Year: 2015
Role: Co-Author, Service Designer
About: While at Usability Matters, Linn Vizard and I co-authored a set of Service Design Heuristics to be used as generative and evaluative principles in the creation and evaluation of effective and delightful services.
Heuristics are rules of thumb and not specific directive guidelines. They can be used in both generative and evaluative ways – as a set of considerations throughout the research and design phases of a project or as an assessment tool to evaluate an existing service.
Services are complex exchanges of value. They are often made up of many parts, with both tangible and intangible goods and value exchanged.
While usability heuristics tend to focus on the user and how they complete tasks, the Service Design heuristics take a more holistic back and front stage view, encompassing all actors in the service, be they customers, employees, third party stakeholders, or partners. This conceptual approach recognizes that services are co-produced, and that human interaction is a key component of many, if not all, services.
In addition to the heuristics themselves, we created a poster and companion Field Guide to help designers and non-designers alike apply the heuristics in their work, uncover opportunities, align stakeholders and benchmark their efforts.
We intended for these heuristics to be applied with many lenses, reflecting the complexity, nuance and multi-layered reality of designing and producing services. A heuristic can apply to a single touchpoint or interaction, as well as to the overall service eco-system. Similarly, the heuristics could be applied to a single moment in time through to an actors’ entire long-term relationship with a service.
We created these Service Design Heuristics in the hopes they would be adopted as a tool by a wide range of practitioners, who would test them in the wild and help iterate on them too.
We also created a series of blog posts (read part 1, read part 2, read part 3) taking a more in-depth look at each heuristic.