Chapter 8. Service Design

In San Francisco, if you want to buy a monthly pass to ride the local public transportation system, MUNI, there are only two ways to do it: either find (via the Web site or, seemingly, by randomly guessing) the stores that sell the pass, or buy it online and have it mailed to you. This plan has (at least) two flaws: very often the passes don't arrive at the stores in time for the beginning of the month, and buying a pass online costs an extra $10 so that the monthly pass offers no savings at all to most commuters. Compared to New York City's MetroCard vending machines (Figure 8.1), or to Hong Kong's Octopus SmartCards, which not only allow passage on transportation systems but also work on everything from vending machines to public swimming pools, the MUNI system is terrible. It is a poorly designed service.

Figure 8.1. New York City's MetroCard kiosks are excellent examples of good use of technology in services. Designed by Antenna Design, they are a welcome addition to the New York subway service.

courtesy of Antenna Design New York

When people think of interaction design (if they do at all), they tend to think of it as tied to technology: Web sites, mobile phones, software. I'm as guilty as anyonethe subtitle of this book refers to the creation of applications and devices after all. But technological wonders aren't all interaction designers create. The new frontier of interaction design is services.

Up until this point in this book, we have been using the clunky phrase "products and services" to describe what interaction designers design without ever much explaining what a service is. Back in Chapter 1, we noted that interaction designers can design not only objects (things) and not only digital or physical things, but also the ephemeralways of performing tasks that are hard to pin down but easy to feel. These "ways of performing tasks" are services.