e.g., riders buying a single Uber trip) and tangible ones (e.g., iPhone owners visiting Apple Store for assistance/repairs). Overall, service design is a conversation where you should leave your users and customers satisfied at all touchpoints, delighted to have encountered your brand.

Learn More about Service Design

Learn all about service design by taking our course: Service Design: How to Design Integrated Service Experiences .

Read this insightful piece, Service Design: What Is It, What Does It Involve, And Should You Care?

Discover more about service blueprinting in Service Design 101

Read this eye-opening piece exploring Service Design Thinking

Examine Uber’s service design in Uber Service Design Teardown

Questions related to Service Design

A service design diagram is a visual representation of the overall structure and components of a service, including the interactions between different elements. It provides an overview of the service and helps stakeholders understand how different parts of the service fit together. It may include information such as user interfaces, system components, data flows, and more.

Actors/Roles: Entities bringing the experience to the customer.

Information Flow: Details of data shared, required, or used.

Interactions: Between people, systems, and services.

Devices & Channels: Tools and mediums of communication.

The diagram is essential for understanding the current state of a service, emphasizing the intricacies and interdependencies, guiding service blueprint creation, and identifying potential breakpoints or areas for enhancement.

In the context of service design, frontstage refers to the actions performed by employees that are visible to the customer. It includes interactions such as customer service, product demonstrations, and any other activities that customers can directly observe.

On the other hand, backstage actions are performed by employees that are not visible to the customer. These actions support the service delivery and may include tasks such as inventory management, quality control, and other behind-the-scenes operations.

Good service design is a holistic approach that prioritizes every user interaction, both in digital and real-life contexts. Jonas Piet, Director and Service Design Lead at Inwithforward shares the example of Kudoz, a learning platform to demonstrate backstage service design.

While the digital platform is a crucial component, the user's journey begins long before they interact with the app. It might start with discovering the service at a community event or through a promotional video. Service designers ensure that every touchpoint, from community events to the digital interface, provides a coherent and positive experience. They focus on the intricate details, be it designing the role of an 'Experience Curator', crafting a compelling story, or ensuring safety checks. In essence, good service design intertwines various interactions, ensuring they align perfectly.

Discover the principles of human-centered design through Interaction Design Foundation's in-depth courses: Design for the 21st Century with Don Norman offers a contemporary perspective on design thinking, while Design for a Better World with Don Norman emphasizes designing for positive global impact. To deepen your understanding, Don Norman's seminal book, " Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered ," from MIT Press, is an invaluable resource.

Developing service design begins with 

In-depth user research, often ethnographic field studies, forming personas and journey maps. 

Engage stakeholders early and consistently. 

Utilize tools like the business model and value proposition canvases for a strategic foundation. 

Transition from journey maps to service blueprints, mapping out the entire service ecosystem. 

Embrace prototyping, iteratively refining with stakeholder input. 

Thoroughly test prototypes, launch the finalized service, and continuously measure its impact. 

Learn more from the video below:

Service design starts by understanding all pieces of an activity, centered on a user's need. 

It involves figuring out systems from the ground up to support the experience, considering digital, physical, and social contexts. In-depth user research, stakeholder engagement, and aligning organizational resources, user needs, and outcomes are vital. 

Service design, as discussed in our video, encompasses both the visible interactions a customer experiences and the underlying processes staff engage with. It deals with a complex web of interconnectivity, from front-end interactions to back-end systems and distribution. However, the challenge isn't just about designing services. The organizational culture must be receptive. Even if service designers identify areas of improvement, if the organization isn't prepared or faces legislative and technological barriers, change becomes arduous. Despite having dedicated individuals wanting change, they can often be constrained by larger, intricate issues. Service design requires a holistic approach, and while it can pinpoint problems, actual implementation might be held back by factors beyond the design realm.

UX (User Experience) design centers on the digital experience of users, focusing on specific touchpoints (which are often screen-based interactions). CX (Customer Experience) is broader, encompassing every touchpoint a customer has with a brand, from digital to in-store. 

Service design has the highest scope of the three concepts, factoring in business processes, systems, and other back-end elements that the customer does not interact with. While UX zooms in on digital interactions, service design steps back, integrating everything for a seamless journey. All three disciplines aim to enhance the user's or customer's experience but operate at different scales and depths.

Absolutely! As businesses increasingly recognize the value of delivering exceptional customer experiences, service design has become a pivotal discipline. It ensures seamless and holistic services that cater to both customer needs and business goals.

• Copyright holder: Matthew Yohe. Appearance time: 0:06 - 0:08 Copyright license and terms: CC-BY-SA-3.0 . Modified: No. Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Steve Jobs Headshot 2010-CROP (cropped_2).jpg

The demand for professionals with expertise in service design is growing across various industries, from tech to hospitality. In order to stay competitive and satisfy the current demand, many individuals are looking to improve their skills. For those keen on mastering this domain, Interaction Design Foundation's course on Service Design provides an in-depth understanding and hands-on learning. It's a great way to get started or deepen your expertise!

Literature on Service Design

Here’s the entire UX literature on Service Design by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Service Design

Take a deep dive into Service Design with our course Service Design: How to Design Integrated Service Experiences .

Services are everywhere! When you get a new passport, order a pizza or make a reservation on AirBnB, you're engaging with services. How those services are designed is crucial to whether they provide a pleasant experience or an exasperating one. The experience of a service is essential to its success or failure no matter if your goal is to gain and retain customers for your app or to design an efficient waiting system for a doctor’s office.

In a service design process, you use an in-depth understanding of the business and its customers to ensure that all the touchpoints of your service are perfect and, just as importantly, that your organization can deliver a great service experience every time . It’s not just about designing the customer interactions; you also need to design the entire ecosystem surrounding those interactions.

In this course, you’ll learn how to go through a robust service design process and which methods to use at each step along the way. You’ll also learn how to create a service design culture in your organization and set up a service design team . We’ll provide you with lots of case studies to learn from as well as interviews with top designers in the field. For each practical method, you’ll get downloadable templates that guide you on how to use the methods in your own work.

This course contains a series of practical exercises that build on one another to create a complete service design project . The exercises are optional, but you’ll get invaluable hands-on experience with the methods you encounter in this course if you complete them, because they will teach you to take your first steps as a service designer. What’s equally important is that you can use your work as a case study for your portfolio to showcase your abilities to future employers! A portfolio is essential if you want to step into or move ahead in a career in service design.

Your primary instructor in the course is Frank Spillers . Frank is CXO of award-winning design agency Experience Dynamics and a service design expert who has consulted with companies all over the world. Much of the written learning material also comes from John Zimmerman and Jodi Forlizzi , both Professors in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University and highly influential in establishing design research as we know it today.

