Four tips for designing beautiful services

1. Understand in detail what your services are made of
A beautifully designed service is made up of many moving parts that work seamlessly together without the customer, or service staff, realising it. Having an awareness of the parts, how they’re connected and how they work together will give you a greater understanding of the metrics or performance thresholds you need to monitor in order to measure its effectiveness.

2. Fine-tune your ability to communicate what good feels like
Experiencing services as a regular consumer is something that you may need to consciously do when you work professionally in the service industry. It’s not easy, but it’s a useful skill to develop to help you to discover elements of great services that might work for your own business. Regularly stopping to recall your own feelings about service experiences will help you to detect the emotional connections that linger long after the experience has ended.

3. Design for humans
Businesses can be highly data-led, which suppresses instinct or common sense when it comes to assessing risk. If you’re creating a service for humans, your own human existence is extremely valid in connecting to what other humans value and enjoy. We’re not suggesting that you shouldn’t use good customer insights, what we’re saying is that at some level we are all the same so design for humans and the positive emotions you are trying to create.

4. Be prepared to defend the beauty spots
When budget or resource put restrictions on getting a service to market, there can be pressure to cut corners, but it’s important to avoid stripping out the beauty spots that make your service beautiful. These are the things that will delight customers, get them talking about it to their friends and coming back for more. Distinctiveness, originality, usability and how it expresses or enhances your brand are all things to note here. You may need to argue the case internally for them to be designed into your service to put it on the strongest possible path to success.

The full article is published in the July edition of Design Business Association (DBA) Insight