 In this episode, we'll be talking about why the most valuable services are actually a struggle for customers. We'll talk about how to design services that are easy and difficult at the same time. And finally, why human-centered design isn't always the best approach for service design. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. This is Utaka Yamaguchi. This is Service Design Show. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to design services that have a positive impact on people and that are good for business. My guest in this episode has studied service design by looking at sushi restaurants. He's currently a professor at the Kyoto University. His name is Utaka Yamaguchi. In this episode, we're going to address one of the big misconceptions in the service design field. And that is that we should design services to be as user-friendly as possible. Utaka has a different perspective on this and that is that great services are sometimes a struggle for customers. That's what we're going to talk about in this episode. We post new videos on this channel every week that help you to level up your service design skills. So if you haven't done so already, be sure to subscribe and don't forget to click that bell icon so you'll be notified when new videos are out. I also have a free training on how to explain service design without confusing people. If you're interested in that, check the show notes down below for the link. So that's all for the introduction and now let's quickly jump into the interview with Utaka. Welcome to the show, Utaka. Hi, thank you for inviting me. I'm really happy to have you on as the first guest from Japan. So I'm really curious to your perspective on service design and the things that are on your mind. But before we start digging into your topics, for the people who don't know who you are, could you briefly tell us a little bit more about yourself? Okay, I'm an academic and I study services and I'm in management field. So I study services from the management perspective. But then I got involved in design school. We have a design school in our school. So I started thinking about connecting service and design. Then service design became very popular. And which school is that? Where do you teach? It's Kyoto University. Yes. Okay. So since then I've been doing teaching and doing research and service design. All right. So that brings me to my next question. And that's the question I ask all of the guests. What is your first memory of service design? Okay, good. Good question. So yeah, so when we started design school, that was eight years ago. So I was wondering what I should teach. And then around that time, I started to hear the word service design from many people. So I didn't know what that was. But then it made sense to me because I was doing research and service. And then I was going into design, so service design. So that's how I got connected in that field. Okay, cool. So you've sent me three questions, really interesting topics that haven't been really on the show so far. I've sent you a few question starters. We're going to co-create this episode. Are you ready to start? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Let's go. So the first topic, let me get it over here. The first topic is already a really cryptic one. It's called inter-subjective struggles. Do you have a question starter that goes along with this one and can you show it to us? Yeah, that's why. Okay. Why, yes. My question would be, why are some of the services intimidating? Intimidating for customers. Are services intimidating for customers? Yes. So for example, if you go to an upscale restaurant in Japan, we have sushi bars or some kind of traditional Japanese restaurants. But in Europe, you have French restaurants, Michelin-starred restaurants, all those settings. You're kind of intimidated. Yeah. When you go to that kind of place, you worry about how you look. So kind of manners you have to master and all those things, right? Yeah. And then when, yeah. So and then when you like get into the setting and you start, let's say you order wine, right? Mm-hmm. You are given this thick list of wine and then you have to say something sophisticated. You want to sound smart. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So that kind of thing. But the problem for me was this why question, right? Because existing theories of service basically suggest that the customers should be satisfied or pleased. Yeah. You have to please customers, right? Yeah. And the customer satisfaction is very important. But then, so these theories, existing theories cannot explain why some of these services are intimidating. And especially the upscale services, right? The inclusive premium services where you feel intimidated as a customer actually buying from someone. Right. Yeah. It's actually more marked in the kind of expensive settings. Yeah. But then actually my argument is that every service, no matter how reasonably it is or how expensive that is, is a kind of intersubjective struggle. Okay. It's a kind of intimidating. Yeah. That's really interesting. Where does this come from? Okay. So when I started doing research on sushi, or maybe I should get back, when I get into the field of service, I was thinking what to study. So I basically chose sushi bars in Tokyo as a site. So the reason was that sushi chefs are kind of intimidating. So they have a stern look on their face and they don't smile. They don't try to please you. And on top of that, when you go to a sushi bar like