You’ll earn a verifiable and industry-trusted Course Certificate once you complete the course. You can highlight it on your resume, CV, LinkedIn profile or on your website.

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UIT Service Management

• Service Design

What is Service Design?

Service design is the first stage in the service lifecycle. During this stage, you will design the blueprint for a service, identifying the vision, key deliverables, processes, stakeholders, and tools needed for ongoing success. 

Examples of key deliverables include:

• Service support
• Costing and rate development
• Ordering and provisioning
• Securing your service
• Developing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to help you measure and manage your service
• Campus readiness 
• User experience

Why do I need to design my service? 

Having a strong service design will ensure that you meet the vision and service objectives as defined by the business owner. A solid design will also reduce costs over the lifetime of your service. 

Service Design steps

• Establish a clear vision of how the service will deliver value (including what, why, and how).
• Create a clearly defined set of service requirements that support the vision, including the voice of the customer and leadership. 
• Identify key stakeholders needed for the development and ongoing success of your service.
• Identify and document processes, tools, and resources needed for the development and ongoing success of your service.
• Complete the Service Design Template. 
• Engage with the service management consulting team by submitting a Help request .
• Submit a demand to obtain resources and approval to move forward.
• Finally, prepare to develop and launch your service.
• Develop and Launch a Service
• Manage and Improve a Service
• Service Retirement
• Service Fundamentals
• Secure a Service
• Vendor Management Toolkit
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Home Blog Business How To Create a Project Presentation: A Guide for Impactful Content

How To Create a Project Presentation: A Guide for Impactful Content

Corporate, academic, and business meetings share one common factor: successfully delivering project presentations. This is one skill professionals should harness in terms of articulating ideas, presenting plans, and sharing outcomes through an effective project presentation.

In this fast-paced reality where new tools and frameworks make us question the human factor value, we believe there’s much to be said about how working towards building presentation skills can make a difference, especially for making a project stand out from the crowd and have a lasting impact on stakeholders. We can no longer talk about simply disclosing information, the manner in which the narrative is built, how data is introduced, and several other factors that speak of your expertise in the subject.

This article will explore the art of project presentation, giving insights to presenters to deliver a memorable project plan presentation. Whether you are new to this experience or a seasoned presenter, this article promises to give you valuable information on how to build and present a project presentation that resonates with your target audience and will convert into your expected results for the project. Let’s get started.

Table of Contents

• Who is the audience of a project presentation?

Executive Summary

Project overview, the project process model, the project scope, the project resources, the project roadmap, the project activities plan, the project risks, quality control, project execution and monitoring.

• The Project Team

What Is a Project Presentation?

A project presentation is a business activity that brings together stakeholders and team members to oversee a project from execution to completion. During a project presentation, one or two people present a document or slide deck with an overview of all the project’s details.

During a project presentation, the project manager highlights key data about the project initiation and planning activities, like the project scope, requirements gathering, a deliverable list, timelines, and milestones.

The first instance of a project presentation is right before the execution of the project itself. Then, during the project process life cycle, you present it again with timely updates and news about the progress.

Who is the audience of a project presentation? 

A project-related audience is made up of stakeholders – all individuals and entities that affect or are affected by the project’s existence.

Discuss the project presentation with team members that’ll work on the project so they know what’s at stake and what’s expected of them. They’ll need information like requirements, the roadmap, the work breakdown structure, and deliverables.

Stakeholders

Present your project to the stakeholders that can authorize resources and expenditures. Show them how the project will offer the solutions they want under the conditions they impose in a set amount of time. 

Stakeholders want to know details like project scope, budget breakdowns, timing calculations, risk assessments, and how you plan to confront these risks and be ready for changes. 

The Structure of a Project Presentation

Project presentations follow a standard structure covering all critical elements. Follow this guideline to ensure that you cover everything with the slides, the speech, and the discussion.

In the next section, we describe a project presentation structure you can build with SlideModel templates or working with our AI PowerPoint generator . As you will see, most sections in the structure are summaries or overviews of project management practices completed during initiation and planning. 

At the start of your presentation, add an executive summary slide . This section is meant to welcome the viewer to the presentation and give an idea of what’s to come. To differentiate your executive summary from the project overview that comes right after it, use the opportunity to place the project into context. 

In an executive summary , show how this particular project fits into the overall strategy for the company or the section it belongs to. If, for example, your project is about TikTok Marketing, offer information as to how it fits in the overall marketing strategy.

Continue the presentation with a project overview to show the audience what to expect. This section covers one slide or a combination of slides depending on the layout. The project overview slide serves as the introduction to a project presentation and what’s inside.

Include these items:

• An Introduction with a brief background about the project. 
• A short explanation of the project’s objectives and completion goals.
• A quick overview of the timeline with start and end dates.

The project life cycle is the series of phases that a project goes through from its inception to its completion. The project process model is the group of knowledge areas, processes, and their relationships that will guide the activities along the project lifecycle. The next slide should display the chosen project process model and explain how it’ll be carried out along the different lifecycle phases. Project process models examples include Waterfall, Scrum, and V Model for software development, and Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and Swimlane for general business-related projects.

Process models are important for the team to understand execution processes. Stakeholders need to see the process model to understand the systematic process of activities and how long they will take. 

Use one slide for the model, show only high-level components, and offer details during the presentation if the audience asks for them.

The scope is a crucial element of any project and needs its own section in the presentation. The scoping process begins with requirements gathering and includes the creation of a work breakdown structure , an analysis of what’s in and out of scope, plus validation and scope management plans. 

One or two slides are enough to highlight key scope details in a dashboard-style layout mirroring the information on your project scope statement. Preferably, place the scope slides towards the start of the project presentation close to the process model and project resources.

Every project needs resources, and that assessment must be included in the project presentation as well. In a general sense, all resources are what make up the overall budget for the project. In turn, you’ll need to show a budget breakdown that shows high-level resources.

Like many aspects of a project presentation, what you include depends on the industry you’re working for. Construction projects use constructors, materials, machinery, etc. Software projects use programmers, designers, software licenses, computers, etc.

Time is the main resource of any project. During project planning, the project management team estimates the required effort needed to complete the defined scope. Using the Project Process Model, Scope, and Resources, a plan is built. Present a roadmap to highlight the expected time for project completion and where each milestone falls along that line.

