Intro
Why Many Service Designs Fail and How to Fix Them
In 2018, I discovered why integrating new services into daily operations often fails—a finding that remains crucial today. Traditional organisations struggle with rolling out new services due to entrenched practices and resistance to change. Surprisingly, even startups, initially agile and innovative, face similar challenges as they scale. Companies like Spotify, Airbnb, and Uber, which rely heavily on their core service models, often encounter these hurdles.
Why Service Design Initiatives Fail
Lack of Clear Vision
Without a clear direction, service design initiatives often flounder. A well-defined vision provides the necessary guidance and motivation for the entire organisation. When this is absent, teams may lack the focus needed to drive new services forward.
Resistance to Change
Organisational resistance to change is a significant barrier. Established processes and a fear of the unknown can stifle innovation. Both traditional companies and growing startups can become complacent, preferring the status quo over the risks associated with new ventures.
Insufficient Integration
New services frequently struggle to mesh with existing processes and systems. This misalignment can lead to operational inefficiencies and poor user experiences. Ensuring that new services are seamlessly integrated into the current workflow is crucial for their success.
What is Service Design?
Service design focuses on creating and improving services to meet users‘ needs effectively, ensuring a smooth experience. It involves understanding user journeys, designing touchpoints, and aligning various organisational functions. Unlike product or software design, which focuses on creating specific products or applications, service design considers the entire end-to-end experience of using a service.
For instance, designing a banking app involves creating its features and interface (product/software design). Service design, however, would consider the entire customer journey, from onboarding to customer support, ensuring each interaction is cohesive and user-friendly.
Successful Examples of Service Design Projects
U.K. Government Digital Service (GDS)
The U.K. Government Digital Service transformed complex public services into user-friendly digital services. By focusing on user-centred design principles, GDS made government services simpler and more accessible. This involved extensive user research, iterative design, and a commitment to accessibility and usability.
Lufthansa
Over three years, Lufthansa collaborated with various partners to revamp their onboard food and beverage experience. By identifying passenger needs and addressing pain points, they developed a new service that significantly boosted customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Hellon
Hellon partnered with a major healthcare provider to transform patient care services. By focusing on the entire healthcare journey, from appointment booking to post-treatment follow-up, Hellon redesigned service touchpoints, streamlined communication, and introduced digital tools to support patient engagement. This resulted in increased patient satisfaction, better health outcomes, and improved operational efficiency.
Livework and Dutch Railways (NS)
Livework collaborated with Dutch Railways to improve the experience for train passengers. Through detailed user research, they identified issues such as confusing ticketing systems and inconvenient station layouts. Solutions included a redesigned ticketing process, better wayfinding signage, and a mobile app providing real-time updates. These improvements led to increased passenger satisfaction and higher ticket sales.
The common thread among these cases is a user-centred approach to redesigning and improving services, driven by extensive research and a focus on addressing specific pain points. This approach resulted in significant improvements in user satisfaction, operational efficiency, and overall service effectiveness across different sectors.
"What we need is a new view of reality: the insight that much of what we see separately is connected, that the unseen threads connecting things are often more important to what is happening in the world than things themselves"
— Frederic Vester
Research Design
Understanding and Implementing Complex Service Design Projects
In my exploration of complex Service and UX Design projects, I developed the ‚KUER‘ model, which stands for Key Prerequisites, Understand & Discover, Enable & Define, Reinforce & Deliver. This model provides an organized approach to analysing and implementing service design projects. The research shows the importance of understanding how various systems within an organisation interact. To achieve success, service designers must improve their skills in organisational consulting.
Service design focuses on user needs and digital innovation, but many ideas never become reality. Introducing new services requires significant changes that impact the entire organisation. These changes must be integrated into strategic plans, requiring new ideas and actions that drive organisational and cultural shifts.
This study examines how complex service design systems are implemented. It draws from various disciplines, recognizing the complex nature of organisations as socio-technical systems. Successful change processes depend on understanding these interactions. The common failure of many service design projects to reach implementation highlights the essential need for designers to refine their skills and methods.
