Great Design is More Than Just a Beautiful Appearance – This is Why I Love Digital Service Design

I have a few favorite brands that warm my heart more than others. When I think about what connects these darlings of mine, the answer is good design. Interacting with the brand is effortless and enjoyable, whether it’s through a product, service, social media presence, physical store, or digital platform.

A well-functioning brand is the sum of many carefully designed elements, and a website is far from a secondary factor in this equation—quite the opposite. Especially in industries where business leans heavily on digital channels, the website stands at the forefront of the customer experience.

Designing a great customer experience isn’t magic, although it does require time and thought. Or if it is, then digital service design is the wand (made of elderwood) that brings this magic to life. Even with this method, an enchanting customer experience doesn’t materialize with a mere flick and snap of the wrist—it requires robust tools and the right methodologies.

So what on earth is digital service design, then? UX? CX? Diamonds and gold?

”The design is not just what it looks like and feels like. The design is how it works”
-Steve Jobs

A few terms to start with

Service design is a design philosophy that emphasizes user-centricity, as well as a collection of various tools and methods for designing user-oriented and user-centered services. Because service designers (myself included) love definition and clarification, the field has developed its own terminology and an endless number of thinking tools.

Let’s explore a few.

User-Centered Design and User-Driven Design (also Customer-Centered and Customer-Driven Design)
User-centered design starts, well, with the user. It’s akin to the concept in Richard Scarry’s childhood book: What do people do? User-centered design emphasizes identifying the needs of users and placing those needs at the core of the design process. In contrast, user-driven design involves bringing users into the design process—allowing them to tell us what they do.

Customer Understanding

Customer understanding refers to the awareness of customers’ needs, their daily lives, and their desires. Customer lives can be studied through qualitative (interviews, observation, participation…) and quantitative (analytics data, surveys…) methods. With customer understanding, we can design more customer-centric services and improve the customer experience.

User Experience (UX) and Customer Experience (CX)

User experience refers to the feelings that arise when using a service. It encompasses observations, emotions, thoughts, and reactions that come from engaging with a service. Customer experience, on the other hand, covers all the interactions a customer has with a company. For example, even if the user experience of an online shop is finely tuned down to the last detail, the overall customer experience will suffer if package deliveries are delayed.

Service Journey (Customer Journey Map)

A service journey is a visual description of how a customer interacts with a company in various situations while using the service. It’s a tool used to make the intangible service, which consists of many different stages, visible as a whole—specifically from the customer’s perspective. This method is particularly useful for understanding the current state of a service.

For example, a customer might see our advertisement while browsing LinkedIn, later search for our company via search engines, and after conducting background research, decide to send an email to our CEO Aapo with a request for a proposal for service design and definition for a web service. The customer’s journey takes place across multiple channels, and they interact with the Into-Digital brand in different ways.

Service Concept

A clearly documented, comprehensive description of the service being planned. It answers the questions: who, why, how, with what resources? Often, the service concept is one of the outcomes of service design.

We often refer to the outcome of our service design projects as a “definition document” because, in most cases, we provide detailed guidance on building the service according to the concept.

Design Thinking

It’s difficult to discuss service design without mentioning design thinking. It’s a process that focuses on gaining a deep understanding of the user and shaking up preconceived notions. It’s both a process and a comprehensive way of working, with its brilliance lying in the fact that it brings design thinking outside of the design team. By combining analytical and creative thinking, we can design services that are based on customer needs rather than the opinions of someone sitting in an office corner.

How Design Thinking Works in Practice

Design thinking, as summarized in five phases (à la The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford), brings structure to the creative process while keeping it flexible and iterative. Here’s how it works in practice:

1. Empathize – Understand users’ experiences, triggers, challenges, and needs. The goal here is to deeply connect with users and their world to discover the underlying issues they face.
2. Define – Combine the insights gathered and analyze them to define the core problems you are trying to solve. This is where you narrow down what to focus on and what to aim for in your solutions.
3. Ideate – Explore solutions outside the box, boldly and without holding back on ideas. This phase is all about generating as many ideas as possible, even the wild and unconventional ones.
4. Prototype – Test ideas affordably using prototypes. In web service design, this is often a wireframe or a low-fidelity model that helps you explore how the solution could work in practice.
5. Test – Let users try out your product. This is not a one-time task at the end of the project, but a continuous process that yields new insights for improving and refining the service.

In practice, design thinking is not a step-by-step series of tasks that leads to a polished final product. Instead, it’s an iterative process. For example, during the prototyping phase, a new idea might emerge that requires background research, redefinition, and further ideation before it can be included in the next prototype.

Diamonds – The Designer’s Best Friends

The phases of design thinking are often visualized using the double diamond model (à la British Design Council). These sparkling diamonds are valuable because they break the problem-solving process into smaller pieces, clearly showing what’s being worked on at each stage. This thinking is also applicable to solving problems outside the realm of service design. The double diamond structure helps guide thinking in a flexible, dynamic way.

The first phase of the design process, represented by the first diamond, focuses on collecting information and defining the problem. In this stage, we seek to understand the problem we are solving. In the second phase, we move into idea generation and testing solutions (using prototypes, for example). Here, we search for the best solutions to the problem at hand.

The diamond shape itself symbolizes the varying thinking approaches: divergence and convergence. These might sound fancy, but in practice, they mean that during the divergent phase, we generate new ideas and explore different ways of thinking, while during the convergent phase, we focus on finding solutions and making decisions. The left side of the diamond opens up to new ideas, while the right side narrows down to a clear, defined outcome.

Each part of the double diamond is supported by a set of methods that help us dig deeper into the current phase. At Into-Digital, we leverage data analysis, surveys, interviews, and workshops to collect information, synthesize insights, and generate ideas. These methods allow us to thoroughly address the task at hand and move forward in the design thinking process.

Why?

Well-executed user-centered design results in a service that solves users’ problems and is a joy to use. However, there’s some murmuring that this user-focused design method, which concentrates on users’ current needs, might not produce innovative services that users don’t yet know they need.

TED Talk celebrity and author Simon Sinek introduced his widely recognized concept of the Golden Circle. This circle condenses the questions of what, how, and why. Sinek suggests that while all companies know what they do, most understand how they do it, but only a few truly grasp why they do it. This is why business and marketing should be approached starting from the center of the circle, considering the “why” question before moving to “what.” Why does this service exist?

In the process of digital service design, exploring the “why” question helps expand thinking to a broader context. Before delving into specific details (which are certainly important), the purpose of the service being designed must be identified. The answer to the “why” question forms the foundation of the entire design process, guiding decisions and thought.

As a result, what may emerge is a digital service that not only meets users’ needs but exceeds expectations. And that’s when digital service design truly accomplishes something that makes my heart race with excitement.

Aapo Mäki

CEO / Senior Service Designer