Roadmaps can be constructed with an infinite variety of visual layouts, from highly creative and illustrative to structured formats resembling spreadsheets and tables with color-coded roadmaps across the cells. Use one slide to show the roadmap highlighting time estimates, constraints, and projections. For updated project presentations, mark where the project is on the roadmap at that particular moment in time.

Every phase of the roadmap is broken down into action plans . Action plans list activities, their duration, allocated resources (human, material, and financial), and the relationship between activities.

Present your project activities plan with a Gantt Chart and a Costs Report. The Gantt Chart will show the activities to execute, how long they will take, and who (person or team) will be responsible for them. The costs reports will show how much the execution of activities will cost.

During the presentation, you’ll spend the most time on this section, as this is when and where your entire plan is outlined. To show more detail than the roadmap overview, use a few slides to show specific sections of the main Gantt chart and show key activities per phase or milestone.

All projects present risks, and to control them, they must be identified, assessed, evaluated, and mitigated . Visualize your risk assessment with a risk matrix and include it in the project presentation. 

Use this slide to explain to stakeholders how you plan to mitigate the identified risks. Share with team members what’s expected of them in order to keep the risks under control. Risk management is a critical component of project management and something stakeholders will always be looking at.

Controlling the quality of project deliverables is critical for positive project outcomes and continued success with the deliverable. This process is called quality control or quality assurance.

The project process model includes which quality control techniques the team will use and when. Some quality assurance (QA) techniques include statistical process control (SPC), Six Sigma, ISO 9000, and Total Quality Management (TQM). Use one slide to visualize the process and your plan to execute it.

Once the project starts, the project plan is a living entity and evolves over time. This section will need to be regularly updated with progress reports, performance KPIs, and status updates.

Across these slides, explain how activities will be monitored and deliverable outcomes measured. Show exactly how you will determine if the project is on course or has deviations. Visualize all execution activities with a Gantt chart to show the current progress. Use big numbers and data points to highlight performance metrics. Use a comparison slide to visualize the completeness percentage vs. planned progress and budget consumption vs. planned budget.

Explain all monitoring activities for the execution phase using a calendar or schedule that shows on what days activities will take place and who is involved.

The Project Team 

When presenting a project, include a stakeholder map to describe the management team, the sponsors, the main stakeholders, and the implementation team or teams. Depending on the size of the project, this will be an org chart or multiple org charts across a few slides.

Why is it important to present the project team to the stakeholders and vice versa? So that everyone involved knows the other parties and their responsibilities.

Another use for the team slide or slides is to present the next person who will speak during the project presentation. This gives the audience some background on that person’s role in the project.

Case Study – Project Presentation Example

Using the structure we present above, we outlined a case study of a realistic project and how the project manager puts together the project presentation using SlideModel templates. The project presentation example is based on a complex project of building a bridge (Cline Avenue Bridge). For the educational purpose of this article, we are not delivering all the elements of the project presentation, as it is out of scope. Still, we illustrate the more representative slides of each section, show how to prepare a PowerPoint Presentation for a project and how simple it is to adapt the templates to the content that needs to be presented. As a disclaimer, all information we present is an adaptation and reinterpretation of the real project, modified by SlideModel to fit the use case learning goals. This information and presentation should not be considered a source of information related to the Cline Avenue Bridge Project.

In this slide, the presenter summarises the project highlights in a project charter style. The Project Manager can extend this introduction all over the project lifecycle, and the speech can jump from different knowledge areas without the need to change slides or get deeper into details. Specifically, in the Cline Bridge Project, the objective is narrated, the location is just mentioned and linked to a map for further details, and a set of important facts are presented (Building Information Modelling Process, Budget, Duration, Sponsor, and Constructor). Key Highlights of the final deliverable are listed (Segmental Bridge, Material Concrete, 1.7 miles of length and 46 feet of width)

Process Model

The Process Model slide illustrates the framework for the project lifecycle, processes, planning, and execution. In this slide, the Project Manager will describe the model and how it is tailored to the specifics of the project. In this case, for the development and construction of the Cline Bridge, the builder has defined the use of BIM (Building Information Modelling) as the process model. During this slide, the presenter can describe the lifecycle phases (Design, Production, Construction, Operation, and Planning) and drill down one level over the knowledge practices involved. For example, the initial stage consists of “Design”, which has two main knowledge areas, Conceptual Design, and Detailed Design. The project manager is able to explain this definition without the need to outline detailed processes and activities within them.

The Scope section of the presentation generally involves several slides, as the content layout is a list of “requirements.” Based on this fact, a table layout is suggested to make good use of space. It is important to avoid abusing the “list” and present the group of requirements rather than specific requirements. Otherwise, the project manager ends up transcribing the requirements document.

In this project presentation example, we present 10 groups of requirements traversing different stages of the project lifecycle. 

• Design Standards: Bridge design must comply with local, national, and international design standards, including relevant engineering and safety codes
• Load Capacity: The bridge must be designed to safely carry a specific maximum load, which would include the weight of the bridge itself, traffic, pedestrians, wind, and other factors.
• Seismic Design: The design must account for seismic loads. 
• Aesthetic Design: The bridge must be designed to meet certain aesthetic criteria aligned with the artists and architects.
• Accessibility and Use Requirements: Requirements for pedestrian walkways, bike lanes, vehicle lanes, load restrictions for vehicles, clearance heights for boats if over a waterway, etc.
• Regulatory Approvals: The project must secure all necessary permits and approvals from relevant local and national regulatory bodies.
• Environmental Impact: The project must take steps to minimize its environmental impact during construction and the operation of the bridge, including implementing erosion and sediment controls.
• Materials Simulation: Materials should comply with regulations and usage expectations for current and future expected requirements.
• Site Preparation: The project must include preparation of the construction site, including any necessary land clearing or grading.
• Foundations Construction: Foundations will need to support materials weight and traffic expected for the next 30 years.
• Site Acquisition: Acquire site and terrain for building and logistics.

Building a bridge involves a high level of resource usage. In an executive meeting of a project presentation, the recommendation is to structure this section as a Financial table with only one level of detail. Further details are delegated to specific resources and cost analysis presentations.

The resources list presented is:

• Professional Services
• Construction Labour
• Quality Assurance
• Contingency
• Waste Disposal and Cleanup
• Subcontractors

In order to break the style of table after table during the project presentation, we suggest using visual elements as icons and colors metaphorically related to each of the elements listed.

Project Roadmap

As explained earlier in the article, the project roadmap serves to offer a comprehensive overview of the significant milestones that will happen over the course of time. Given the magnitude of a bridge construction project and its prolonged duration, it is advisable, particularly for such extensive endeavours, to present a roadmap that aligns milestones with corresponding lifecycle phases in a discernible manner. This approach enables the audience to mentally envision the sequential progression of the construction process.

