As organisations embrace digital transformation, the once-clear boundaries between service design and UX are starting to blur, says Chevonne Hobbs. This convergence offers an opportunity for designers to rethink how we define, design, and deliver services, not just from a technical standpoint, but a human-centred one.
At its core, service design has always been about delivering value, increasing customer satisfaction and helping teams deliver high quality services efficiently. It’s about designing real experiences that capture customer touchpoints, technologies, and the teams used to deliver them. Ensuring the experience is a pleasurable one relies on service designers being human and having a deep understanding of human behaviour.
UI and UX in service design
The user interface sits at the heart of the design of a product or digital service; it’s where designers create wireframes and prototypes or beta versions of their apps. They re-iterate the design of said product or digital service once the UX has been fully tested by the customer and employees, and before releasing it into the live public domain.
When creating your service design journey map or blueprint, you need to identify what tasks are being worked on and by whom (customer or employee) to begin to understand these touchpoints; this should be the basis for a requirements list for your UI, and later tested for service readiness and operational readiness. Once testing is successful and complete you can start creating your XLA metrics for continuous improvement.
From SLA to XLA: measuring customer experiences
In traditional IT service management, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) have been the standard for defining IT performance. But in today’s environments, SLAs fall short. They measure what IT can do, not what users experience. That’s where Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) come in.
Unlike SLAs, XLAs focus on the emotional and cognitive experiences of end users. They ask: Did the user feel supported? Did the service help them achieve their goals? Was the interaction smooth and satisfying?
For this reason, XLAs don’t just belong in the ITSM domain, they demand close integration with UX/UI design. In fact, this evolution points to a larger shift, as it’s about designing end-to-end service experiences that align user needs with a more natural form of human behaviour.
Service design approach
When designing ANY service, ITIL 4 offers an excellent guide: namely the four dimensions of service and product management. This guidance can be used to shape your service design journey map and blueprints under the headings of:
- Organisation and people
- Information and technology
- Partners and suppliers
- Value streams and processes
- .
When building out your map or blueprint, I would recommend including the following:
- Data capture
- AI, RPA and automation
- Cost to deliver
- PESTLE (Political, Economical, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental) factors.
The road ahead: AI in service design
In a world of non-stop discussions on AI, there is an undercurrent of how this will impact human lives. Do we figure out how AI can simply run all of our services? This may be a possibility, even a goal for some, but the service design aspect will still require a human touch if we need to ensure services are meaningful and delivering value, even if they’re automated through AI platforms.
AI platforms can and will provide enhanced data metrics for user experience if configured to capture them correctly. But to configure your AI platforms correctly, you need to design those services to identify the touchpoints in the first place. Otherwise, what are you measuring?
Final thoughts
As service leaders, we’re called to design with empathy, align with business value, and use the tools available, digital and human, to improve the experience. The future is blending UX and UI with service design. It’s about uniting them to deliver smarter, more responsive services, rethinking SLAs to embrace XLAs, and building multi-disciplinary teams that speak both IT and human. Then we’re ready.
There’s often a debate about whether UX/UI should sit in product or service design, and it can sit in both. The design of our tooling platforms for IT services should be designed and built in a way that uses UX/UI methodology and frameworks to help ensure a successful delivery. When these functions operate in silos, opportunities are lost.
What are your thoughts on this?
@itSMFUK @illuminetsolutions @biomni #servicedesign #businessvalue #UX #UI #CX #EX #XLA #AI #ITSM
Chevonne Hobbs
Chevonne Hobbs has worked in IT for 25 years with organisations as diverse as Coca Cola, Leeman Brothers, CAP Gemini and Ricoh. She is currently Senior Manager IT Consultant at Illuminet Solutions.
