User-Experience, Customer Experience, Servuce Design, and Disentangling all the Types of Design

Design is about solutions. Many different design fields have systems that help practitioners efficiently and effectively find solutions.

Why systematic solutions?

Think of houses. There are many types of houses, but they are all basically four (or more) exterior walls and something on top.  But, that said, even the most cookie-cutter neighborhood has differences between houses. Systems don’t close down creativity. Instead, they help designers maintain their creativity while sidestepping pitfalls/ or requiring wasted-time.

Why so many types of design? 

Existence is complicated, and designers need to solve for all those complications. Most design practices come out of a need. Industrial design, for example, came out of solving problems encountered thanks to the industrial revolution. In recent years, human-centered design has been discussed in many different fields. Human-centered design is a practice that overlaps many design fields. HCD can be applied to industrial design, for example, HCD car design.  By practice, service design and user-experience design are naturally human-centered.

User-Experience Design is more product-focused, partly due to its origins. User-Experience Design comes out of technology, with designers focusing historically on user interfaces. Historically, UXD used quantitative and qualitative data to help designers develop more user-centered products.

Service Design is focused on the experience, by looking holistically at touchpoints through the process. SD uses qualitative data to understand how an experience plays out over time. Unlike UXD, Service designers often focus on the broader environment and the processes that occur within those environments.

An analogy might be that the UX designer bakes the wedding cake that is best for the bride, and the service designer is the wedding planner to develop the best wedding for all. Both are important and connected, but slightly different in their approach and output.

What is the relationship between SD, CX, and UXD? 

While SD and UX have been different fields, where do they fit intellectually? Some scholars see them as partially overlapping fields. Other scholars and practitioners, like myself, see UX as a subset of SD.  UX is product related, which is used by people in spaces (Customer Experience) which occurs in environments (SD). Go back to the wedding metaphor. The wedding cake is a product people at the wedding eat; that relationship is not unlike someone using an app on a phone (perhaps less sweet). The interior design is about the space of the wedding. The look is modified to develop a certain feel in the space; this is exactly what customer experience designers consider. The person who deals with the overall experience is the wedding planner. They don’t have one product or feeling, but instead ensure all of  the wedding works. Service design is similar, it is about everyone coming together for the customer.

As the world moves from products to services/ experiences, UXD and SD are moving closer together. Both fields are higher orders of design, as defined by Richard Buchanan in his 1992 book Wicked Problems in Design Thinking. According to Buchanan, UXD and SD are focused on interactions, not just objects or users, and as such are higher order designs. Many tools like the SD blueprint, mapping an experience over time, has become valued by UX Designers.

For Thursday, we will look into different practices to consider how museum professionals can use them.

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