Aligned with previous slides, in the example we created a roadmap with the following high level milestones, and sub componentes:

• Project Budgeting and Financing
• Land Purchase & Renting
• Conceptual Design
• Detailed Design
• Access Routes
• Waste Disposal
• Simulations
• Materials Tests
• Seismic Tests
• Fabrication
• Preparation of Modular Pieces
• Build and Assembly
• Test under Acceptance Criteria
• Stress Test
• Operation and Maintenance

As you can see, the Project Manager decided over a sequential roadmap, presented with little detail in timings, with start and end dates to picture dimension over the diagram.

Action Plan

In the bridge construction project of the example, there will be plenty of activity plans. All along the project several of these slides will be created and updated. The most suitable option for presentation tasks, durations, precedence relationship and resource allocation is the Gantt Chart Template. We present the first Quarter of the project, over the Conceptual Design Activities. 

As displayed in the PowerPoint Slide , the subtitle clarifies the number of slides that will be used for this purpose.

The activities presented are:

• Site Analysis
• Feasibility Analysis
• Design Concepts
• BIM Model Creation
• Model Revision
• Environmental Impact
• Present Design

Project Risks

Risk management is an iterative process all over the project life cycle. When presenting your projects, the risks will vary depending on the progress over the roadmap. For this specific example we decided to present the risks being discussed during the Ideation stage, where the developer is exchanging risks with contractors and the company that will build the bridge.

Our suggested layout for this kind of information is a simple table, where the risks are clearly readable and visible, while the description is a hint for discussion rather than an in depth explanation.

It is very important to classify the presented risks, at least with two dimensions; “Impact” and “Probability”. This will generate quality conversations around them. 

Outlined Risks during the Initiation Phase:

• Design Errors
• Construction Delays
• Budget Overruns
• Regulatory Changes
• Site Conditions
• Equipment Failures
• Health and Safety Incidents

As the reader can spot, the risks outlined, are very high level, and each of them will trigger specific Risk Analysis Reports.

The quality control section of the project presentation may vary depending on the quality process adopted. For large scale companies with a uniform portfolio of projects , it is common to see a continuous improvement quality model, which iteratively builds quality over the different projects (for example software companies) For construction companies like the example, the situation is not different, and the quality control model is aligned with the specific building process model. In this specific case, the project manager is presenting the quality control process to be applied over the BIM model and the Quality Control process to be followed for the physical construction of the bridge:

Execution and Monitoring

During the project, several status meetings will be carried out. During the project presentation the manager can establish the pattern to be used along the project.

For this example, we set a basic progress dashboard where the project manager can present : 

• The current timeline
• Top 5 issues
• Current Burndown
• Top 5 risks.

The art of project presentation goes beyond listing data in random slides. A project presentation is a powerful tool to align stakeholders and foster an environment of trust and collaboration over factual information.

With a structured approach, all members involved in the project design and execution can understand the direction that’s being taken and the importance behind certain decisions. We hope these insights can turn your project into a powerful presentation that inspires and deliver results.

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13 Presentation Design Service Proposal PowerPoint Templates to Win Over your Clients!!

Hanisha Kapoor

You as a service design company work toward improving the quality of the products and interaction between the clients and its customers. You operate to make changes to the existing service or creating a new service from scratch. You understand the needs of the customers, clients and their competences to provide the best services.

However, knowing just this is not enough for a client. You need more to prove your worth. You are one among many service design companies who want to win over this client. With a content-ready presentation service design proposal, you can ace the game. Get ahead of your game using ready-to-use service design proposal PowerPoint templates.

We have covered all the essential slides for you to add in your proposal to showcase your work, experience, services, case study, and more to give clarity about your work to the client. Present your professionally designed presentation service design proposal with confidence and determination.

Click here to Download Content-Ready Presentation Design Service Proposal PowerPoint Templates

Top Presentation Design Service PowerPoint Templates:

• Cover Letter for Presentation Design Service Proposal :

Begin your proposal with a cover letter which is basically an introduction to your company. State how your company is going to ease the work for your client. Mention your specialty and forte to showcase that you are the best choice to pick among others. Your cover letter should be short and brief, but it should be gripping at the same time.

•   Project Context Presentation Design Service Proposal :

Discuss the needs of your client. Jot down their requirements and concerns for a better understanding. As a presentation service design company, they might want to hire you for advertising their products, branding, promoting, etc. Once their problems are clearly understood then showcase the proposed solutions. Solutions that meet their requirements and solve the issue. We have shown some of the problems and solutions in context with the service design project. You can tweak the content and make changes to the slide.

• Our Services and Offerings for Presentation Design Service Proposal :

Use this slide to showcase the offerings you should provide to overcome the problems of your clients. If they want to get some even promoted, then flyers are the best option. If they want to advertise their brand, outdoor hoarding is effective. Mention the services in detail such as why they need them and how they will help your clients. This slide already covers some of the services. You can change it as per your requirements.

• Our Packages for Presentation Design Service Proposal :

Mention different pricing packages that you have to offer so that the client can decide whether they want to hire you part-time or full-time. Showcase various pricing models with tasks and the cost of each model.

• Your Investment for Presentation Design Service Proposal:

Once the selection of the pricing package is done, you can discuss the investment of your client in the project. Mention the tasks that you will be responsible for with their cost. Not just this, add additional costs if there are any. Add terms and conditions as well. Finally, quote the final amount to your client. We have given an overview of how you can showcase the investment. Change and add the content as per your discussion with the client.

• Project Schedule for Presentation Service Design Proposal :

This slide outlines the steps involved in the project execution. Discuss the steps, stages or phases that a project has to go through to be successful. Mention each phase along with the tasks that need to be executed. For instance, we have added some of the steps which you can alter as per the project need.

• Project Timeline for Presentation Design Service Proposal :

Set a timeline for each step involved in the project. The project timeline lets you organize your steps, keeps you on track and has everyone informed and aligned at every step of the project. Let your client know by when they should expect the project completion using the project timeline slide.

Take a few minutes to give the background of your company to your clients. Your proposal must have a few slides showcasing your work and experience in the industry. Introduce yourself using this slide. Talk about the history of your slide. When was it founded and how it started? Give a brief about your company goals, values, and mission. Talking about your company may increase the client’s trust in you.

• Case Study for Presentation Design Service Proposal :

Showcase some of the work that you had done earlier. Present your various design services projects such as brochure designing, flyers, presentations, card logo designing, and more. Mention your client’s name, project timeline, budget, workforce involved, etc.