that, there's no written menu. Right. And there's no price tags. You just order things and you eat. And after two hours, you're done. And then you ask for the check and then you know the price. So and then you have to pay for that. So I kind of found it interesting. Again, the white question. Yeah. So I went into sushi bars and I started studying these sushi bars. So I basically videotaped interactions between sushi chefs and customers and analyzed these interactions in detail. So that's. Yeah. And so I didn't realize this before you actually, before I started digging into your research and now I see it all around you. But still, what's your explanation? Why? It's contraintuitive that services sort of feel intimidating or that you as a customer feel intimidated. Why is this paradox there? Yeah. So my answer is this. In any kind of service, there's this paradox. If you try to satisfy customers, customers will not be satisfied. So that's the product. My explanation is this. So if service provider tries to satisfy this customer, then the relationship a little bit changes. Now this service provider tries to satisfy this customer and the customer thinks that this service provider is interested in my evaluation of the service. So the status changes a little bit. So the service provider becomes a little bit subservient to the customer. Then the service from somebody subservient is not as valuable anymore. So that's the paradox. So the customer is king, right? That's saying that's actually bad for your perception of the service that you're getting. Right. Is that the case? Yeah. So that's why many of the service providers try to make it more difficult for customers. That's the gesture, right? I'm not interested in satisfying you, right? I'm just developing this sophisticated service. You just came, you know, that kind of thing, right? And what? Makes sense. Yeah. I guess it makes sense. But what does this mean for us as a service design community? How do we incorporate this in our design process? Yeah. So that's a difficult part. So now, so service design in service design, which is based on human center design. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you have to kind of empower users. You cannot intimidate customers. That would be interesting. Yeah. Right. But then service is interesting precisely because of this intersubjective struggle, right? So if you try to make, so if you try to make it easy, then the customers just kind of feel the service as some kind of quotidian like everyday kind of thing. It's not, it's not a valuable, right? And then it starts, designers try to design a service that's sophisticated and non quotidian and valuable. Then the customers have to face the service, right? Yeah. They have to show that they are qualified for the service, right? So that's the struggle again. Maybe a lot of questions regarding this topic, but maybe you'll explain a bit more in the next topic. Shall we move on to the second one? Because I think it relates to what you're saying, right? Right. And my print-a-mail function, so I had to improvise. And the second topic is easy and difficult. And do you have a question starter again that goes along with this one? Okay. That would be who are. And what's the question? Yeah. The question is who are these customers that you try to satisfy, right? Yeah. Okay. So we kind of think of customers as input to the service, right? Here's the customer who has certain needs or requirements. And then here's a service that tries to meet the requirements or satisfy this customer. Then the customer becomes happy and so on, right? But then I kind of think this who is an important question. In service. So I guess it's not making sense. Yeah, it is. But yeah, go on. I'm really interested. I'm listening carefully. Yeah. Okay. Here's my explanation. It's a little complicated. Okay. I begin with this notion that service is value co-creation. Okay. So customers participate in the service to basically work together with service providers and everybody else to co-create the value, right? Okay. Then here is the customer and here is the service. And then customer is kind of evaluating the value of this service, right? Yeah. In the traditional perspective, that makes sense. Okay. You just make it easy, interesting, beautiful, delicious. Then the customer becomes satisfied or happy and all that, right? But then think about this. This service is co-created with this customer. So now this customer is actually implicated in this service. He's not consuming it, he's part of the service. Right. Yeah. So now the customer is basically judging the value of this service, but the customer is also implicated in the service. Yeah. So now the customer's value is also part of it. Okay. Yeah. The value of service includes the value of the customer, right? Because the customer is implicated in it. So then the value of the customer, meaning who the customer is as a person becomes important. Okay. Yeah. That's why in a high-end Western case, right? You have to prove that you're qualified. You have to show that you know the manners, you know the jargons, and you know how to behave and all those things, right? Yeah. So you are implicated. Yeah. So this, I don't know if the word is advanced, but the more, let's go, the more skilled you are at using a certain service, the more value you bring as a customer to the service offering, the more value you'll be able to get out of it. Is that basically the concept? Yeah. That's how value co-creation works, right? Yeah. So