Service Design Questions and Answers
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- Introduction
Basics of Service Design

What is Service Design?
What is service thinking?
Is this a product or a Service?
What's the Service Design process?
What to consider when designing a new service?
Is there a common acronym for Service Design?
Who are the key players in service design?
How to implement a service you deliver correctly?
What does a service designer do?
Is there any standard or some detailed list in the service design industry (like ISO 9241)?
Is service design strictly for digital services ?
What are other names used for service design?
Value and impact of Service Design?

How to pitch Service Design?
▶️ How to sell the strategic part of Service Design?
How to evaluate the value/purpose of a service?
What's the impact of Service Design?
▶️ How to get buy-in for Service Design workshops and exercices?
Examples of good Service Design

What stores have a great Service Design?
What are products that become services?
Which are great Service Design agencies in Europe?
Learning Service Design

What are the best schools to learn Service Design?
Where can I learn service design online?
What are free Service Design resources?
▶️ Should I follow a course about Service Design?
Can I get a Service Design university degree remotely?
What are skills you recommend for a service designer
How do I find a good topic for my Service Design thesis or school project?
What are interesting conferences focused on Service Design?
What are podcasts focused on Service Design?
▶️ Should I go to school or learn Service Design on the job?
▶️ Should I know the business terminology as a service designer?
▶️ Where can I find a Service Design mentor or coach?
▶️ What are the different stages of learning Service Design?
Service Design and others fields

What's the difference between Service Design and Design Thinking or XYZ?
How does service design differ from product design?
What should I pursue, service design or UX design?
What’s the benefit of learning service design for a UX designer ?
What’s the difference between Graphic Design and Service Design?
▶️ What's the interplay between business and Service Design?
▶️ Should we replace Service Design by System Thinking?
▶️ What's the difference between a service designer, a product designer and a product manager?
▶️ What is the difference between ITIL Service Design and that championed by the Service Design Network?
Service Design tools, apps and methods

What are Service Design tools?
What are useful apps for Service Design?
Which apps are available for mobile diary studies?
What modules do you use to rate customer satisfaction in an online business?
What tool should I use to test a prototype online, specifically where they do the recruiting for you?
What are tools to store and analyze interviews?
Where can I find Service Design methods?
What gear or computer does a service designer need?
What are impressive uses of AI for Service Design?
What are examples of useful generative AI prompts for Service Design?
What are good tools to create wireframes?
Where can I find the latest tools for my Service Design work?
▶️ I'm overwhelmed by the amount of tools, which ones should I really use?
▶️ When should I use a stakeholder map or ecosystem map?
Service Blueprints and Journey Maps

What's the definition of a Service Blueprint?
Why should I create a service blueprint?
What are the different types of Service Blueprints?
▶️ What am I missing out, if I don't have a service blueprint?
▶️ Can you always combine a journey map and a blueprint?
▶️ How do I manage the amount of detail on a blueprint?
▶️ How to use feedback to improve a service blueprint?
What elements can I include in a Service Blueprint?
How can I create a story around my service blueprint?
How can I improve the end of a Service?
What are good tools to create a service blueprint?
What's a good structure for a Service Blueprint?
What are examples of Service Blueprints?
Can a service blueprint be used in conjunction with other design tools and techniques?
What’s the difference between a service blueprint and a customer journey map?
What are the steps for creating a service blueprint?
How can I use a service blueprint as a diagnostic tool?
How can I use a service blueprint as a prototyping tool?
How can I use a digital whiteboard to make a smarter service blueprint?
How can I bring together a marketing approach and service design approach in my service blueprint ?
How do stakeholders use Service Blueprints?
▶️ Research to do before doing a Service Blueprint?
▶️ What are some common mistakes to avoid when you create a Service Blueprint?
▶️ How can I make a Service Blueprint less overwhelming?
▶️ What tool can I use for people to fill out their own journey map?
Service Design as a career

What is a good background for a service design/strategy consultant?
▶️ What are job interview tips for new Service Designers?
What does a service design company need to be successful?
How to practice and not give up on Service Design?
How can we get more junior Service Design positions?
▶️ How to grow as a mid-level service designer?
▶️ What are Service Design communities I can join?
▶️ How to tackle the impostor syndrome?
▶️ How can I use my past career when transitioning to Service Design?
▶️ Service Design in big organizations?
▶️ Six Sigma or Service Design certification?
▶️ How to apply Service Design insights in your daily work?
Where do Service Designers work?
▶️ How can you show that different backgrounds contribute to the service design work in valid ways?
▶️ How do you best communicate what's the role and what isn't the role of the Service Designer?
▶️ What are your tips on verbal communication Service Design job interviews?
▶️ How can you work in a service design job if you don’t have a service design degree?
▶️ Are there enough Service Design jobs out there?
Do people recommend a service design career?
What does a junior service designer do?
Can I work part time as a service designer?
I’m x years old is it too late to learn service design ?
Can an introvert thrive as a Service Designer?
What skills do you need to become a service designer?
Can service designers work from home or remotely?
Why am I not getting any interviews for service designer jobs?
What’s the best way to gain real world experience when starting in service design?
What are the most important things to consider when becoming a senior service designer? How can people achieve this goal?
▶️ How can I realize that I bring lots of experience when I transition to Service Design?
▶️ Can a service designer survive a recession?
▶️ What are the archetypes of service designers?
Hiring service designers