Take pride in introducing your team. Mention their responsibilities, highlight some of their prominent projects and flaunt their achievements.

• Client Testimonials :

Let your client know that you are the best choice among your competitors when it comes to design services in the market. Showcase some of your client testimonials with client and company name. Give their designations and work experience. Client testimonials are a great way to attract more clients. You must add client testimonials in your slide.

• Next Step for Presentation Design Service Proposal :

Once everything is settled and your client is satisfied with your proposal, take it to the next level by bringing up the contract. The contract must be signed by both parties to initiate the project.

• Terms and Contract of Payment :

Your contract should cover points such as service and payment, terms of contract termination, notice and renewal, etc. We have added some of the major contract terms and conditions. You can change them as per your convenience.

This ends your proposal. This proposal has all the essential slides which you need as a service design company to present to your client. However, you might have to change the content as per your needs.

Download Ready-Made Presentation Design Service Proposal PPT Slides

Get your hands on this content-ready Presentation Service Design Proposal to get your client on board with you.

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• The Ultimate Guide to Service Design

Featured in:

Today’s service industry is all about creating better value and experience for users and improving their quality of life. Service Design is an emerging field that is helping service designers and managers in designing and delivering better services to their customers. As opposed to the traditional ways, technological developments improved products and services while also increasing customers’ expectations. Today’s customers demand products and services to not only perform their basic function but also go beyond that and enthrall them.

© Shutterstock.com | ImageFlow

In this article, we will cover 1) what is service design , 2) the benefits of service design , and 3) a step-by-step process for service design .

WHAT IS SERVICE DESIGN?

Lots of metaphors are used to define Service Design. Service design is a roadmap comprising the steps and processes a customer of a service will undertake when using it. The Spider EU project defines it as a ‘journey’ that a user or customer will embark upon to go through a service. DIY Service Design, the toolkit, defines service design as “finding the most elegant way to help someone to do something.”

NI Business Info defines that the ultimate benefit of Service Design is not to improve upon aesthetical outlook of a product or service but to improve its operability and efficiency. Service design is a brainstorming procedure that brings together the design, web design, product design, graphic design, and business departments, such as consumer research, customer services, sales, marketing, together for deconstructing the user’s interaction and experience with a product and service and reconstructing it for betterment. One needs to envision and understand each step and how it would look and feel like to the customer, so that the service can be improved in the most creative way.

A Combination of Creativity and Practicality

Service Design is not just a logical and analytical approach towards improvement of a service but also a creative and innovative approach of doing things to set a product or service apart. James Rock, the managing director and chief business designer of  Cultivar Consulting Limited , describes Service Design as a right-brain creative thinking and artistic process and not just cut and dried engineering. The Service Design process consists of intensive research and surveys as well as creative and visual content like storyboards, role plays and personas . It means viewing your own service from the outlook of your customer and walking in his/her shoes. Thus, Service Design is a science as well as an art.

BENEFITS OF SERVICE DESIGN

Service Design ensures that the service actually gets used by users in the intended way and creates positive experiences, thus minimizing the need for costly and lengthy customer services. Engaging in a service design process benefits an organization in several ways:

Improves Sales

The application of the service design structure helps a business to understand the customers’ needs, demands and expectations, and create solutions in accordance to them. It adds enrichment to the customer’s experience and creates value for them. Customers’ positive interaction with the product or service means their retention and ultimately greater success and profitability for the business.

Creates Loyalty

The ultimate challenge for businesses in today’s competition driven era is not just attracting new clients but also retaining them in the long run. With availability of a wide range of service options, customers can switch services and brands very easily and thus are spoilt for choice. So enterprises have to look for ways to make their service or product distinct from their competition. Service design allows businesses to understand what customers are looking for and expecting from a service. They can then make their offerings adaptable and better suited to those needs. This vintage point can help them stand apart from their competition and retain their customers’ loyalty.

Strengthen the Brand and Identity

The service design approach allows enterprises to strengthen their brand. The service design process helps service managers to progress from the known to the unknown. It consists of the basic and yet critical evaluation of how the new envisaged product or service fits into the overall image and objectives of the company. Thus, the process helps an organization to stay true to its image and reaffirm its brand and stop it from steering away from its core values and objectives while offering a new service. Service design puts a brand to work, unlock its hidden potentials, and create and deliver value to the customers.

Improve Efficiency

Creative and imaginative steps involved in the service design process help firms improving the efficiency of their employees and procedures. It helps in elimination of wastage and allows team members to pinpoint areas where there is a resource drain or a bottleneck. Service design blueprints help businesses locate problematic areas and potential failure points and rectify them before hand. Engaging teams in the service design procedure allows them to envision the bigger picture and situate their role in it. It helps them understand why change and innovation is necessary in what they are offering and how they are offering it.

Reduce Redundancies

Envisioning the whole cycle of the service design process allows companies to take a bird’s eye view of their service and remove duplicative segments. It helps managers pinpoint where services might be converging or overlapping and it can help them straighten them out before hand. This way inconsistencies and ambiguities can be discovered within the process on and can be rectified. The process of elimination of redundancies conserves energy, improves staff’s efficiency and reduces costs.

SERVICE DESIGN – A STEP-WISE PROCESS

Step 1: Align Vision and Goal

This step is the starting point of a service design process. It decides how the service fits into the strategy of the company. A project may run too far ahead of the company due to ambitious working and innovations, and comparing them with the company’s vision statement and core goals can help the project team realign the service with the company’s desired outcomes. Here is how you can align a service with the company’s image and values:

• Situate a product or service in the overall vision statement of the company.
• Think of ways how designing a service supports the company’s goals in the best possible manner.

Step 2: Brainstorm

The next step is to place a creative and hard working team to sustain this vision and provide it a common space to work together, brainstorm and share ideas. Coming with ideas is easy and hundreds of ideas can be generated in very little time; however, execution tests the practicality of an idea. Solid, workable, and practical ideas tend to get buried under the rubble of the mediocre ones. Here are a few brainstorming tips to ensure that a good idea doesn’t go to waste:

• Allow everyone to pitch ideas during the brainstorming session and participate equally in the service design process.
• Ideas those are unworkable, absurd, and unrealistic.
• Ideas that are good but not workable or achievable at the moment; they can be saved and used for later.
• Ideas that are original and will make a difference.
• Ideas that are ordinary but should be included so as to achieve the minimum service standard.
• Write down, act out and discuss ideas. Legal Design Tools website defines the brainstorming stage of the design service process as a way of getting ideas out of one’s head and out in the open. This way practical ideas will automatically get sifted from the impractical and absurd ones. It further recommends borrowing ideas liberally from sources to improve them further.

