“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Steve Jobs
An inspirational quote pertinent to many design disciplines but in my sphere of experience its relevance rings true in service design. Early in my career at IDEO, we recognised that ‘just’ the mere process of designing products wasn’t resonating with our clients and their customers. Like opening up the hood of the engine, we identified that design thinking and innovation tools could have an impact across the entire offer, not just around the physical product.
Fast forward to 2025, and Service Design is thriving in many sectors. Every business should consider service design and establish how it could help them to build a more desirable, efficient, loveable product or experience.
What exactly is Service Design? It is universally described as:
‘the activity of planning and organising the parts of a service to deliver a consistent experience’.
For me, the important parts of that definition are:
Activity – Great Service Designers are active, energetic, thoughtful and pragmatic;
Planning & organising – Great Service Designers are clear organisers, communicators and always empathic;
Deliver – Great Service Designers are experimental and look to get products or experience in people’s hands to get feedback;
Consistent experience – Great Service Designers help brands deliver experiences that are lovable and manageable to run.
Being a great service designer means having the right mindset; being a non-expert, curious, empathetic, constructive, experimental, and pragmatic. These are all pretty obvious but sometimes, in pressure situations, or in working environments where design hasn’t been practised for decades, it is hard to maintain and not all designers can thrive. That is why working in multi-disciplinary teams really helps, you can lean on each other for certain traits and make sure that, as a group you stay on track.
Leveraging the latest service design tools and methodologies is a key part of launching successful products and services. While at Bupa, we built a HCD (human centred design) toolkit with a range of tools to help employees to understand the needs of customers and evolve their offers. Working out which tools to use to understand, frame and answer your problems takes experience.
Some tools come and go, but there is a selection that never fail and are at the heart of service design and design thinking (for me, it is not dead). A few that we constantly use are: Ethnography and the act of speaking to your users is the base of all great service design; Journey mapping and the process of mapping your end-to-end customer experience helps you define what is working well and what isn’t for both your customers and your employees; Prototyping and the mindset of ‘failing early to succeed sooner’ and learning from your users; and finally KPI performance boards that help us and our client track the past, present and expected future performance.
The industry has widely adopted the double diamond design process and many firms have tweaked it to compliment their offer. The principles of the double diamond design process are to embrace divergent thinking and convergent thinking and if you trust the process, you will deliver a solution that your target users needs.
There are several ways of interpreting the double diamond design process, the fundamental element is to believe in the process, follow it and ‘hold on’ as it can be a bumpy ride! At tangerine we use a Learn, Leap, Land model that follows the classic steps of Discovery, Definition, Design, Deliver and importantly continues to support our clients post launch. At tangerine over 80% of our work gets to market, compared to other innovation firms this is a remarkably high figure. We are proud of that and believe that our process, design team and relationships with our clients are the main factors for this 80% success rate.
Form no longer follows function. In the 21st Century, as designers we need to understand how businesses work, what is desirable for users, how to get products to market and how to build a ‘fit’ system that is constantly reviewing and evolving a product or experience. That is good practice and that is what Service Design is. Gone are the days where we could design and launch a product or service and hope that someone would buy and then use it just because it ‘looked nice’.
Service design evolved from companies launching products and realising that they weren’t delivering the desired experience. Initially ‘switched on’ employees of the company would identify the problem and then others would start ‘plugging’ the issues with additional offers around the product to complete or make the experience work. Or worse, advertise to overcompensate short-comings with messaging that didn’t resonate with customers!
At tangerine we help our clients improve their offer by identifying their users’ problems, frame them as opportunities and design products, tools, services, roles, spaces or experiences to make their offer more seamless, loveable and inherently work better. Great service designers are passionate, empathic to users & stakeholders, problem solvers and have a skillset to bring ideas to life.
Not all sectors have engaged with Service Design yet, and yes it does lend itself to certain sectors over others. For years we have been working with our mobility clients helping them to analyse their passenger experiences and create more memorable, seamless journeys both in the air and on the ground. We are also extremely excited about the massive opportunity for museums and adjacent spaces to create experiences that the public get inspired by. Over the last few years, we have all been deprived of immersive, engaging encounters and now is the time to innovate, not only to make the public feel comfortable but to totally ‘up the game’ of these entire experiences through great service design.
Service design also adds value to a spatial experience in the built environment. Architecture firms design beautiful spaces and buildings by creating pragmatic masterplans. However, sometimes they lack the people-centred approach that is drilled into experiential/ service/interaction designers. Architects design and build the organs of the building and service designers get the blood flowing through by understanding and creating great user-led experiences using human-centred design.
Defining the visitor experience at the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) is a case in point. We worked closely with our client, Hassan Allam Construction Group, to take the architects’ masterplan that was designed in the early 2000’s and translate it into a user experience blueprint to implement the overall visitor experience for the entire GEM destination. The spaces, structure and exhibitions are installed, and they are incredible, but the destination lacked activation and a clear understanding of the potential range of users who would be coming to the destination. It was clear that global tourists would visit for once in a decade/lifetime trip to see the largest collection of treasures from Ancient Egypt and King Tutankhamun in the world. Our role was to help our client expand their thinking and to understand the needs of local Egyptians and people who could use the destination weekly, because they might work there or go for lunch there twice a week, for example.
Our multi-disciplinary team, working with Hassan Allam, defined an overall narrative and vision for the destination and crafted a blueprint, a design manual and an implementation plan to guide a range of local partners to build the remaining experiences (that fully opened last month). Using Service Design tools we defined over 20 additional ‘experiences’ from reinforcing what was ‘signature’, underlining what was ‘fundamental’ and finally creating a seamless experience by translating the value of ‘in-between’ experiences for visitors.
For the uninitiated, this might sound like ‘gobbledygook’. But believe me, it works and if used wisely, service design has the power to deliver spectacular commercial results.
Dr Ralf Speth, as CEO of Jaguar, coined it perfectly by saying:
“If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design”.
By turning your business challenge on the head and looking at it in a new light, not as a piece of intangible or physical design, but as an exercise in delving into why you want to change in the first place, by asking the right questions and adopting the right tools, you can unlock something valuable about your offer and who will be attracted to it, and you may even surprise yourself.
You can find more about our work at the Grand Egyptian Museum here and our Service Design offer here.