What are common mistakes company make when hiring service designers?
What are good questions to ask to a service designer to evaluate his skills during a job interview?
Where can I find great service design talents?
Is it possible for a junior service designer to do freelance work?
Coaching and Service Design

How can you help people to find the solutions to their problems by themselves?
What are useful references when it comes to coaching?
How do you evaluate a coaching session?
How can you rebuild the motivation of a person?
How can you make the whole team benefit from personal coachings?
What tools do you use for your coaching sessions?
What are the different coaching styles or modes?
Service Design portfolio

Sturcture: What's a good structure for a Service Design portfolio?
Tips: How can I build a service design portfolio?
▶️ Examples: What are examples of service design portfolios?
▶️ Format: PDF of website for a Service Design portfolio?
Importance: How important is it to have a Service Design portfolio?
▶️ How can I show complex Service Design work in an attractive without downplaying the efforts that went into it?
What is a good site for service designers to share their work
What is the best platform or tool to build a service design portfolio on? (Example: medium, WordPress, Behance, etc?)
How can I improve my portfolio?
How can I customize a Service Design portfolio easily?
▶️ Can I make a Service Design Portfolio with Notion?
Service Design workshops and facilitation

What's the right way to facilitate a workshop or meeting?
Where can I find workshop templates and ideas?
How can I make sure my workshop ends on time?
How can you improve the results of workshops?
How can I use spirituality in a Service Design workshop?
How do you help people stay on topic during a workshop?
How do you create psychological safety in a workshop?
How can you run a good workshop without preparation?
How can you accelerate decision making and workshops?
▶️ What are different facilitation styles?
▶️ How can you be quicker and more efficient when you have to create a report about a workshop?
▶️ What's the perfect meal and food for a workshop?
Service Design and Ideation

How can I test and evaluate early ideas?
Service Design and research

How do you recruit users and testers?
What to do when I'm stuck in analysis paralysis?
Should I use family and friends in my prototyping testing sessions?
How to prioritize user research?
How to analyze interviews or research data?
What are good structures for a prototype?
▶️ How to structure the synthesis or insights of user testings?
Does research in service design look like research in social sciences or market research?
How do you take notes during user interviews?
Where can I find sample interviews to train my note taking skills?
Should feedback be free?
What are important elements to put in a screener?
How much should I pay research participants?
Service Design and Presentations

How to create presentations that work for multiple stakeholders?
What are tools to create presentations faster?
When should I create a presentation and when not?
How can I fix a presentation that goes all over the place?
What are good storylines I can use to structure a presentation?
How can I use a presentation as a prototype?
How to create quickly summaries for presentations?
How can I keep the engagement and focus high during a presentation?
How can I embed a whiteboard in my presentation?
How can you take good notes and format your presentations?
What are good ways to finish a presentation?
How can I embed a timer in my presentation?
What's one of the best slide structure and design?
▶️ How can I make presenting less painful?
Service Design Principles

▶️ What's a Service Design Principle?
▶️ Why should I create my own principles library?
▶️ How does a Service Design Principle Library look like?
How can I create my own Service Design principles?
▶️ What are the different types of Service Design Libraries?
▶️ What's the minimal version of a Service Design Library?
▶️ What are the different profiles of people creating a Service Design Library?
▶️ How many Principles can you extract from one story?
▶️ I don't like to write, how to write a Service Design Principle?
▶️ How do I edit my Service Design Principles
How can I make it easy to edit a Service Design Principle?
▶️ What are recommended books to start your Service Design Library?
▶️ Are Service Design principles metaphors or litteral?
▶️ How to define principles for a project?
▶️ Should you co-create service design principles?
How to pitch the value of Service Design principles?
▶️ What is a Service Design Principles Library?
▶️ What are the benefits of creating your own Principles Library?
▶️ What's the mindset of someone who builds his own Service Design Principles Library?
▶️ How to build a Service Design Library Principles for a team?
▶️ How to organize your Service Design Principles Library?
▶️ What tools to use to create your own Service Design Principles Library?
▶️ What are apps that make it faster to write Service Design Principles?
▶️ What are apps that help write clearer Service Design Principles?
How do I manage the references of my Service Design Principles?
What are the advantages of writing your Service Design Principles in the open and how to do it?
How do Service Design Principles evolve over time?
What are metrics you can track in your service design principle library?
How to name your Service Design Principles?
▶️ What are healthy goals to have for a Service Design Principles Library?
▶️ What are daily practices I could have to build my own Service Design Library?
▶️ What are ethical consideration when building a Service Design Principles Library?
▶️ How can you create your writing routine?
▶️ Where can I find Service Design Principles ideas and inspirations?
▶️ How hard should you work on your Service Design Principles Library?
▶️ How can you make a Service Design Principles Library that is useful for others too?
▶️ Where do principles come from?
▶️ What makes a good Service Design Principle?
▶️ How to keep the motivation when building a Principles Library over years
Service Design projects