The “Diabetics Away Morning” is an example of a project that employed the above-mentioned ideation ways. A workshop was held with stakeholders and they were asked to give presentations and tell personal experiences through narrations. The designers onboard gathered ideas from the presentation and developed them further through discussion. They also illustrated some of the stories told in the workshop. Through these exercises, they could develop a process that would mark the users’ journey and develop a service process that could address the challenges the users were facing.

Step 3: Conduct a Market Analysis

Before a new service is launched or an improvement is being made in the existing one, extensive research needs to be done to situate the service in a context. At this step, you and your team can do the following:

• Analyze the market size, trends and drivers for the service.
• Understand the ways your envisaged service would address a gap in the existing market.
• Then try to establish your own service stance i.e., whether you are breaking into a market as a new entrant, improving an existing service to satisfy and retain established customers, challenging your business competitors or willing to coexist with them, or looking for ways to establish yourself as market leaders.
• Consider the users’ needs for the service and its potential tangible and intangible benefits to the customers, such as savings in terms of cost, gains in terms of quality and convenience.
• You also have to weigh the pros and cons of launching the service at a certain point in time or not launching it altogether.

Step 4: Identify Barriers and Limitations

This is one of important steps of the service design process as it helps you put your ambitious ideas into the realistic realm.

• Allow all team members to critically evaluate their own ideas and of others and identify weaknesses and kinks and iron them out. Remember service design is a learning opportunity and not a ground to prove others wrong.
• Identify the internal and external barriers working against the service implementation. The Spider project encourages identifying the ‘brakes within an organization’ at this stage.
• Also, set limitations and define boundaries within which you must situate your service.
• Identify creative ways to work around these barriers and limitations.

Here is how the Holstebro Municipality in Denmark responsible for providing meals to the elderly overcame an emotional barrier. During the service design process, it learnt that many senior citizens were embarrassed to have a van titled “HOLSTEBRO MUNICIPAL MEAL SERVICE” parked outside their homes. Hence, they renamed their service ‘The Good Kitchen’ and experienced great success.

Step 5: Establish a User Profile/Personas

This is another critical step of the service design process. You must have spent lots of time and energy into your design process and think about the service, your organization’s aspirations and expectations from the service but you must answer the most important question: Who are the users of this service and how will they use it, and what are their expectations. An example of this step is a social work project titled ‘Social Inclusion of Seniors in Urban Centers’ conducted in Belgium. The service designers utilized creative techniques such as the “lotus blossom” and different “personas” (Spider Project Tool) to get an insight into the senior citizens’ needs, values and desires. Service designer and managers have to learn to step out of their own paradigm and think of the service from the users’ perspective in order to make it user friendly. Here is how you should go about this step:

• Develop different types of fictitious personas or user profiles of your users.
• Think about what your users do; where do they live; what do they do, etc; and endow them character traits accordingly.
• List down the users’ possible motives in using your service when they have other options.

Step 6: Prototype and Test

This important step provides a creative, quick and inexpensive way of testing service ideas. It gives quick insights into what works and doesn’t. The Design Gym and Service Design Tools recommend the use of storyboards, hand-sketched screens and improvised props to facilitate the process. For instance, the UK based Lewisham Housing Options project developed as many as three prototypes during their service design process.

You can test prototypes of a service on your employees as well as engage a few real users. Here is how you should go about it:

• Create mockups to create something as close as possible to the real environment.
• Define the contact points at which the users will come across your service.
• Develop a stepwise procedure of how they will interact with your service.

Step 7: Evaluate Users’ Experience

Customers’ interaction with the service leads to users’ experience. This aspect of the service design procedure ensures that the user’s experience with a service is a ‘wow’ moment and certainly not a ‘yuck’ one. It’s all about the feeling a user retain after using the service. This means conducting surveys with users or giving them brief questionnaires. You should focus on two areas:

• Gather insights from the users about the service features that made the users happy and created moments of delight for them.
• Inquire the users about the service features, which they found off putting.
• easy to use with no or minimum assistance
• useful for them in getting closer to their goals
• valuable enough for them to desire it and pay money for it

Closely investigating customers’ expectations from a service will help service managers improve the service design.

Step 8: Get Feedback, Improve the Service, & Evolve

The Evolution step is the final phase of the service design process that is from conceptualization towards recommendation. Service Design is a cyclic process and means gathering feedback and feeding it forward. Thus, you should gather all the information that you have learnt from engagement in the above mentioned steps and use it to:

• Identify gaps and fill them up
• Define how you would define your service’s success
• Develop metrics to gauge this success
• Feed the results into your final product
• Decide if you want to roll out a pilot version of the service or go towards full fledged implementation

Two companies might be offering a similar service but ultimately their respective design process will set them apart in terms of how users will experience this service. Better user experience is not just about creation of the best product but how this product is served to the customer. Service design is not just a process to improve a service but a process to touch upon and improve people’s lives.

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Successfully Implementing Service Design Projects

Why is the success rate in implementing service design projects still low? Why do brilliant concepts fail when it comes to anchoring them in the daily business of the client organisation?

This article by Tina Weisser is part of the issue Touchpoint Vol. 12 No. 1 - Embracing change. Discover the full list of articles of this Touchpoint issue to get a sneak peek at more fascinating articles!  Touchpoint is available to purchase in print and PDF format. To get a hands-on learning experience and more detailed insight join the upcoming workshop with Tina.

Where are the barriers to implementing service design projects and where are the optimisation potentials? And are there any influencing factors that service designers should consider in future projects? Finding answers to these questions and better understanding the complex topic of implementation was the motivation behind a three-year international study. The results are 24 influencing factors and the ‘KUER’ implementation model.

Designing for impact means designing for implementation. Today, the focus of most service design projects is on the first phases – only around four percent 1 of the methods applied in service design focus on implementation. It is therefore likely that service designers will need to expand their methodological knowledge and skills in order to be more successful in the future. Dealing with this complex issue requires the integration of new skills and approaches. Because the implementation of new concepts requires organisational and cultural changes for the client organisation, techniques from the areas of systemic organisational development and management consulting can be particularly valuable.  

