 Service design and user experience design are not the same. The people who understand the strengths of both are the ones who create the most impactful solutions. Curious what these strengths are? Stick around because that's what I'll talk about in this episode. Let the show begin! Hi, I'm Ark and welcome to the Service Design Show, the show that helps you to design services that have a positive impact on people and business. I've been getting a lot of questions lately about the relationship between user experience design and service design. As user experience design is starting to break out of the digital interfaces realm, this is starting to create some confusion. Some people say that user experience design is just service design, but with a focus on digital interfaces. I don't think that's entirely the case. Yes, they have a lot in common, but they are also different and have their own strengths. And I think the people who don't see the differences won't be able to fully use these strengths and create the best possible user experience. Now before we continue, I'd really like to know what you think. Could it be that user experience design and service design are converging to a point where there won't be any differences anymore? I read all the comments and tried to reply to as many people as I can, so leave a comment down below and let's continue this conversation. I've talked about the relationship between the problem space and the solution space on the show before. The problem space is where you do research, where you try to understand your users, their worlds and their specific needs. It's a space where you enter the world with an open mindset trying to make sense of it. It's a space where you try to find problems that are worth solving. In the solution space, you generate new ideas. It's a space where you explore new scenarios and where you try to make the future tangible by prototyping. For me, the big difference between user experience design and service design is how they deal with the problem space. Yes, research is important in both service design and user experience design, but the type and nature of research differs vastly. So let's look at this from a case study perspective. Imagine that a bank has the ambition to make the process first time home buyers go through more user centered. In a typical service design project, you'd go out and start digging. You'd try to understand who these first time home buyers are and what they are going through. What's the life like? What are their dreams, their ambitions, their fears and their challenges? Based on the insights you get through field research, you will start generating new ideas. As service design buys various natures channel agnostic, these ideas will come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. They can range anywhere from training the bank staff to handle the questions from these first time home buyers in a different way to creating a youtube channel where you share videos to educate your target group. And it could even be that eventually you decide to restructure the internal process, removing some of the touch points as there weren't adding any value. When you approach the same challenge from a user experience design perspective, the scope is already narrowed down. You know that the outcome of the process will be a new or improved digital product or service. And yes, that can still mean a lot of different things. So this still makes research very important because you'll want to know what the pain points are that the first time home buyers have that you should be addressing. But in general, user experience design tends to move from research to ideation much quicker than service design does. So it's likely that pretty quick you'll start generating solutions for these pain points and these solutions will be in the digital realm. Most likely screen based and who knows, even maybe voice. It's at this stage where user experience design takes a different turn from service design. Yes, research still remains important in the user experience design process, but the nature shifts from exploration to validation. You start to focus on creating the best possible user experience within your digital product or service. It becomes about optimizing how your product or service works and feels. How can we make it as user friendly as possible? And let me be very clear about this. This isn't a bad thing. I'd go as far as saying that's a blessing that user experience design is gaining so much traction and the clients see the value and are willing to invest in it. Heck, if I'd be a client, I'd pick an agency that knows the thing or two about user experience design over one that doesn't any day of the week. So going back to the problem space and the solution space, research in service design tends to be more open. There's more room to explore and gather inside and it tends to take a holistic perspective on challenges. User experience design spends more time in the solution space. It focuses more on creating solutions and optimizing them. Research is about validating ideas rather than exploring alternatives. We could say that user experience design is more about execution with a user in mind. The huge overlap between user experience design and service design is of course that they are both grounded in the same human centered mindset and approach and they share a lot of the same tools and methods. Again, I want to stress that I'm not saying that one is better or more important. I think it's good that we recognize the differences and make use of each other's strengths. So what do you think? Could it be that service design and user experience design are converging to a point where there won't be any differences anymore in the future? Let me know down below in the comments. Do you know someone who might be interested in what we've just discussed? Grab the link and share the video with them. If this is your first time here on this channel and you'd like to see more videos that help to take your service design skills to the next level, don't forget to hit that subscribe button. Thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.