your knowledge matters, right? Yeah. Your knowledge and experience, competence, everything matters for the value of the service, but also you are also part of the service. So your value, you know, what kind of value you have, how do you represent matters? So what kind of person you are matters? Yes. Yeah. So yeah. So it's not like just getting a better service by bringing in more knowledge, you know, who you are matters, right? In the service. And once again, the question, this is of course a super interesting topic as we are human centered and we think about who the customer is, but we always think about how do we serve that type of customer, right? That's the, at least that's the thinking I've been seeing in service design, how do we serve the different customer types, but not per se, what do the different customer types bring in into the service? That's like the other way around. And so I come back to the question, what does this mean for the design process? Yeah, exactly. So again, the customers are not input to the service. Customers are actually output of the service. So the customer becomes certain person. That process is the service. Okay. In the case of sushi bar, right? So you're intimidated. And the first question they ask is kind of testing you. So whether or not you're qualified and so on, right? And you are tested, you are negated and tested and you try to prove yourself. So now the service is the process by which you become certain person, right? So my definition of service is like that. So if you design service, you have to design this process, who the customers are and who they become. That's, and that's tricky. What's tricky about it? What do you find hard? Yes. So when you start thinking about who they become, you kind of negate the customers, right? So you're kind of challenging the customers. You're basically saying my service is sophisticated. Are you qualified? And then customers have to struggle to prove themselves. And that means you have to make the service more difficult for customers, right? Not easier, more difficult. Because if you are making it more difficult, it will allow them to get more value out of it eventually. And also, if it's easy, customers just see it as just ordinary service, right? So just let me give you one example. Yeah, sure. So Starbucks, Starbucks or any kind of coffee shops like that, they have like an American Starbucks, Starbucks in the U.S. They have like a short toll, that's fine. And then grantee, venti, and enome, those are Italian words, right? So the Americans, most American customers don't know these Italian words, right? So the question is why do they use that kind of obscure language in describing the service, right? So they have to make it more difficult for customers, something that customers don't know, something special for the customers. And this is so counter-intuitive, right? We're in the design field, we think we need to make everything as user-friendly as possible, as usable as possible, without using jargon, without throwing in barriers, lowering sort of the effort somebody has to put into something. And I guess that's okay, but as long as you realize that it has consequences for the value perception of the service, your customer is sort of getting, right? Yeah, but I think I don't want to confuse people, but I have to emphasize this as well. You have to make your service more difficult for customers, but at the same time, you have to make it easier for them as well, right? How does that work? Yeah, how does that work? Making it difficult and easy at the same time. Right, think about Starbucks, right? So there's basically employees who are friendly and you are given a lot of information and everything, right? But at the same time, they use these obscure language, right? Italian words and all that. So they are doing both, right? And I have to also emphasize that sushi chefs, although they are intimidating, they are making money out of this service. So eventually, they have to satisfy customers, right? So it's not like they are making it more difficult for the sake of making it more difficult. So it's contradictory things that you have to do in service design. So the Starbucks example, if we continue on that, how do you know what you should make easy and how do you know what you should make difficult? How does that work? Yeah, sorry, I don't know the answer. But what I know is in every service design, you have to have certain struggle designed into it and you have to negate customers a little bit. But at the same time, you cannot just negate the customer and lead, right? You have to attract them, right? You have to have been a survivor. You have to make it easy. What I'm thinking is it should be experienced as a game and you said something like he survived but I can imagine that at the end of the service you feel like you've overcome a challenge that you can celebrate a victory that you were able to get that coffee, right? Or to get that sushi. That gives you satisfaction, I guess, in some sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In most services, that kind of struggle is not that dramatic, right? It can be just Italian was on the menu. You're okay with that. A little bit of a struggle, right? But eventually the service, you kind of overcome and you kind of feel confident and you kind of gain a new self. Yeah, cool. We have a third topic that's also really interesting and we should definitely address this one. So let's move on. Topic number three. It's called radical design perspective