Study design and approach

Within the framework of a three-year qualitative study, implementation projects of complex service design concepts were examined at the intersection of external service design consulting and its clients (for-profit organisations). With the support of approximately 50 experts from the areas of service design practitioners (Hellon, Livework, Dark horse, IDEO, etc.), service providers (EON, BMW Group, Océ, etc.) and business and organisational consulting (Capgemini, Etventure, OSB-I, etc.), explorative interviews and workshops were conducted to identify influencing factors, frequent barriers and future potentials. The many factors found were reduced to a set of 24 and examined for their interrelationships by using sensitivity analysis, an effective system analysis tool designed by systems researcher Frederic Vester 2 . Sensitivity analysis recognises that client organisations are not only embedded in complex environments, but are themselves complex socio-technical systems. There is broad scientific agreement that due to the complexity of organisations, the consideration of system relationships provides essential insights and perspectives for successful change initiatives. Through a systemic approach 3 , many of the obstacles occurring in service design projects could be explained. Also 12 general lessons can be derived for practical use.

Results: Objectives and obstacles

A crucial question is what success can mean in the context of service design implementation. Targets can be purely process- or result-oriented, or a combination of both. Examples of process-oriented success are when employees learn service design methods, spaces for co-creative work are established within the client company, and the organisation prepares for cultural change. In these cases, the successes would be based on the fact that the client organisation becomes familiar with new methods and prepares itself procedurally and spatially for future projects. On the other hand, a result-oriented success is when the new service design concept is introduced into the company's typical way of working, accepted by users and reconfirmed by measurement that it meets criteria such as efficiency, user satisfaction, or return-on-investment (ROI). It becomes obvious that there are different areas of application and success in service design, which in turn depend on the goals and capabilities of the client as well as external consultants. The reasons found for failure are just as numerous. Obstacles may exist on the client side as well as on the service designers’ side. For example, the lack of experience and implementation maturity of external service designers, internal resistance or decision-making dilemmas of top management, lack of user acceptance, or a better offer from competing brands.

Results: 24 influencing factors

Recurring patterns and general influencing factors (see Figure 3 ) could be identified despite the heterogeneous projects found in practice. These factors were examined for their effect upon each other and their influenceability. Six of them can be described as necessary ‘hygiene’ factors and eighteen as ‘desired’ factors. The hygiene factors are key prerequisites that must be present to favour result-oriented implementations. Ideally, they must be considered as early as the contract clarification stage in Phase 1. Because, as expected, not only one or two factors were found, it becomes clear that service design projects are not happening in an isolated and context-free space.

In many cases, service designers spend several years working on individual touchpoints before commissioning and successfully implementing end-to-end, holistic customer experiences. When projects fail, it is reasonable to assume that either one or both parties weren’t ready for implementation, or that the hygiene factors were simply not yet fulfilled at the time.

Want to get an even better understanding and a practical deep dive into the methods discussed here? Tina offers a workshop specifically tailored to the topic of this article to give you a hands-on learning experience plus valuable tools and methods.

Results: The KUER implementation model  

To date, there is no model in service design research that offers a comprehensive analysis and structure of the influencing factors in the implementation of projects. Based on the empirical results, the KUER model was developed, consisting of four phases and main activities (see Figure 1). KUER stands for ‘Key Prerequisites’, ‘Understand & Discover’, ‘Enable & Define’ and ‘Reinforce & Deliver’. In addition, Figure 2 presents the factors and their relationships. Looking at the KUER process model, it becomes apparent that the entire process begins with the clarification in Phase 1 (‘Key Prerequisites’), but that the phases do not have to follow each other linearly because setbacks and feedback must be taken into account. In Phase 2 (‘Understand and Discover’) a temporary project organisation (‘safe space = physical and mental space for new ideas and thoughts unfamiliar to the organisation and co-creative working’) is set up and extensive diagnostics are carried out. Users, the client organisation and economic parameters must be analysed. Solutions developed in Phase 3 (‘Enable and Define’) are tested in rapid cycles with users, employees and relevant stakeholders and evaluated at decision nodes using a three-dimensional selection mechanism. As activities to support the process and its orientation are used iteratively as required, the transition to the integration Phase 4 (‘Reinforce and Deliver’) is seamless.

Results: 12 lessons learned

A systemic approach to the implementation process helps service designers to achieve a better understanding of the interaction of systemic elements and their causes. The basic insight that there is an unmanageable number of social (groups such as departments) and psychological systems (the individual actor/human) colliding is an important aspect because the connectedness of the individuals involved depends on it. If systems thinking is applied to service design practice, the following lessons (which are all closely interwoven) can enrich daily project work.

Lesson Number 1: Six necessary hygiene factors

It became apparent that the following six hygiene factors are essential for a successful implementation: 1) Implementation maturity, 2) Compliance/C-level sponsorship, 3) Implementation management at all phases, 4) Temporary project organisation, 5) Inter-divisional staff involvement and 6) Personnel capacity.

Lesson Number 2: Implementation starts on day one

The foundations for implementation are already set at the contract clarification stage. It should be investigated whether (and up to which iteration) the six aforementioned hygiene factors could be sufficiently present. An iterative service design process calls for ‘iterative contracting.’ 4 If one considers the change curves in the change literature, it becomes clear that integrating something new takes a significant amount of time. It is therefore important to accompany the implementation process from start to finish when the new concept is reconfirmed through measurement, testing and anchored in the organisation’s day-to-day activities.

Lesson Number 3: Client organisations cannot be controlled linearly and are always context-dependent

Client organisations have their unique history and reason for existence. Therefore, it is crucial to thoroughly diagnose the organisation (e.g., existing culture, stakeholder expectations, expected resistance) and to build upon their knowledge. 5 Client organisations as ‘living systems’ cannot be controlled from the outside, because they cannot be reduced to being mere simple machines.

Lesson Number 4: Working against the system logic creates resistance

It becomes evident that different ‘worlds’ – i.e., system logic, languages, terms, cultures and working methods – meet temporarily when external service designers collaborate with the employees of a client organisation. Resistance from employees is the norm rather than the exception when new and foreign elements are introduced. The unknown endangers the status quo of every ‘living system’ and can create great fears.

Lesson Number 5: Systems and people are oriented towards the meaning they give to things

Tangible prototypes can help employees and executives understand both rationally and emotionally the opportunities and risks of a new service design concept. Because the evidence and the design of service design concepts are closely interwoven, prototyping and storytelling are of fundamental importance: they have the strength to make the abstract vivid for non-specialists and to support social interaction processes. In practice, the prototypes must make the ‘meaning’ of the idea applicable to the organisation, in order to reduce uncertainties.  

Lesson Number 6: Connection capability

Understanding each other is trivial but indispensable. It is advisable to clarify common terms that include both the service design process and internal abbreviations or terms. External service designers should also develop a sense of the existing corporate culture so as not to be unintentionally irritating and incomprehensible. Being able to communicate with executives is an essential prerequisite.

