But while there are different types of service, they all have something in common: no matter which type of service you are offering or receiving, each one is an experience. These service experiences happen at touch points – the places where user and service come into contact – which can range from an information desk to a call center, from an iPhone application to a website.

As we all know from bitter experience, bad experiences stay with us far longer than good ones. They make customers unhappy. This is bad enough in itself, but the point that all service providers need to remember is that unhappy customers like nothing more than letting others know about their displeasure (telling an average of 17 people about their bad experience), while happy customers tend to keep their happiness to themselves (sharing their good experience with just three people). That’s why unhappy customers are so dangerous if you happen to be a brand or company. They can severely damage the image, reputation and trust you have worked so hard to build up. The problem is that service design is much harder to perfect than something like product design, because it is essentially intangible. You can’t make it in a factory, inspect it, or store it in a warehouse. You can’t send samples. If you send out faulty service, you can’t recall it.

Yet it is precisely because of this problem that the Internet presents such exciting possibilities. As a place dedicated to providing information and services, it acts as an ideal laboratory in which to experiment with, test and improve service design.

Time to build bridges

The rise of the connected consumer – one who expects an outstanding brand experience in both on- and offline worlds – is an established phenomenon (cf. FEED, Razorfish, 2008), but we have tended to limit our understanding of a user’s journey to digital elements, such as websites or applications. We sometimes take the activation mechanism into account, identifying where the audience is and driving it to the digital product. Equally, we are seeing increasing implementation of “buy-on-line-pick-up-in-store” functionalities on e-commerce websites. However, until recently, we have rarely seen the whole picture from the user’s point of view, considering all physical and digital points as parts of the whole, and thus creating bridge experiences.

A bridge experience is one in which the user’s experience passes through multiple communication channels for a tactical purpose. The most common type links physical and digital environments, helping the user maintain cognitive continuity (ie. the same mental model) from one context to another.

To create these bridge experiences, we have to connect and balance interactions between digital and non-digital environments, at all times keeping in mind the need to avoid issues such as back-tracking, time-wasting and cognitive hiatus. All elements must interact; sometimes complementing each other, sometimes acting as interchangeable tools, but always in a consistent and seamless way. This approach calls for a change in the methods and tools that UX professionals use for designing. It is no longer enough to analyze data and describe users as personas, to draw wireframes and write test scenarios. The UX professional must place all elements – digital as well as physical – within a wider perspective and manage both on- and offline elements of the customer’s experience.

New questions, tools and skills = new answers

A wide variety of methods, ranging from error analytics to personal inventories, from shadowing to rapid ethnography, can be drawn into a more holistic approach to service design. If service design is a puzzle, then it is through observing the way people act and gaining a deeper understanding of their behaviors and goals that we can spot where the gaps are. The next step is to fill them with innovative solutions.

The UX professional is increasingly working outside the office, in the field, collecting data from observations, interviews, surveys and workshops. As a result, she has to acquire or develop new skills: How better to look, listen and hear. She must also employ good judgment in choosing the right methodology for each project, and, like any researcher, must elaborate the outcomes of her experiments. As creating new solutions through innovation has become a central part of the job, the UX professional’s way of working is becoming ever closer to that of the research scientist.

As the processes and methodologies of UX have changed, so too has its deliverables, becoming somewhat more abstract in nature. Interface schematics are now just the tip of the iceberg – things have moved on. However, the documentation of service design remains crucial, because it is necessary to communicate this new vision of UX to clients, to impress upon them the utility to the design process of new methods such as field studies. We should expect to see changes in documentation techniques proportionate to the evolution of UX as a field in recent times.

From user to guest

The word “service” conjures up the image of someone carrying your bags up to your hotel room, where you find a bunch of fresh flowers on the bedside table and a little chocolate on your pillow. Service entails a sense of welcome and a sense of luxury. It’s about those little things that stroke your ego and make you feel important. But it stands for something else too: politeness. That is, showing the proper regard for others. Just as we think of it as the right manner with which to treat a guest, so it must also be considered the right manner with which to treat users. This leads to my concluding observation: We changed our general conception of the experiences we design from “consumer-oriented” to “user-oriented” long ago, but as these experiences are increasingly related to service, we find ourselves in the process of making the next conceptual step. From now on, experiences will no longer be “user-oriented”, but “guest-oriented”.

It may appear only a slight and formal difference, and indeed linguistically it is, but the consequences of adopting this phraseology would be huge. As UX (or GX?) professionals, we will create a different kind of service by privileging not the question “is it working for the user?” but “is this appropriate for my guest?” This approach will bring new solutions to light and, hopefully, have positive implications for ‘digital’ in general.

(Thanks to like to Anthony Banks for his assistance in rendering this article in English)