and my question once again, do you have a question started that goes along with this one? Yeah, so I go back to this, why? The favorite question of a lot of designers. Yeah, so why? So my basic question is this. Why do we put service, the word service, in front of design, the word design, right? So if we do that, if we call it service design, which I really like as a concept, if we put these two words together and then we cannot do the design in the same way as before. It has to be a distinct design methodology, design philosophy and so on, right? Otherwise there's no point in putting two words together, right? So if we... So human center design is very important. I have no problem with that. Although I want to emphasize that there's the other aspect to service design, which is related to the intersubstitutive struggle concept. So if we put service in front of design, now the design as a concept is completely different from the traditional concept of design. And the traditional concept is like the product design, industrial design, that area, right? And I would even say human center design. So service design is based on human center design. That's half true to me, right? But if we take seriously that service is an intersubjective struggle and that you have to negate customers and you have to let customers struggle and prove themselves, right? Then you have to have a completely new approach to design, right? And what's different or new about that approach? Yeah, so instead of making it easy and instead of empowering customers and letting customers or users take control of the process, you have to make it more difficult, a little bit of intimidating, and you have to challenge customers, right? We have to have that kind of process. And again, we have to do both. We have to do the human center design as well as the other approach. The other approach, I call it human de-centered approach, human de-centered design. So you kind of have to de-center users and the customers and the customers are kind of challenged and prove themselves and become somebody else, somebody new in that process. That's really interesting because then sort of the discipline of service design also will become the discipline of helping people grow as a human being through services by giving them sort of challenges, right? Maybe that's a bit exaggerated, but that's at least what I feel where it's heading to. Yeah, when I say that again, not every service is marked in that sense, but it's easy to see that in upscale French restaurants or upscale restaurants in Japan, but every service has that kind of component routine. I'm also interested, have you also looked at really basic services like in the public sector field, public services, the government? Right. Is this also a part there? Yeah, I think so. Think about hospitals, right? So I just accept that it's wrong to make it more difficult for patients. You cannot design hospitals to be more difficult. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, so you have to make it easier, right? So that's because in a hospital setting, right? So you have patients and patients have some problem and you try to fix the problem, right? So who the patient is, it doesn't matter so much as long as you're trying to fix the problem that the patient has, right? So the co-creation part isn't that big in... Isn't that right? Right. But then, so if we assume that, if we kind of say here's the patient, here's the hospital service and we kind of separate them, now the patient is not implicated in the service, then you have to make it easy, right? That makes sense. At the same time, I would say always who the patient is also matters in the hospital in many different ways. So maybe patients want to be treated respectfully or maybe patients wants to show that they are different from other patients. They know better than other patients so they should be given better service all those kind of things, right? So who they are matters even in the hospital setting. Yeah. And if that's the case, the human-decentral design approach or intersubjective struggle aspect of service becomes important, right? So in many hospital settings, you kind of make it obscure for patients, right? You use some medical jargons and you have like, electric medical records that's kind of cryptic for patients. Right? And you have the doctors, you have to show that they are special, they are different, right? So now it's getting more interesting. Yeah. I'm interested if the amount of co-creation in a service matters for how human-decentred it should be. So if there's little... I don't know. Yeah. I think that's one way to approach this. So let's say you go to some kind of machine to get some drinks. So in Japan, we have all kinds of vending machines. So you put some coins and press the button and get the drink. Okay, if you think about this as a service and there's no value co-creation, right? Then you want to make it transparent, easy, and efficient, right? Mm-hmm. But on the other hand, if you go to an upscale restaurants or hotels, then the other aspect becomes more important. It's interesting. I've talked with Joseph Pine from the experience economy here on the show. And what I also feel in this episode is that the more a service leans towards an experience, the more interesting it becomes to sort of think about the intersubjective struggle and the more a service leans towards a transaction, the less it becomes important to make it more human-decentred. Something like that. Interesting, right? Because