Lesson Number 7: Closeness - distance dilemma

Systemic organisation consultants emphasise collaborative approaches, because as employees are empowered by learning new skills and methods, organisational learning takes place and resistance diminishes. Service designers must, therefore, work with the clients in unusual proximity, but always keep enough of a distance to avoid being dragged into the client’s problems. The temporary   organisation provides a good framework for this close cooperation. Through early involvement, employees can experience user problems first-hand, recognise their own meaning in the insights found, and thus develop the necessary acceptance for the possibly new or even uncomfortable changes ahead. A crucial result is a shared awareness of the identified problems. Service designers can experience a first wave of resistance when they conduct the diagnosis of the client’s organisation (or, e.g., an existing user journey), using a purely external view without the participation of internal employees.

Lesson Number 8: System logic = survival

If systems (clients) are confronted with their external image (results of user research), which usually involves a lot of negative aspects and an extensive collection of failures, a defensive attitude can spread among the employees, because this can be seen as an attack against the existing system. The system tries to protect itself and restore its balance to ‘survive’. It has been reported that service design projects often come to a halt or lose the necessary priority for the client at exactly this point.

Lesson Number 9: Each action is an intervention

Every activity, such as stakeholder interviews or co-creation workshops, are interventions. However, an effect may only become visible or noticeable in the client organisation at a later point in time. This highlights the strong networking of actors and actions as well as the fact that unintended consequences can arise.

Lesson Number 10: Risk minimisation

Executives must be supported in decision-making and risk assessment. The prediction that the developed concept can be economically relevant in the market, satisfactory from the user's point of view and successful for the organisation regarding skills, remuneration and general conditions within the desired time window, must be proven repeatedly in the process. The more the system logic, culture and interdependencies are understood, the higher the probability of being able to reduce uncertainties and thus convince top management.

Lesson Number 11: Three-dimensional consulting

Ideally, service designers support in three ways: as process, specialist and mindset consultants. Depending on time and role, they can provide both conceptual and process-related support so that employees remain able to work and process reliability is guaranteed. If service designers are not responsible for or do not want to control the process, a successful later implementation is questionable.

Lesson Number 12: Prepare disciplinary borders!

For service designers who are leaving the process at an early stage, because their focus is on conceptual work, it is crucial to think ahead and prepare the disciplinary boundaries for the concepts to not end up in the drawer as “corporate entertainment,” as Melvin Brand Flu (from Livework) calls it.

Outlook 

The KUER model can be used at any time in the process to enable the actors involved to explore new perspectives about the project, to reflect together or to derive options for action. Systematic reflection can promote learning processes and contribute to improving the readiness for implementation. Knowledge of the interrelationships and influencing factors can be used to set up or adapt individual success criteria for service design projects. This prevents negative consequences and unrealistic expectations at an early stage, and preserves both the quality and reputation of the service design approach and the service designers. 

Service designers have excellent capabilities and methodological approaches to support organisations in change projects. Therefore, it is an advantage for the success of transformations if they are accompanied by an innovation project using a human-centred design process. Service designers who want to support the implementation of projects must acquire skills from organisational consulting – especially business management and systemic consulting – or expand their service portfolio together with partners. Connectivity with the company's top management and employees at all levels of the hierarchy must be ensured throughout the process. A fundamental insight is that organisations as social systems cannot ultimately be specifically controlled from outside or by service providers. They can only change themselves and successfully implement concepts. On the long way there, however, client organisations have a great need for professional support.

1 Martins, R. (2012). Poster at Design for Next, EAD 12 Rome. 2 Vester, F. (2007). The Art of interconnected thinking: Tools and concepts for a new approach to tackling complexity. 3 See also Luhmann. N. (1984). Soziale Systeme. Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Simon. F. (2015). Einführung in die systemische Organisationstheorie. 4 Mager. B. (2018). Keynote at Service Design Conference, Helsinki Finland. 5 Mager, B. (2010). Service Design and Behavioural Change. Touchpoint Vol. 1 Nr.3: 73-75.

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Service Design

DESIGN X491

Get an introduction to the fundamentals of service design . You gain an understanding of how services are designed through the ability to group together human, physical and digital interactions in order to create excellent customer experiences for your users. You learn best practices for determining what design methodologies are most appropriate to use to create intangible experiences that make up the services we use every day.

Research and user preparation entails orchestrating your audience and stakeholders, processes and touch points to influence the metrics and evaluations of your testing results. In this course, you get an opportunity to learn more about the crucial co-design activities that allow users to become an active part of the creative development of a product by interacting directly with your service blueprint and design cycle.

You also learn the elements of service design systems, including topics such as service safaris , experience prototyping, storyboarding and service blueprinting . You then learn to apply those tools and practices in a real-life service design project during the course. The service design assignments and final presentation are designed so that you come away with a portfolio-ready project .

Course Outline

Course Objectives

This course is entry level and suitable for people from any discipline who are looking to learn about designing intangible experiences and services (e.g., public and social services, health services, financial services or any service you might have in mind).

• Define the fundamental elements of a service identify and analyze key aspects of service
• Learn the fundamental approaches of service design
• Explore tools used in service design
• Research, develop and test service concepts
• Understand customer needs and how to exceed their expectations
• Design hands-on prototypes that are totally applicable to services

What You Learn  

Service design examines a system of activity from design planning, communication and material components of a service to create a new or improve the quality and interaction between service provider and users.

• History of service design
• Elements of a service
• Service design principles
• Research and user testing preparation
• Stakeholder and ecosystem mapping
• Design, executing and synthesize qualitative research
• Brainstorming techniques
• Co-design activities
• Future-state journey mapping
• Developing insight and opportunity statements
• Paper prototyping
• Storyboarding
• Role-playing and simulations
• Video prototyping and Wizard of Oz
• Identifying service concept assumptions
• Planning for rapid prototype testing
• Metrics and evaluation of testing results
• Defining a service value proposition
• Service blueprinting
• Reflecting on the advantages and limitations of service design
• Service safaris
• Course-end project presentation

How You Learn

We are online! All of the design classes are conducted online and include video classes, mentor-led learning and peer-to-peer support through our student online platform, Canvas. 

• Reading assignments
• Quizzes at instructor’s discretion
• Small-group activities
• Homework assignments
• Capstone project

Is The Course Right For Me?

This class is for any professional or existing students who want to build their skill set. Students will read, perform hands-on research and complete exercises each week. A final presentation challenges you to redesign a service at your choosing to be included in your design portfolio. Our experienced instructors provide practical information, offer their service-design skills and monitor your development along with peer-to-peer support on our student online platform.

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