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Understanding the differences between Service Design vs UX vs CX is crucial for creating seamless user experiences. This guide breaks down each concept, explaining how they intersect and where they differ. Whether you’re a designer, business owner, or strategist, learn how Service Design shapes end-to-end solutions, UX focuses on usability, and CX enhances the overall customer journey.
What is Service Design?
Service design takes a holistic approach to enhancing service delivery by focusing on customer needs and designing a seamless service ecosystem. This includes optimizing processes, touchpoints, interactions, and the people involved to ensure a smooth and efficient experience.
Service designers work to streamline internal operations, policies, and structures, ensuring alignment between back-stage departments (e.g., IT, Finance, Accounting) and front-stage teams (e.g., Sales, Customer Service). By bridging these areas, service design creates a more cohesive and customer-centric approach.
A great example of Service Design vs UX vs CX in action is Starbucks! The brand excels in crafting a welcoming in-store experience with thoughtfully designed layouts, cozy seating, and relaxing music. Additionally, Starbucks prioritizes personalized interactions, where baristas take the time to understand customer preferences and create customized beverages. This approach has helped Starbucks build a strong brand identity and a loyal customer base, proving the impact of well-executed service design.
Principles of Service Design
In the service industry, service design thinking plays a vital role and can be the key differentiator between success and failure for businesses. It focuses on strategically organizing resources and planning business operations to improve both customer and employee experiences.
By integrating Service Design vs UX vs CX, organizations can create seamless, efficient, and user-centric service experiences. This approach ensures that every touchpoint, from internal processes to customer interactions, is optimized to deliver maximum value and satisfaction.
In the book “This Is Service Design Doing”, the authors outlined 5 core principles defining service design thinking:
- Human-centered: The experiences of all stakeholders, including users, customers, employees,… must be taken into account. To design services, designers need to gather stakeholders’ viewpoints to identify users’ feelings/expectations about the service, and what should be changed to improve,…
- Collaborative: All stakeholders should be actively involved in every step of the service design process from design to development.
- Iterative: Service development takes time. This approach involves starting with small experiments and prototypes, allowing for learning from mistakes to refine processes.
- Sequential: A service consists of a sequence of interconnected actions, visualized by using customer journey maps. Designers should look into each step of the journey to understand how it works, what might go wrong, and how it can be improved.
- Holistic: Service design is not about addressing isolated issues, but holistically designing the entire service. The focus is not solely on meeting customer needs but on aligning those needs with the company’s goals and internal processes.
What are common Service Design tools?
To excel in service design, designers must empathize with both businesses and customers, taking a holistic approach to defining, iterating, and solving their challenges. This iterative process ensures that all aspects of the service experience are thoughtfully designed and continuously improved.
In the realm of Service Design vs UX vs CX, designers utilize a variety of tools to enhance their work. Some of the most commonly used tools include:
1. Personas
A persona is a fictional representation or reference model that represents a specific type of customer based on various characteristics. These characteristics can include Demographic characteristics (e.g., name, age, gender, occupation, etc.) or Behavioral characteristics (e.g., preferences, needs, motivations, goals, and pain points, etc.).
By creating personas, organizations can develop a deeper understanding of their customers and, hence, tailor their services to better meet customer expectations.
2. Journey maps
The journey map is a sequential description of a customer’s interactive journey with a service. It describes what happens at each stage of the interaction, what touchpoints are involved, and what obstacles and barriers they may encounter. It also represents the level of emotions (positive/negative) that customers experience throughout the interaction.
3. Service blueprints
A service blueprint is a diagram that maps out the entire process of service delivery, listing all the activities that happen at every stage above and below the line of visibility. The service blueprints help visualize all of the components of service encounters:
- Actors: people delivering the service (e.g., Service representatives, technicians, etc.)
- Location: an environment where customers receive the service (e.g., stores, offices, websites, apps, social channels, etc.)
- Props: objects used during service delivery (e.g., catalogs, POS systems, Information kiosks or touchscreens, etc.)
- Associates: other organizations involved in providing the service (e.g., Suppliers, Financial institutions, Logistics service providers, etc.)
- Processes: workflows used to deliver the service (e.g., Order fulfillment process, Customer onboarding process, Complaint resolution process, etc.)
What is UX? What is CX?
UX (User Experience) refers to the overall experience a user has when interacting with a product or service. UX Design (User Experience Design) focuses on optimizing every aspect of this interaction, including usability, ease of use, and overall satisfaction.
In the discussion of Service Design vs UX vs CX, UX plays a crucial role in ensuring that digital and physical touchpoints are intuitive, seamless, and user-friendly. By prioritizing user needs and behaviors, UX design enhances engagement and creates meaningful interactions that contribute to a positive overall experience.
Meanwhile, CX (Customer Experience), which evolved from UX, takes a broader approach! It encompasses every interaction a customer has throughout their entire journey—from pre-purchase to post-purchase stages.
In the context of Service Design vs UX vs CX, CX focuses on creating memorable and engaging experiences across all touchpoints. Effective CX strategies aim to impress customers at every stage, ensuring brand loyalty through meaningful interactions. This includes everything from brand packaging, apps, and websites to the buying experience, staff interactions, and even the ambiance of physical stores.
