As a Service Designer, I have a bit of a different view about who is a user. Many innovation approaches say today that they are customer-centric, user-centric or human-centered.
These are jargon words that are used when the person you want to please the most is the person using the service and not anyone else like your manager or boss.
Of course, this is great. But focusing only on the end user can sometimes become a little difficult. For instance, it can make companies not care about their employees or staff members. By focusing only on the end user, you could potentially forget the people who have to actually create the service for the end users 🤭.
That’s why you’ll often hear service designers say: Hey, how do the stakeholders 👔 feel about this?
Stakeholder is another jargon word that refers to any person involved in the creation of a service. It can be a staff member, partner organizations and so on.
As a service designer, I consider stakeholders, end users, partners, employees as all being users 👫 of a service. In an ideal world, service designers would say that there is no hierarchy of users.
The end user, the person using the service, the stakeholders or whoever else should all be treated as equals.
Going further
This article is part of my free course "What is the Service Designer mindset?" which helps you to finally understand how service designers think and what makes them such a special group of innovators.