This is Service Design Thinking: Basics - Tools - Cases

by Marc Stickdorn (editor)

This is Service Design Thinking introduces an inter-disciplinary approach to designing services. Service design is a bit of a buzzword these days and has gained a lot of interest from various fields. This book, assembled to describe and illustrate the emerging field of service design, was brought together using exactly the same co-creative and user-centred approaches you can read and learn about inside. The boundaries between products and services are blurring and it is time for a different way of thinking: This is service design thinking.

A set of 23 international authors and even more online contributors from the global service design community invested their knowledge, experience and passion together to create this book. It introduces service design thinking in manner accessible to beginners and students, it broadens the knowledge and can act as a resource for experienced design professionals. Besides an introduction to service design thinking through five basic principles, a selection of individual perspectives demonstrate the similarities and differences between various disciplines involved in the design of services. Additionally, the book outlines an iterative design process and showcases 25 adaptable service design tools, exemplifying the practice of service design with five international case studies. The book concludes with an insight into the current state of service design research and sets service design thinking in a philosophical context.

Genres: Design, Business, Nonfiction, Professional Development, Entrepreneurship, Management, Reference

376 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 2, 2010

Reviews

[Henri Hämäläinen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Service Design has been an interesting topic for me for a some time. Finally I wanted to get more understanding about it and its basic. That's the reason I got my hands on a book that was saying to be "the book" for service design -This is Service Design Thinking by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider.

I was super excited to start reading about the wonderful world of service design. I read and read and read and became really bored. First hundred pages of the book the authors are trying to say WE ARE IMPORTANT. I knew it already, designing good services is important and doing it structured way with service design must be even more important. After this start, I wasn't anymore really sure. If someone needs to state in so many different ways that they are important, maybe they really are not.

In the middle section book got better. It told in short articles, bit like blog posts, methods to do service design. Unfortunately these were quite simplistic and didn't dig into most of those properly. If you think of a book like Gamestorming, that's about ten times more useful for these methods than this book.

My hopes was for the last section of the book, examples of service design. As the whole book, that turned out to be a disappointment too. Examples were not really interesting and the way those were presented was quite dull. In one of the examples the designed service never got in to use, but they stated project was still a success. I think the exact opposite. Service which was designed but never got live, is a failure, real big failure.

Book was planned by top service designers and that might have been that the reading experience also failed. They tried in top of everything to renew the concept of a book with coloring, icons and lines going here and there. That made the book complex to read. Maybe there would not have been need to renew a such a working concept that a book is.

I honestly don't recommend this book to anyone. I want to believe Service Design and the people behind service design. This book does no good to the practice. There must be better books about the subject than this one.

I don't think I learned anything about this book. At least not in the positive way. Do yourself a favor, mark this to the "no go" list.

This review was originally published in my blog - here

[Cristian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard about service design back in Italy. I actually didn't understand what it meant. For me, it was marketing. It was design thinking. It was "smoke". However, I kept this book under the radar for later reading. It took a week to finish this book, according to several websites, one of the fundamental documents on service Design.
Now the definition is clearer and more real in my head.
The book is simple and goes straight to the point:
- Introduction and Context
- Toolbox (the most interesting part)
- Business cases (unfortunately, most of the solutions are too old and outdated)
- Essays
Don't feel like I know service design after reading this book, however, I can see where to use it and how I can include this tools into my very own (and eclectic) toolbox.

[Claudia Yahany · Rating 5 out of 5]

No es un libro para aprender a diseñar.
No es un libro para encontrar una herramienta y resolver un problema.
No es un libro para descubrir estrategias de innovación, ni para aprender sobre Design Thinking.

Este es un libro de texto y está estructurado como un libro de texto (y me gusta precisamente por eso, los diseñadores no tenemos muchos libros de texto escritos por otros diseñadores).

Empieza muy académico definiendo diferentes disciplinas dentro del diseño y sigue con herramientas. Algunas ya conocidas y comunicadas por otros autores. La diferencia es que la mayoría de los otros autores (los de IDEO, Osterwalder, et al) pretenden simplificar el proceso de diseño y hacerlo parte de un proceso de innovación. Lo que hace que cuando comunican las herramientas, pareciera que argumentan que "todos pueden hacerlo". Aquí no te invitan a probar las herramientas, simplemente describen cómo despachos de diseño de todo el mundo usan las herramientas.

El término Design Thinking se puso de moda y resulta que en algún momento, todos quieren ser diseñadores. Y sí, todos pueden ser diseñadores.. si se forman como tal. En un proyecto de Diseño de Servicios, es tarea del diseñador del proyecto estructurar su propio proceso y resolver el problema.