▶️ What are the deliverables of a Service Design project?
▶️ How to start a Service Design project?
▶️ What's a good context for a student project using Service Design?
▶️ How to turn self help into a service?
▶️ What tools should I use for each Service Design project?
▶️ What are some best practices for collaborating with a service designer on a project?
▶️ What are the biggest challenges when it comes to designing new products or services?
▶️ What are the reasons for product and service design or redesign?
Service Design Books

Who are book authors on service design?
What are beginner books on service design?
What are the most recommended books on service design?
What are books on the service design tools and methods?
What are books on the service design process?
Where can I find and buy interesting books on service design?
What are my favorite non Service Design books for service designers?
What are audiobooks on Service Design?
Academic and scientific view of Service Design

Where can I find academic papers on service design?
Who are academic experts on service design to follow?
What are interesting statistics related to Service Design?
What are the most cited academic papers on Service Design?
Accessibility and Service Design

What are rules or norms to make digital services more accessible?
How can I make sure the colours I use are accessible?
Sustainability and Service Design

How can I create more sustainable digital services?
What are resources to learn how to make sustainable services?
Service Design in government

▶️ How can you measure the maturity of your Service Design practice in a local government?
▶️ What are common patterns for public services?
▶️ Where can I find case studies about Service Design in the public sector or for the government?
▶️ What are processes for service design in government or public services?
▶️ What are resources to learn service design for the public sector?
Service Design Philosophy and Mindset

▶️ What's too much service?
What comes after Service Design?
▶️ Should we really make all experiences less shitty?
▶️ How should we call the people we serve?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using a service design approach?
How can service design skills be used outside of work in day to day life?
Should Service Design have another name?
What's the history of Service Design?
Can "bad" service be "good" service?
▶️ What are the different stages of the maturity of Service Design within an organization?
▶️ What's the invisible role of the service designer within an organization?
What are great quotes to inspire service design work?
Service Design in Switzerland

Who are Swiss Service Designers?
What are agencies that do Service Design projects in Switzerland?
What are case studies of Service Design work done in Switzerland?
What makes service design special in Switzerland?
What are the salary a service designer can expect in Switzerland?
What are schools that teach service design in Switzerland?
What are Service Design communities in Switzerland ?
Where can I find Service Design jobs in Switzerland?
In which Swiss cities are there more service design opportunities?
What are the industries where Service Design is the most used in Switzerland?
Is there a future for service design students in Switzerland?
What are big organisations in Switzerland that use Service Design?
What's the history of Service Design in Switzerland?
Can I study or work in Switzerland if I don’t speak German, French or Italian?
World wide Service Design

United States: What's the state of Service Design in the US?
▶️ What organizations use Service Design in Switzerland?
▶️ Finland: What's the state of Service Design in Finland?

▶️ Examples: What are examples of service design portfolios?

The full question

Do you have any Service Design portfolio examples I could look at?

My two cents

In my opinion the best Service Design portfolios are often the ones that you never see.

Because they are the ones that contain confidential material or the ones of great Service Designer's who already have found their dream job and therefore don't show their portfolio anymore.

Nevertheless I've spent some hours for you to find public examples of portfolios that showcase work done either by Service Designers or by people who used a Service Design mindset.

Three portfolio's I really like

Andrea Pastor's Service Design portfolio shows a deep understanding of the different people (and their different needs) who will watch her portfolio. She highlights with humility her role, for the nerds shows quickly an overview of the tools and methods and keeps the whole interesting with visuals of work in progress and final deliverables like videos.

I really like Selin Sargut's Service Design portfolio for its extremly clean and well structured format.

Mandy Dols's Service Design portfolio manages well the balance of giving a quick overview for the people in a hurry and showing detailed examples of the work that has been done by highlighting the different methods used.

More examples of Service Design portfolio in PDF

Here a few examples of PDF Service Design portfolio that where in open access on the web:

More examples of Service Design portfolio as websites

Here a list of portfolio's that show Service Design projects I could find on the web:

If you see a broken link or know of another publicly avaiable Service Design portfolio leave a little comment below to help the rest of the aspiring service designers.

About this question

This question was originally asked by Cybele W. and has been answered by Daniele during the second Service Design webinar that you can rewatch in full here for free.