Design Research

In This Course, You'll

• Get excited to turn everyday services into seamless experiences people love. Think of Starbucks: You get a promotional email, you use the app to order, and you arrive at the store to collect it. In service design, you orchestrate both sides of that service: the parts customers see, and the operations, processes, and systems behind them that make it possible. When the whole sequence works, customers come back, teams stay aligned, and businesses run more efficiently. Whether you're shaping customer experiences or improving internal workflows, this course teaches you to design services that work better for the people who use them and who run them. If you're a UX designer, you'll learn how your existing skills map to service design, whether you want to add service design methods to your current role or specialize into a service design career.

• Make yourself invaluable when you can design human-centered services that align with business goals, from flight booking and food delivery to government services. PwC found that 32% of customers stop buying from a brand they love after just one bad experience, but are willing to pay up to a 16% price premium for a great one. This course guides you through the full service design process to align operations and catch potential issues before they reach customers. With worked examples for Amazon and Airbnb, you'll use Osterwalder and Pigneur's Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas to define how your service fits the business and meets customer needs. You'll run ethnographic research and synthesize your findings into role-based personas and journey maps. To map every moving part of your service, you'll use customer lifecycle maps, ecosystem maps, and service blueprints, then prototype and test with service staging. As automation and AI take over technical execution, this process gives you the timeless, human-centered design skills companies are looking for.

• Gain confidence and credibility when you can advocate for service design, embed it, and build maturity inside your organization. Because the best services are co-created, collaboration will become a core part of how you design. You'll bring stakeholders together in workshops and run four kinds of ideation sessions (brainstorming, braindumping, brainwriting, and brainwalking), and combine group and individual modes so every voice contributes, not just the most confident ones in the room. You'll also learn how to fit the process into Lean and Agile workflows, and measure performance after launch with Google Ventures' HEART framework. Through interviews with professional service designers who've worked with organizations like Twitch and the IRS, you'll gain practical industry insight you can bring straight into your own work.

• Craft a personal portfolio that shows you can run a real service design project end-to-end. In an optional hands-on project, you'll experience a real-world service on a service safari, and turn your findings into personas, a journey map, and a Value Proposition Canvas that ground your design decisions in proof. You'll develop your chosen idea, prototype it with Business Origami, and test and iterate until it's launch-ready. And with 20+ templates and step-by-step guides, you'll apply these methods immediately in your work. You'll leave ready to collaborate on and lead service design initiatives, whether in your current role or your next one.

Learn From Industry Leaders

Master complex skills with proven best practices and toolkits directly from industry leaders. Meet your experts for this course:

• Frank Spillers: Service Designer and Founder and CEO of Experience Dynamics.

• David Bill: Interaction Designer who led service design for five U.S. federal agencies at Booz Allen Hamilton before driving innovative design solutions as a Senior UX Designer at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

• Kendra Shimmell: Vice President of Design at Remitly and former Senior Director of Research and Central Science at Twitch (Amazon).