[Mamduh Halawa · Rating 2 out of 5]

This feels like an open google-docs consisting of smart thoughts about anything vaguely related to the design of products. Could easily chop off 80% of the sentences and barely make a difference.

[Ahmad hosseini · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a textbook.

What is service design?
Service design is an interdisciplinary approach that combines different methods and tools form various disciplines. It is a new way of thinking as opposed to a new stand-alone academic discipline.
The approach of service design refers to the process of designing rather than to its outcome. The outcome of a service design process can have various forms: rather abstract organizational structures, operation process, service experiences and even concrete physical objects.

About the book
It is a good start point for reading about service design. It introduces tools of service design such as Stakeholders Maps, Shadowing, Service safaris, and etc. Also, there is five case studies in the end of book.

[Marielle De Geest · Rating 3 out of 5]

Idk just kept going on about service design in the meta sense way too much. Like we get it. Service design is important and new(ish). I liked the last essay but all of the icons and annotation systems felt unnecessary and distracting which is a little bit *alanis morissette voice* ironic.

[Nick Mastenbroek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clear and nicely formatted 'handbook' on service design. Expect no major breakthroughs or new insights, but if you're looking for a quick understanding or brushup on what Serice Design Thinking is, this is your book.

[Jurgen Appelo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good stuff that everyone responsible for product development should at least be aware of. One star deducted for the horrible Kindle adaptation.

[Tessa · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars: a bit too much thinking, not enough service design.

The information: not as practical as I would have hoped. It starts with a ~holistic~(you'll get tired of that word) reflection on what service design is, which in my opinion is a bit too vague. The tools are nice, but not as well described, so you have to use your information a bit on how to apply them. The cases are good to get a general idea of service design in practice, but I was hoping for a bit more detail on how the tools were used. Instead, they only get a brief mention ("We used this method").

The readability: overall this was fine, but the first part contained too much abstract thinking and fancy words to my taste.

The structure: they did something funky to the structure. Like they explain at the beginning of the book, they try to treat it as a service. It's a fun gimmick, but I don't think it really adds anything to the book.

Best part: the medical case.

[Steffan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a broad stroke style book aimed at being a reference toolkit rather than a front to back read. An essential for awareness, but if youre looking for deep dives and case studies, look elsewhere. Practitioners can probably skip through most of it and focus on filling gaps in their knowledge. Also, I wish the authors had done a better job of pointing readers to further reading and resources in each short chapter. It would have made the book more useable. Still a decent reference and it's clear a lot of work went into this books's production.

[Lloyd Downey · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is actually a review of the Blinkist summary of the book. So it should be interpreted in that light. It maybe unfair to the full book though I’ve generally found the Blinkist reviews to be remarkably good. And in the case of this book, I have no desire to seek out the original and read it. However, here are a few snippets that give the gist of the book:
These blinks explain the basic principles of successful service design and provide you with methods and tools to enhance your service.
What is service design? There are five common principles that most everyone agrees on.
1. The first is that the process of service design should be user-centered......the customer should be treated as a crucial piece of the process .....and no two customers are exactly alike. Each one has a culture, a set of habits, a range of motivations. If you want to fully understand your customer base, you can’t underestimate these differences;
2. The second principle of service design: it should be a co-creative process......A stakeholder is anyone who’s involved with the service–including managers, marketers and engineers.........customers can also be counted as stakeholders......All these people should have a direct or indirect say in the creative process of service design
3. The third principle of service design is sequencing, that is, the sequence–or timeline–of providing a service.......Sequencing is helpful because it allows you to break down each step of the user experience.....Details that might otherwise be overlooked often get caught in the sequencing process.
4. The last two–evidencing and holistic thinking......It’s good to think of a tangible item, or physical evidence, for your service.......a sort of service souvenir, if you will.....Tourists and travellers bring home evidence from their trips in the form of coffee mugs, snow globes or postcards......Your service souvenir should function similarly.
5. It’s time to take a holistic approach.......It’s just as important not to get lost in the details and fail to see the grand design.........Thinking holistically will also help you see the potential for alternative sequences that could improve how the service begins, ends or unfolds.......For instance, what if there was always a pot of freshly brewed coffee in your barbershop? Customers would not only have the option to enjoy a cup; the fresh brew would also fill the shop with a pleasant aroma.
The stakeholder map, the first tool in the toolbox, can obviate confusion.......A stakeholder map provides a visual representation of every stakeholder...With a project in Holland....the map was a great asset. It allowed the team to consider the complex relationships between all the businesses and government agents and how they affected the work.....This allowed the NL Agency to refocus on what was truly important: the customers, businesses and educational institutions that the agency was designed to help.
There’s also a tool called the customer journey map that works as a great visual aid for service designers......Here, it’s important to reach out to customers and ask them about their experiences........With the help of a customer journey map, you could easily figure out how to improve their experience and change some of these individual touchpoints.
Whether you’re hoping to make a big improvement or just a small one–like redesigning your website–a customer journey map will show just how that improvement will affect all the other aspects of your service.
The key message in this book: Service-design thinking is a dynamic process that includes not only the service providers and their customers but also all the service’s stakeholders. It’s about paying attention to every little detail as well as seeing the big picture of the overall customer experience. In short, there’s a whole lot more to service design than just a transaction with a customer.
Actionable advice: Use questionnaires to learn more about your customers. Next time you want to collect more qualitative
My take on the book. Services have never been really well understood by the bulk of the population who equate economic activity essentially as agriculture, manufacturing and mining. So this is probably a worthwhile contribution to the literature about services and what makes services unique. I'm not sure that the suggestions here oversimplify things or, are indeed, extremely clever because the DO simplify things. They tend to use the Hairdresser as the classic sort of service provider but I think this is far too limiting. An airline is also providing a service as is an artist and a lawyer and an orthopaedic surgeon. Sure you can force-feed the process of a hip replacement into the 5 steps outlined above but it's not a neat fit and you might want to redesign the process for different modes of service. Overall, I thought it was ok but not sure that I learned a lot from it. (Admittedly, I have been steeped in service trade and modes of services over many years). But two stars from me.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some personal notes, not an actual review:

Service design seems to a bit of everything. Synonym to business development and consulting. Includes everything from marketing and strategy to interaction design. Background probably from user experience design. Nothing revolutionary, just a name for the approach to solving problems with several quite simple frameworks.

The book itself gives a good introduction into the topic. Tells how service design is part of everything with some examples. What I would have wanted to see is if service designers are usually focused on one topic, e.g. interaction design. I would find it surprising if they basically did consulting in every field.

The book goes on to introduce several service design concepts. They are all quite simple and nothing you would not have seen before in other contexts. Followed by a few short case studies.

While reading the often I felt like I read a few pages of which included a few sentences of actual content. There's a lot of fluff in there, riding with the hype and staying on a very general level.

Summary: service design = consulting/business development. A term for problem solving. Nothing revolutionary, but I guess often you can rely on the basic fundamental things in business. Good introduction to the topic.

[Rob Molyneux · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this a good, simple practitioner book for service (and product) designers. The tools lean more theoretical than hands-on, step-by-step guides, but they still do the job of showing what each tool is for and how you might use it.

I wouldn’t say this is the best book for absolute beginners or non-practitioners. To really apply what’s here, you need at least some grounding in service design methods and practices. That said, Stickdorn explains things in a really straightforward way, which helps make sense of a discipline that can often feel broad and undefined.

It’s also very much a book of its time. You can tell it was written when the field was still emerging, and that shows in some of the framing. But that’s also what makes it valuable, it was one of the first to capture these ideas and approaches in one place, and on that merit alone it deserves credit.

Definitely worth a read if you’re working in service design and want something that lays the groundwork in a clear, accessible way.

[Peter Augustin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't find anything useful in this book.
Most of the intro is just a lot of SJW ideology, written into service/product/marketing design. Explaining how this magical inclusive design process will change the world into a utopia. As most of the actual methodology we now use as service designers comes from much richer etnography, psychology and human factors practice, which were actually well grounded, I seriously doubt that another workshop and post it session is going to stop climate change. Service design is largely political process in organizational change design, that explains how ideas gain momentum by making people feel included. It's actual "work" methods come from mentioned arch-practices. It's most valuble aspect is generating more income for companies. There's about 30 pages in this very expensive book actually dedicated to methods. You can get those from most wiki pages online. Spare yourself an afternoon and just skip this book.

[Dolf van der Haven · Rating 2 out of 5]

The content of this book on service design smells heavily of marketing and advertising agencies and not so much of actual design of a service. The authors make it seem service design is something from the past twenty years or so and ignore everything that has been done in the design of (IT) services through Lean, Design for Six Sigma, ITIL, VeriSM, etc.
Some of their concepts are useful in order to mve the focus more onto the customer journey and people's needs, but the application remains very high-level and workshoppy without clear (let alone measurable) benefits being shown at the end of the process.
This is not design thinking, it is a superficial approach to applying marketing techniques to services.

[Sashko Valyus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Це дуже оригінально зверстана книга, ніколи схожого не читав. Сворена краудсорсом, і позиціонується як перша книга по сервіс дизайну. Я не рекомендую починато його вивчення з цієї книги

З контентом біда-біда. Книга поділена на 4 частини:
- теорія: взагалі ні про що, я розумію що це мультидисциплінарна робота але тут описували окремо різні речі але не разом
- інструменти: тут цікаво, кілька нових речей для себе взнав, жаль що вони не завжди детальніше
- кейси: непогано, але NDA часто не давало повністю розкрити цікаві деталі
- філософія: ну графіоманія кароч.

