by 
Oleksandra Horobchenko and Roman Engler share what they learned during the third day of the Master Service Design program of the HSLU, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
During this day the learners explored the question: What makes a good service?
This day is part of the overall course “Service Design for People, Public and Planet” where we explore more in depth how Service Design can be a source for good for humans, public organisations and the planet that hosts them.
To analyse existing services, the Service Design learners used two tools: the Service Envy template and activity and the Business Model Canvas. The students were sent out to go and find existing services that they thought were good and document the touchpoints and what the service felt like using adjectives to describe them — easy, simple, reliable, etc. Similar to how industrial students might take apart a vacuum cleaner to understand how it is made, this process helps students to understand how services are constructed.
In a second activity, either using the business model canvas as a guide, or by doing their own desk research, guesswork and estimation, the students tried to imagine and analyse the backstage touchpoints and business model of the services.
Video transcript
This transcript was fully generated using Descript. The transcript wasn’t corrected. Which means it can be pretty creative, funny or wrong at moments.
What makes a good service?
Hi, I’m Aleksandra.
Hi, I’m Roman.
Today we looked into the Business Model Canvas
and, we were looking what makes a good service. We checked out different services. Took them apart and looked at the different parts that combined the thing.
We did the envy sheet, which is basically what do we like about service, what excites us. And then we put all these nice, beautiful notes here and we clustered them to understand what is important in a good service.
We were looking at the different touchpoints, especially going from the touchpoints to the backstage behind them and seeing how the whole area of the backstage, builds up and is combined and interconnected to actually bring those touchpoints together.
What else did you discover when you were looking at the backstage stuff? For me personally, I discovered in the backstage that coming from the touchpoints, it’s a very good way of going down the rabbit hole through a company and realizing how huge it is.
Everything that I’ve considered as a company so far is actually just the backstage of service.
Is there anything that inspired you that you’d take away and you can apply to your own projects?
One thing that inspired me is that I understood that The service I want to work on for sure has to be simple, clear. And maybe offer something free.
It is so simple, but very useful.
What inspired me to take into my own work was probably to really look deep into the backstage of the service. And. Find the interesting connections between different silos. Find areas where energies can be aligned in the backstage. And where communication can be improved in the backstage.