Using a Grounded Theory approach, I conducted 34 interviews with experts from service design firms, service providers, and consultants (e.g., EON, BMW Group, Hellon, LiveWork, Dark Horse, IDEO, Frog Design, Capgemini, osb-i, etventure). We identified key factors, methods, and barriers, and analysed their interdependencies using a systems analysis approach (Vester, 2011). This led to the creation of the KUER model, a set of 24 success factors, which helps in understanding these interactions and improving implementation.
"We are teaching them how to approach their services with a customer centric mindset. We train a group of change makers in the organizations that start operating in a new way...“
— Service Design Lead, Helsinki
Results.
Why Implementation Fails
There are several reasons why services often fail to be implemented effectively. Key issues include:
Lack of Key Prerequisites
Leadership Buy-In: Leaders need to be fully committed to provide direction and support. Without their investment, initiatives can falter.
Cultural Resistance: If the organisation is resistant to change, service implementation can be blocked. An innovation-friendly culture is essential.
Poor Understanding and Discovery Phase
Insufficient User Research: Failing to grasp user needs and expectations can lead to services that miss the mark. This phase needs detailed research and empathy mapping.
Inadequate Stakeholder Engagement: Engaging key stakeholders early and consistently is crucial to address their insights and concerns.
Weak Enable and Define Phase
Unclear Vision and Goals: Without a clear vision and specific goals, the process can become directionless and ineffective.
Insufficient Resources: Allocating the right amount of time, budget, and skilled personnel is crucial for support.
Poor Reinforcement and Delivery
Ineffective Change Management: Significant change management efforts are often required for new services. Resistance, poor communication, and lack of training can all obstruct successful implementation.
Lack of Monitoring and Feedback: Regular monitoring and feedback are necessary to spot issues and make timely adjustments.
Success
Success in Service/UX Design implementation relies on both the process and the results achieved. It depends on client goals and the consultants‘ guidance. Failures can arise from inexperience, internal pushback, indecision from management, lack of user buy-in, or more appealing alternatives.
Preconditions and Influencing Factors
Across various projects, common patterns and critical factors have been identified. These factors and their interactions within the implementation system were analysed. They were classified into ’necessary hygiene factors‘ like readiness and C-level sponsorship, and ’sufficient factors.‘ The model shows that successful Service/UX Design Projects require ‚double maturity’—preparedness from both the external consultancy and the client organisation.
Model KUER
No current model in service design research fully considers all the factors in project implementation. To address this, we developed the ‚KUER‘ model, which includes four phases: Key Prerequisites, Understand & Discover, Enable & Define, and Reinforce & Deliver. This model helps to navigate the complex interactions within a project, showing that every action can affect the entire system.
The workshop procedure developed with this model encourages ongoing reflection and helps identify barriers. This approach improves everyone’s understanding and readiness for implementation.
"…this is only going to be deep, resilient, sustainable and long-lasting, if we take a mindset approach, not a process toolkit method approach"
— Service Design Lead, Sydney
"The fabric of human-centred innovation is the organisation, which consists of humans not machines"
— Tina Weisser
Outlook.
Service designers are in a great position to help organisations with big changes. Unlike usual consulting, service designers need to combine business management with system-based methods or team up with partners to offer more services. Creating roles like implementation managers or organisational ethnographers can be really helpful. Putting more focus on the employee and organisational experience, alongside the user experience, is key to getting everyone involved. Lastly, it’s important to remember that organisations are complex and can’t be controlled directly. They need to be guided to manage their own Service/UX Design Projects.
This summary is based on my PhD with the title „Systemic Consideration of Influencing Factors in the Implementation of Product and Service Design Systems“ – supported by Prof. Birgit Mager (KISD Cologne) and Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Jonas (HBK Braunschweig).
Here you can find an article about the KUER framework published in Touchpoint 12/01 and 10/01
