As the economy shifts from an emphasis on products to an emphasis on services, people in the community are increasingly expecting higher standards of service both from the public and the private sector. For the public sector improved public services can mean improved citizen experience and improved public confidence in government. For the private sector improved services can mean a competitive advantage.

Because services are intangible and experienced over time, service design requires a deliberate and specialised approach. Without a service design approach, a service can result in an experience that is ineffective, causing not only customer frustration, lack of confidence and unintended work-arounds, but also additional re-work and inefficiencies for the organisation. A deliberate co-designed practice approach can align benefits to the user as well as to the service delivery organisation.

To optimise the service experience the design of services should involve the people who use these services — people in the community, as well as people delivering the service. The approach to best practice service design is to understand the whole service system and the end-to-end customer experience. This means we can purposefully design all interactions.

Service design is fuelled by insight into people’s lives and real-world experiences and the context within which services are used. This requires front-end service research. Together with design thinking techniques that generate options and new possibilities, insight leads to innovation and to services that make sense in the users’ worlds and therefore have high levels of acceptance and success.

The goals of service design are to improve the usability of a service, to deliver the intent and to provide a workable and cost-effective service.