Оформлення і те що там небагато контенту в результаті витягнуло рейтинг

[Kelly Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book for a grad course I'm in, and it was the most difficult thing to get through. The layout was distracting and the amount of typos throughout (extra words, missing words, misspelled words) just made my writer/editor heart scream out.

The strong point of the book is that it provides real-world examples of Service Design thinking in action. Unfortunately, this didn't provide enough information or context for me to see why such projects should be pushed for. Stuff sounded fancy, but impractical and flashy...

[Jen Serdetchnaia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid foundation. Covers service design from a variety of perspectives, including that it's a technique difficult to force into a single process. Stickdorn then offers a structured process, and a toolbox of methods. He then ties it all together by showing how this structured/unstructured process and methods were applied in real-life cases. I especially liked that he did not advocate for a dogmatic approach, and showed how service design tools and processes can be made flexible for imperfect real-life applications.

[Aman Parnami · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first book I read on service design. I was expecting a much better introduction to service design than one that relies on my implicit understanding of the term. However, I found the different frameworks, methods, and tools valuable. The presentation of case studies was not very compelling for me and the last three chapters about motivation, perspectives, and research left me asking for more, perhaps due to my bias towards academic research. I found the format of the book fresh and easy to skim through, but the cross linking within the book was not intuitive.

[Daniel Te · Rating 3 out of 5]

A basic introduction to the field of service design. Good overview, though I find it a little bit light on content. Its sequel, This is Service Design Doing, is almost too heavy on content, being nearly 1,000 pages. The two books together do make a good pair.

I will say that the methodology behind this book is interesting, in that a lot of it is meticulously crowdsourced and consulted with many, many people in the field. However, this also means that it takes a less assertive stance on what service design actually entails, keeping it more broad.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read this because a course I took recommended it
It's a waste of money
It's a book about design so the authors felt they had to make the book flashy with design elements, that only served to hinder readability and comprehension
It's pompous and full of quotes that were hand picked to support the authors. lacks content of substance
The case studies are the worst, they say they used xyz method, but didn't even show what the artefacts from that method are...

Don't waste your time or money on this book

[Jakub · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the book in the kindle version and while the book might have been desifned for the paper quite well, for kindle the design didn't work at all.

As for the content, I liked the presentation of the tools and the use cases from real world.

I didn't like the way the book was written. For my taste there was too much repetition.

Anyway, if you don't know what the hell is service design then this book provides quite good overview focused on the ways to apply it in real world.

[Ardavan Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

A general overview of service design with a little bit of history. My only problem with these types of books are that because of scattered and brief introductions of concepts and theories, they become harder to learn any applicable knowledge from them. Of course, lack of cohesive story helps you disengage easily.

But, this book is a good catalogue of concepts, models and the mainstream discourse in SDT community.

[Kylie Upton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Everyone recommended this book to me for service design, however, it felt more like a beginners guide to service design with too much emphasis on how amazing service design is. This book seems targeted at selling service design to users, however, why would anyone read a 300+ page book if they weren't already a little sold. I would not recommend this book. I think that stating it as a guide to service design is vastly underselling the field of service design.

[Sabine Schmidt · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are looking for a book that gives you an overview of what service design thinking is and what types there are to conduct it this book helps. It offers types, examples without taking you by hand how to do it. It offers examples to get an idea how it can help you.

I also bought the workbook so am curious about the content of that book.

[Harley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just finished ‘This is Service Design Thinking’ and I can’t say this book gave me much knowledge around what it is other than the value of a Customer Experience Map and a Graphic Designer.

Either way, I think it’s a really important topic and would like to know more, so if you have any recommendations, let me know below.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was a bit disappointed in this book. It’s just an anthology of different opinions on design thinking, without any strong point of view or educated commentary. As a read, this feels very tedious after a while.

Plus, I thought some of the slang and typos took away from the credibility (“Harvard B-School” and “Rodman Business School”).

[Gabriel Werlich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Take it seriously when the book says it's the basics, tools and cases. Language is simple, understandable. It would be most beneficial if the tools were more deeply described, it's a good panaroma thought.

[Leon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a must read for anyone interested in service design thinking.

But reading it is a bit like a pilgrimage. It feels like climbing a mountain. In many ways it is a hard book to read, primarily because it is trying to be new in the way it presents the information.

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably a must-read essential for getting yourself familiar with the topic and understanding the concept and the context of design thinking. It will make you confident about the topic and ready to move to deeper understanding and application of DT.