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Differences in scope: CX Design vs UX design
To understand the differences between the scope of CX vs UX Design, let’s explore the three levels of experience, described by Nielsen Norman Group.
1. Interaction Level
At the interaction level, UX design focuses on crafting seamless user experiences for individual interactions, ensuring tasks are performed effortlessly. Most UX designers work at this level by designing interfaces for digital products (websites/apps) or optimizing physical touchpoints to make every tap, click, or swipe intuitive and user-friendly.
In the realm of Service Design vs UX vs CX, interaction-level design plays a crucial role in enhancing usability and engagement. Examples include adjusting button color, position, or size for better visibility and ease of use or integrating gestures like swipe, pinch-to-zoom, or drag-and-drop to create more intuitive touch-based interactions.
2. Journey Level
At the journey level, UX design focuses on the entire end-to-end process a user goes through to achieve a goal over time. This journey often spans multiple devices and interaction channels, such as websites, apps, email, online chat, and social platforms.
In the context of Service Design vs UX vs CX, journey-level design ensures a smooth, cohesive experience across all touchpoints, reducing friction and enhancing user satisfaction. Examples include designing user flows for booking flights or accommodations, enrolling in an online course, or completing a job application process.
3. Relationship Level
At the relationship level, the connection between customers and a brand evolves into a long-term engagement. This extends beyond individual interactions or journeys, focusing on the overall relationship and how it develops over time.
In the realm of Service Design vs UX vs CX, CX designers play a key role in shaping the full spectrum of a customer’s experience with a brand. Instead of just optimizing single touchpoints, they prioritize the lifetime journey, ensuring ongoing satisfaction, loyalty, and meaningful engagement.
Some examples of CX work at the relationship level, include:
- Optimizing end-to-end product engagement: From initial awareness, research, purchasing to usage and troubleshooting support.
- Designing a lifecycle experience with a SaaS platform: From subscribing and using the service to addressing issues, receiving newsletters, and eventually terminating the account.
Note: Interaction-level UX impacts the journey-level experience, and collectively, they shape the relationship-level experience. Each holds its significance with unique constraints and objectives, therefore, no single level takes precedence over another.
While UX tasks operate at the interaction and journey levels, CX Designers handle responsibilities at the relationship level. This illustrates the expansive scope of CX in comparison with UX. Some may perceive CX as a broader domain that encompasses numerous UX tasks (just like 3=1+1+1). However, certain CX works do not involve UX Designers, such as Developing brand identity, Building Customer Relationships,…
Check out this blog:
- Inclusive Design: Design Approach for All Users
- The Power of the UX Pyramid in User-Centered Design
CX vs UX vs Service Design: What are their differences?
It’s crucial to understand that the distinctions between Service Design, UX, and CX Design are not black and white, and there are some overlaps among them.
- CX vs service design: CX involves designing, implementing, and managing interactions across the entire customer journey. Meanwhile, Service Design steps back and focuses on designing behind-the-scenes activities to ensure a seamless delivery of services throughout that journey.
- UX vs service design: While UX design deals with the appearance and functionality of websites/apps, service design goes beyond the screen. It involves the entire customer journey, ensuring the internal structure functions harmoniously to provide a seamless UX across digital interactions and human touchpoints.
You may want to read more: What is a Design Audit? How to conduct an effective Audit?
UX, CX Design, and Service Design in practice
To imagine how UX, CX Design and Service Design work in practice, let’s break down an example within the context of a customer’s journey to purchase new clothes.
- UX works: In the online realm, UX comes into play as the customer navigates the brand’s website in search of potential clothing items. The well-organized and visually appealing layout, coupled with an efficient filter function, categorizes products by types, colors, sizes, and prices. This enables the customer to quickly and effortlessly find suitable items.
- CX works: As the customer decides to visit the physical store, CX Design takes center stage. Upon entering, the customer is greeted by welcoming staff, and the ambiance is crafted with pleasant smells and music. The staff also assists in preparing clothes and expedites size changes, ensuring a minimal waiting time for customers. The brand also enhances the overall experience by offering multiple payment methods (cash, bank transfer, credit card, and wallet payment), providing flexibility for customers to pay in their preferred manner.
- Service Design works: Service Design encompasses the broader operational aspects. This involves training staff on behaviors and attitudes towards customers or the internal communication system built by the Development team that enables staff to proactively check item availability in the storage. The Finance team also plays a role in connecting various payment methods, thereby supporting a smooth payment process for customers.
Final thoughts
The fields of Service Design vs UX vs CX often overlap, making it difficult to separate them entirely. This blog aimed to clarify their distinctions and highlight how each plays a vital role in creating seamless experiences.
If you’re planning to develop a digital product—whether it’s a website, mobile app, or management system—that enhances customer experience, we’re here to help!
At Morhover Design Studio, a global UI/UX design agency, we craft impactful designs and localized digital experiences for businesses in the USA, Japan, Vietnam, and beyond. Let’s take your business to the next level—contact us for a free consultation and start building meaningful experiences today!