Designing for Wearables

Chapter 7. Service Design

Everyone’s design process is different, and even individual processes are different from project to project. Add to that all of the wildly different types of wearable devices and services, and you can see how it wouldn’t make any sense to get too prescriptive about the details of design. So rather than lay out step-by-step tutorials, in this chapter I discuss my general design process and some specific tools that are useful to communicate those designs as well as some of the future-focused techniques and ideas around machine learning that I’m working on.

Service Design

What precisely is service design? Simply put, service design uses design methods and approaches to craft a holistic, end-to-end experience of a service: how its operations and processes unfold, and how value will be delivered over time to its internal and external users. This is different from product design or user experience (UX) design because in traditional UX, the design decisions that you’re making usually focus on a single touchpoint, even if those decisions are made with an awareness of the greater context. In practice, service design usually takes a higher-level approach to the end-to-end process of delivering a complete service. If we look at the design of a hotel experience, service design would involve mapping the end-to-end experience, considering the design of visible touchpoints like the registration desk or online booking tools, the specific role and experience of the person ...