The five myths summarized

What are some of the biggest myths about service design? In this video, I'm going to cover five of them.

Myth number one: Service design is all about making beautiful or easy services.

The word service design is a word that is a bit strange for a lot of people for the first time that they meet it. Often they attach some meaning to it based on what they think design is. For a lot of people, good design is like a beautiful chair.

So their expectation is that, oh, service design is about making beautiful services. Or they might think that good design is what makes objects work well. Like Apple. They make beautiful iPhones that are super easy to use. So they assume great service design is all about making things easier in services.

But that's all a big myth.

Because there is much more to service design than making things beautiful. Because in service design, we are also interested in what is called the backstage. The backstage is the invisible part where, employees make the service happen.

And this stuff isn't beautiful. But super useful.

A lot of time in service design, yes, we try to make things simpler for people.

But that's not an absolute truth.

Because in fact, There are moments where we want people to stop, think a little bit more about what they're gonna do, and then do it. So here, we're not trying to make things easier, but making things even a little bit more harder to do.

Let's take a bit of a weird example, but a very interesting one: vasectomies in Switzerland.

When a man calls his doctor to have a vasectomy, the doctor doesn't say, Okay, awesome, we can do that tomorrow.

No, in Switzerland, if a man wants to have a vasectomy and he is under a certain age and has no kids, from the moment that he says, I'd like to have it and goes to the doctor to have a bit of information, there is then reflection time. That is blocked where the procedure can't happen.

That's a process that has been designed to make that service a little bit harder to get.

So that nobody wakes up from being hangover and gets a vasectomy right within the hour.

I told you, weird example, but very telling.

Myth number two. Service design is complicated.

So here I'm super biased because my passion is to make service design so simple that anybody can use it.

But I feel that a lot of the time what makes service design look complicated is how people speak about it.

Because the practice of service design is the one that is especially complicated. Sure, it takes time, it takes patience, and sometimes a bit of repetition.

But frankly said, it's not rocket science. What makes it feel like rocket science is all the fancy terms that people use.

Terms like end to end customer journey, stakeholder management. When we just speak with those terms, obviously, it feels like it's rocket science.

So service design hasn't to be complicated. It can be sometimes complicated within a specific project, but it isn't complicated per se.

Myth number three. Service design is only for big corporations.

It's for Bank, insurances, megacorps, only these companies can do service design.

At least, that's what many people think. And This is linked to our previous myth. If service design is so complicated, obviously, only the big ones can do it. But once we realize that service design isn't complicated per se, we realize that we can do it also at a smaller level.

In fact, a few days ago, I just published a new course, which is all about showing that service design can be used in everyday life. Which means Service Design can be used even by individuals instead of teams and companies. If we can use it as individuals, obviously, a small barbershop with a team of 2 or 3 can also use it.

Your dentist can use it. And surely, big corporations, Spotify, Apple, and so on, can use it too.

Myth number 4. Service Design is a profession.

If service design is a profession, it's something that can be done only by service designers, which again, makes it this elite, very complex thing. But I personally believe that Service Design is rather a skill. Which means many professions can benefit from Service Design practice within their own profession.

But, like with any skill, there are some weird people just like me who took that skill to an extreme and made it their job.

Drawing is a skill, and you can become an illustrator. But you can also use drawing in your meetings to create clarity about what is happening in a conversation.

The same goes for service design, you can be a service designer or you can use Service Design within many different professions.

Myth number five. Service design is better than "fill in the gap".

I sometimes see conversations that say that service design is better than UX or any other field.

As someone who comes from a religious culture, I know pretty well that the wars on religion or the wars between churches and denominations doesn't bring anything.

In my opinion, no religion is better than any other, but each religion fits to a specific type of person.

So it's less about finding the perfect one than the one that fits better to you. And the same goes for service design. For specific projects, specific cultures, service design might be the better fit. But for other projects, other cultures, service design might just be the wrong fit.

And strangely enough, as someone who is really passionate about service design, I want people to remember that it's just one other skill.

It doesn't make the other skills that you have in your toolbox look less good.