Digital services must be well designed. Their creation should require people who specialise in researching and analysing audience needs. Unfortunately, service design in Poland is still underestimated. This negatively affects the quality of IT projects that do not use the potential of creativity and innovation.
Service design – why is it so important?
Service Design aims to optimise all processes as much as possible to meet user expectations. It does not matter whether we are optimising existing processes and services or designing a new solution – the important thing is to carry out an analysis that enables us to create the ideal service.
A badly designed interface translates into real losses – it prevents the success of a service implementation, blocks innovation. Even Facebook has found this out.
In 2016, it noticed that users had started to set up groups among themselves to sell goods, so it launched Facebook Marketplace – a platform to facilitate this. Today, this platform is the second largest marketplace in the world (only Amazon does better in terms of monthly active users), but its beginnings were not at all promising. A seemingly minor element stood in the way of success: an ineffective search button.
We realised that users were only using the search engine to find a specific person, not products from the Marketplace. With the right analysis, we added a large search button next to the search bar, despite some resistance from our design team. This had a positive impact on the number of users using the search engine, and the number of users remained higher even after the button was removed,” recalls Debi Liu, who was responsible for the development of Facebook Marketplace.
This analytical approach, which characterises service design, should be at the core of every project.
Service Design delivers a better digital experience
In Poland, in the context of creating IT services and applications, it is used to talk mainly about the role of user experience, i.e. designing a good user experience. Service design is still overlooked. It could be said that the emotions a product will evoke are still more important than the quality of the product itself. And although service design encompasses a wide range of activities, including preliminary research, the aforementioned user experience design (UX) and customer experience design (CX), if you want to create a truly innovative project, you need to go one step further.
The creator of the concept of service design, Lynn Shostack, called as early as 1982 for the design process to integrate the product with the service and to focus on how behind-the-scenes factors, such as people’s behaviour in a given environment, influence product development. She believed that managing fragments, rather than whole projects, was the wrong approach, making a company slower to respond to market needs and audience expectations.
Service design helps to create an environment that encourages people to think about the product in an unconventional, yet safe and controlled way. It is not just the literal design of a service, but the holistic design of the entire customer journey, which not only allows a greater understanding of the customer’s needs, but also opens up many innovative avenues for the organisation.
The Polish IT industry needs creativity, and service design can activate it
By using methods such as service design, customers are more satisfied and organisations find new ways to grow. But there is a shortage of specialists in this field in Poland, which translates into the quality of the solutions created.
I often see that companies create seemingly good products, but for some reason they cannot penetrate the consciousness of a wider audience. This could be avoided by using service design.
What is it like with Polish innovation? On the one hand, Polish companies are spending more and more money on IT solutions, the digital technology market is growing at a rate of around 6-7 per cent per year, and companies in this sector are now worth almost PLN 50 billion. At the same time, in the Global Innovation Index report, Poland was ranked only 40th out of 132 analysed countries, lagging far behind, for example, Estonia or the Czech Republic.
What could be the reason for this? As the main reasons, Joanna Brzoskowska-Czerepiuk, a lecturer in the Innovation Commercialisation course at Łazarski University, mentions, among others, insufficient investment capital, an extensive decision-making process, as well as difficult contact with the target customer, which often results in the product being developed in isolation from market reality.
This may also be due to the fact that we have become hostage to certain thought patterns.
IT companies are afraid to be creative. This attitude forces them to explore uncharted territory, which, after all, does not immediately have to turn into success. Meanwhile, mistakes are great teachers, only they need to be made at the initial stages, when projects are in the testing phase. Methods such as Service Design or Design Thinking provide a sense of comfort.
Polish companies have a lot to gain by betting on service design. The biggest advantage of its implementation in the development of IT projects is the ability to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the business environment. The team has the space to conduct interviews, make important observations and even experiment, which is especially important when the project is still underdeveloped or at an early stage of development.
Service design minimises risks and costs, but it also transforms the entire organisation and allows it to react faster to change, reduces the aversion to making mistakes and allows it to create innovative services or products faster. This translates not only into higher profits, but also continually new opportunities for the organisation and customer satisfaction.
The effectiveness of this approach has already been proven by the IT industry overseas, where service design is an essential part of product and service design. Tech giants Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and LinkedIn, already noticed a few years ago that users of their applications were tired of using complicated, complex and slow versions of their solutions and started creating ‘Lite’ versions of their applications, simplifying the interaction path. Looking at the effects of this approach, one is tempted to say that service design has a bright future ahead of it. Let’s hope for a bright future in Poland, too.
