UX Research & Service Design: a match made in heaven
By: Valentina Salvi
Tags: UX Research, Design Thinking, User Experience, Product Design, Service Design

Premise: Agency vs In-house

Something to highlight prior to dissecting the topic is the intrinsic difference between working in a consultancy versus working in-house, as a professional. Whether you experienced one work set-up and/or the other, your role and routine as a Service Designer and/or UX Researcher are most likely not identical and potentially leading to slightly diverse insights. This is natural, given the fact — among others— that working as a consultant heavily revolves around external client relationships while working in-house focuses more on the tight collaboration within the internal company ecosystem. Just placing this pointer here as a disclaimer, so that you can keep this difference in mind.

Differences between UX Research & Service Design

#1 FOCUS & SCALE

Bird view vs Targeted effort

The capacity to connect front-stage and back-stage holistically is one of the top strengths of Service Design, therefore projects tend to be quite broad, often with a discovery mindset, aiming to understand and reframe the big picture of a problem. UX Research, to the contrary, tends to take on more targeted UX problems, questions, and use cases related to a specific digital touchpoint. UX Research thoroughly provides seminal and granular insights to improve the experience associated with a particular set of interactions so that findings can promptly trigger a result-driven conversation for better solutions. Service Design, on the other hand, usually uncovers new out-of-the-box explorative possibilities, concepts, and value propositions for the business across both physical and digital touchpoints.

#2 CRAFT

Designing concepts vs Insights dissemination

Service Designers commonly leverage the research to sketch & prototype initial concepts. This is not the case of UX Researchers, who rather concentrate on crafting ways to share and disseminate insights across the company by leveraging a variety of mediums with impartiality and attention to detail (i.e. reports, scripts, video reels, newsletter etc.). If we look at the responsibilities, UX Researchers seem to have a more defined split: They generally conduct solely the research, handing over the prototyping and concepting to specialised UX/UI designers. This doesn’t mean that you won’t benefit from having design skills as a UX Researcher, but that your craft will be less pixel heavy. Service Designers differ in this aspect since they tend to straddle both phases as generalists, handing over to UX Researchers and/or UX/UI designers once and if the concept gets injected into the real world.

#3 RESEARCH GOAL

Cross organisation vs Product level

Service Design research finds its uniqueness in the amount and variety of actors involved at once, in and out of the organisation: stakeholders, customers, and/or employees. It is often process-oriented and enables a company-wide understanding of complex topics such as why internal processes fail to reach the intended KPIs or how employees could be enabled to more happily do their job, for example. UX Research tends to focus on target users more exclusively and has the UX of digital touchpoints as the focal point of the practice. The ultimate research goal often differs: Service Designers keep a broad, exploratory, company-wide focus, while UX Researchers apply higher granularity and have a more action-oriented, digital-driven inner purpose.

Overlaps between UX Research & Service Design

#1 MISSION

Ensuring Human-centricity

Service Designers and UX Researchers are end-users’ ambassadors, advocating for their needs, expectations, and pain points to be heard and acted upon by the business. They make sure that the desirability lens is well embedded with feasibility and viability when informing business decisions, putting people at the center. In the day to day, this mission translates into having direct contact with users to validate assumptions coming vertically or laterally on what should be the next move for the company to make. Both roles are essential for a reality-check — before costly investments — that any considered solution actually deserves that time and attention. Many technically feasible and financially viable solutions end up failing because they don’t meet users’ wants: UX Researchers and Service Designers dig deep and question whether those solutions are something people would love to see in the first place. A deal-breaker that any company can’t bear to ignore.

#2 QUALITATIVE SKILLS

The ‘Why’ behind the ‘What’

Both fields overlap on a qualitative research level: moderated interviews, focus groups, usability testing are the main recurring techniques applied by both parties. The two are good at understanding the deep reasons, needs, and emotions behind numeric data patterns emerging. The foundation is the same, and that’s the reason why it is so likely for Service Designers to consider UX Researcher positions and vice-versa. The only difference, in my experience, is the greater level of rigor, actionability, and accuracy applied by UX Researchers in qualitative studies, while still juggling fast-paced deadlines to make it an effectively embedded element of the agile product cycle. Moreover, UX Researchers more often apply mixed methods research with a quantitative layer to it for greater evidence and cross-pollination.

#3 METHODS

Communication tools & Co-creation

Something I noticed intersecting, in my experience, are also some of the tools such as Customer Journey Maps and Personas. If I was looking at them as ‘deliverables’ demanding quite some time in a Service Design context, now from a UX Research perspective I see their value more as a communication tool, that should be extremely easy to modify and iterate: for example by leveraging Miro or Mural rather than a static document. The same goes for the methods, like co-creation in remote workshops and brainstorming sessions collaborating in multidisciplinary teams. This is yet again a solid overlap the two roles have in common, as a way to create alignment, spark conversations, and facilitate the progress of initiatives towards meaningful outcomes by bringing diverse experts in the same (virtual or physical) space.

💌 To conclude…

If Service Design was a cake, UX Research would be one slice of it, but one with greater depth, owning the responsibility to inform traceable steps for immediate action. To be able to equally capture both the complexity & big picture of a problem or opportunity space as well as the granularity of it, ideally, human-centric organisations should apply and cultivate the flourishing of both approaches.

Acknowledging the value of both perspectives and trying to fulfill them both with the resources you have — either via separate roles working in sync or by feeding your Service Design/UX Research practice of the other dimension — is a great step towards more desirable, well-thought-through human-centered innovation. Service Design and UX Research are not mutually exclusive approaches, but rather complementary to each other: to maximise the impact of your solutions, you should use them both, at the right time.