Paper

Service design = cognitive design

About the design of touchpoints and perception in analogue and digital user contexts

Reading time: approx. 5′ 17″

Cognitive Computing

Experience Design

Human Centered Design

Reading Time & Pyramidal Preception

Service Design

Basics

Service design is regarded as cognitive design, which encompasses the design of touchpoints and perceptions in analogue and digital usage contexts. The aim is to develop service innovations that are suitable for everyday use and that come close to people. A consistent, holistic design of service-product systems is necessary in order to offer the customer a high degree of experience, novelty and tangible added value.

Cognitive Design

Design is understood as a design process that is cognitive at its core. It is based on our perceptual experiences and knowledge experiences that we recognise as patterns in everyday life and enjoy or avoid. The critical doubt about something new arises in the first five seconds of perception or use. The good thing about cognitive design is that it can be professionally designed and evaluated and that there are argumentative rules that lead to success.

Cognitive design is based on perception and action patterns and thinks in terms of future scenarios of situational action and experience from the user's perspective. The precise observation of these contextual schemata is essential in order to develop accurate, design-oriented new solutions. The action schema is based on the unmarked case, the user illusion and the conditions of happiness and takes them seriously. In the end, the only thing that counts when designing market-successful innovations is the pure ability of cognitive design confidence.

Service Design

Service design is described as a practice that designs systems and processes to provide users with comprehensive services. It does not consist of additive individual elements, but of the comprehensive orchestration of various innovative measures in a perceptible overall ensemble, always from the customer's perspective. It develops added value for all stakeholders throughout the entire product life cycle, right through to improved value creation.

Good service design has many faces and arises from the comprehensive orchestration of various measures that are viewed from the customer's perspective. Components and criteria for good service design can be the service-centred design and consistent customer-oriented quality of all points of contact with the customer, as well as sustainable process and business model design in the background of project planning.

Practical example: Package logistics portal

A practical example of the implementation of these principles is the design and realisation process of a package logistics portal. The strategic service and product positioning, the definition of the system and user requirements, the design of the information architecture and the user interface design were developed in close collaboration with the project team. Usability testing and evaluation of the operating logic, user experience and brand positioning were carried out with end customers.

Practical example: Marketing add-on product

Another example is the marketing add-on product ‘Schönerverpacker design collection’, which was issued to customers as a giveaway as part of the portal rollout. The ‘service highlight’ for the market launch was the ‘Rockefeller principle’, in which GLS package couriers presented potential new customers with a Schönerverpacker set and offered them their first shipment via the new package labelling portal free of charge.

Conclusion

The in-depth analysis and customer evaluation via touchpoint scenarios made it possible to define measurement points and calculations for the marketing measures, which gave managers an optimal overview for decision-making. The transparency achieved regarding the perceptual and contextual needs of the potential target customers enabled the digital product design and communication measures of the rollout to be highly accurate. The insights from the touchpoint analysis and the prototypical evaluation in the qualitative customer groups were used to systematically optimise the customer experience and were able to be coordinated within the budget.