Service designers think in journeys

When I started my journey in Service Design, Andy Polaine, a great Service Designer, showed the following idea at a conference. Service Design is all about turning around the silos within a company ↩️ so that they work together and people don’t get trapped in between the silos.

Services designers understand that people experience a service through a journey. They pass from one department to the other without ever thinking about the fact that these are different entities. 

Your customers pass different touchpoints 🏃‍♂️. They might start their journey by visiting your website: the first touchpoint. Then, they might give you a call and, eventually, visit your brick and mortar shop. 

Much of the work of a service designer is to smoothen the transition 🤝 from one silo to the other. Service designers need to make the information available within all teams. In that way, when a customer calls another department of the company, they will feel that they are talking to the same company and not two different entities within a company.

Therefore, service designers try to create journeys for the customers where they never see the transitions 🙈 that occur in the invisible backstage.