an upscale restaurant is probably more of an experience than it is actually a service. Right. We're heading towards the end of this episode, but not before I gave you the opportunity to ask us, the viewers, the listeners of the show a question. Is there anything you'd like to ask us? Yes. My question is this. How can you design a service like Starbucks? Okay. So it's a service, somebody designed it, right? But it's very tricky. The person who designed Starbucks tried to satisfy customers in a simple way. It's very complicated. So Starbucks started in the early 70s. So early 70s, late 60s was the time where the young people who were born after the war, the world war, became adults and they kind of struggled to prove themselves because they came to universities to be an elite, but they saw many people like him and they couldn't prove themselves in an easy way. So they were trying to, they were struggling to prove themselves, right? So Starbucks was part of the specialty coffee movement. So the concept was developed by Alfred Pete, so Pete's coffee, right? So now you have beans from different world and everything and you have to be culturally sophisticated. So cultural sophistication is a way to show that you are different. So that's how you show your identity, right? So, and then Starbucks kind of repeated the model in Seattle, right? And they became successful. So already we are seeing that they are not just satisfying the needs or requirements or appetite of the customers, right? The customers wanted to become some other people. So, and there's another twist to this story. So how are the shorts came to Starbucks? And he completely transformed Starbucks and there are so many specialty coffee shops around that time. But Starbucks was the only one that became globally successful, right? So the trick was this. So shorts kind of thought that not most customers are not seeking the authentic cultural sophistication type experience. Most customers wanted the Italian words. Yeah, okay. So now it's getting more interesting. Now he completely redesigned the specialty coffee service. And they kind of preserved, he kind of preserved the Italian authentic atmosphere by making it more accessible to many customers. He commoditized it basically. Right. So he is a genius because he kind of played this subtle game of culture, right? So now customers can just pay four dollars and then, you know, in an easy way, in an accessible way, experience this part of culture, right? So, but my point is this. So to design that kind of service, you, I guess, human-centered design, although it's very important. If I were a designer, I would do human-centered design, but you need something different as well. And my answer to that is human-centered design. Yeah. And if I understand your story correctly, Starbucks played a role in helping people to express their identity or to make their identity tangible by allowing them to be part of the sophisticated coffee movement. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it's still challenging for customers. Some kind of negation was going on because now you are using the words, Italians words that most customers don't know and be awkward, right? But still he's a genius because at the same time, he made it more accessible for people. And if we would have to summarize this question, how would the question be to us? Yeah. So, subs design has to be broader. It's already broad. That's broader. So, I would ask this question, right? What kind of identity project people have, right? So, service designers have to think about it. So right now in this particular situation, most people are having some kind of anxiety in terms of how they can prove themselves, right? That always is the starting point. But even before that, there's some kind of social change, right? In the case of Starbucks, that's the generational difference, right? The young people in the late 60s, early 70s had that kind of particular problems. So, social change, people's identity projects and then service design. So, we have to think about the whole thing as service designers. So, how do we incorporate thinking about social change and how people, yeah, maybe social change and incorporate that into our service offering as well? Yeah. That's the question, right? Yeah. Okay. Exactly. Super interesting. Taka, I'm sort of going to thank you because I think you've inspired a lot of people in this episode and I think a lot of people will have questions. If they want to reach out to you, what's the best way to get in touch next to commenting on this episode? I have my website and I have all the details of myself. I'll make sure to put links in the show notes. So, if people want to discuss this topic further, if you are with us, they can get in touch. Thanks again. Thanks for your time. It was really inspiring, Yutaka. I hope I didn't make it more confusing. I hope you did because that's the goal of the show. We won the struggle. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you very much, Mark. All right. Thanks. So, what do you think? Do you know of services that are actually a struggle for customers? Leave a comment down below and share your examples. And if you enjoyed this episode and know someone who might benefit from what we've just discussed, make sure to grab the link and share that with them. If this is your first time here, I'd love to have you to subscribe so that we can keep bringing you more videos like this. Thanks for watching and I look forward to see you in the next video.