This Thanksgiving, as we gather around tables abundant with all our favorite foods, we reflect upon the richness that surrounds us — including the AI innovations rapidly revolutionizing how we work, live, and connect.
Just as the holiday season brings people together, AI unites innovation and progress, offering a feast of possibilities for your career.
Let’s take a moment to dig into the pivotal trends in tech we’re thankful for, along with actionable tips you can apply to keep pace with a hot, evolving job market.
When you use a product such as an app or a website, you judge that experience by logic and emotion—how it made you feel.
The functionality and the aesthetics have the potential to make you frustrated or happy. It’s not enough for a product to look good—it must also solve a problem or provide a user with actual value.
User experience design, or “UX design,” is a method of thinking and a design technique for building products and solutions. When designing a product’s functions and interface, UX design considers the end user’s needs, goals, frustrations, and motivations.
Design-centered companies are more profitable. A study by the Demand Management Institute found that design-centered companies like Apple, Intuit, and Disney outperform the S&P 500 Index by 211%
User experience (UX) design is one of the tech industry’s core disciplines: Considering users’ potential actions is a key component of designing a website, application, or other products. UX is a skill that just about every type of company needs in order to grow — and demand for it is only increasing.
But what is UX design, really? To get to the heart of it, we talked to design experts from The New York Times, PayPal, Zola, and more.
Tyler Hartrich, faculty lead for General Assembly’s User Experience Design Immersive course, leads a session at the 2018 99u Conference. Photos by Craig Samoviski.
As design educators, we at General Assembly prepare students for their careers — but how can we ensure designers continue to grow their skills beyond the classroom? Industry-leading work emerges from teams that persistently enrich themselves by fostering new skill sets and perspectives. But between deadlines, client fire drills, and day-to-day trivialities, a focus on growth can often be put on the back burner. In the long-term, this can result in uninspired designers who don’t grow to their full potential, and teams that opt for the easy way out instead of taking on risks, challenges, and explorations that drive innovation.
When Adobe approached General Assembly about leading a session at the 99u Conference — an annual gathering for creative professionals to share ideas and get inspired to help shape the future of the industry — we knew it would be a great opportunity to guide leaders in creating natural spaces for learning within their teams and workflows.
In our sold-out session “Onboard, Engage, Energize: Tactics for Inspiring a Crack Design Team,” Tyler Hartrich, faculty lead of GA’s full-time User Experience Design Immersive course, and Adi Hanash, GA’s former head of Advanced Skills Academies, shared insights on how directors and managers can structure spaces for learning within their teams, and encourage new approaches to problem-solving. The presentation was developed in collaboration with Senior Instructional Designer Eric Newman and me, GA’s director of product design.
At the event, we outlined the following five ways leaders can encourage their teams (and themselves) to keep learning and improving throughout their careers, including an exercise to spur creativity, reflection, and action. Read on to learn more, and find out how you can perform the exercise with your own team.
After synthesizing user research and thoroughly uncovering problems to solve, user experience (UX) designers begin their design by ideating on a number of solutions. This is where the creative magic happens! Designers sketch to explore many workable solutions to user problems, then narrow them down to the strongest concept. Using that concept, the next step is creating a workable prototype that can be tested for viability against the user’s goals and business needs.
An interface is a means by which a user interacts with a computer, service, or product. It’s a way of simplifying a complex system so that it’s easy to use. In this day and age of modern digital services and businesses, interfaces are omnipresent. Every day, we interact with websites, apps, and even voice assistants that all require some sort of interface for us to use.
For a business, having a well-designed interface for your app, website, or even your internal dashboards or CMS means easier actions and easier ways for users to find information. This ultimately ensures that your users take advantage of your product in a seamless way. A good user interface is one that’s largely unnoticeable. When a user starts noticing clashing colors, misplaced buttons, or unreadable text, they may feel frustrated and leave, never to return.
The practice of designing interfaces can take years to master and teams of people to execute. An interface is the result of the collective thinking of user experience (UX) designers, visual designers, developers, and other business stakeholders, whose different perspectives ensure that each user’s experience is simple and clear. UX designers plan and structure the interface, assuring that has been tested with users, works properly, and meets their needs. They then work with visual designers to craft the interface’s appearance so that it’s easy to use and actions are simple and clear to understand. This is all done in close collaboration with web developers, who build the interface in code and bring it to life.
It might seem like a lot of work, but interface design fundamentally rests on a few simple guidelines and principles. If you ask these questions and follow these steps, you’ll have an interface that enables your users to easily take advantage of your what your business has to offer.
Who Are Interfaces Designed For?
Like with any product design, it’s important to set a clear direction and goal before you actually pick up any tools. A “user experience” or “understanding your users” phase helps you research the business goals of your product and the people for whom you’re designing it. Before you embark on any design for your product — especially one for its interface — try answering these questions:
What’s your product’s ultimate goal? What do you want users to do with your site or mobile app?
Who is going to use your product? What do they want or need?
What are the benchmarks for success? What interfaces work well and why? Which don’t work as well?
On what devices will your product be used? Where is it going to be used the most?
Having the answers to these questions informs every decision you make with regard your interface design and helps to avoid any confusion about what it needs to do.
Using Wireframes to Plan an Interface
Wireframes are the digital equivalent of a house’s blueprint. They provide a clear understanding of how an interface will function — the layout of the text, buttons, images, and more. Most importantly, creating a wireframe helps you establish hierarchy (the order in which you want your users to read information on your interface). Wireframes are meant to be quick and dirty, which helps you focus on your design’s logic rather than its looks.
Wireframes are simple ways of demonstrating the layout of your interfaces and how they will work.
Wireframes should be low fidelity; i.e., you shouldn’t pay attention to how they look, but rather how they work. Use only three shades of gray, along with clean and simple fonts, symbols, and iconography. These elements only represent the structure of the interface, so there’s no need spend a lot of time crafting it. Think of it this way: If your interface doesn’t work when it’s low fidelity, then it’s probably too complicated.
While there are many approaches to creating wireframes, they all share a common goal: to plan what you need to design for your interface with a solid framework and demonstrate how it will function. As long as your wireframes achieve these goals, your method doesn’t matter!
How Visual Design Powers Usable Interfaces
The common misconception is that adding visual design to a product is only “making it look pretty.” While attention to visual elements does make a interface good-looking, it also makes it more usable, as colors, typography, and images can all provide clarity to a user when they’re using your product. When it comes to your interface’s visual design, consider the following techniques.
Grids
Grid guides give you a framework, making it easier to fit all of your interface’s elements together and maintain consistency within the structure of your site.
A grid is the first thing you should include when designing an interface, as it provides a rigid structure in which all your elements will sit. It is a set of lines that helps designers align elements and fit them together (like a giant puzzle). Grids guide a natural flow of information on interfaces and ease the strain on development. Here are some considerations to keep in mind when creating your grids:
Grids work best when their values are factors of 12, as this provides flexibility in your layout — i.e., a 12-column grid means you can have a three-, four-, or six-column layout.
Remember that the smaller the device, the smaller amount of usable space you have. Typically, for mobile devices, you want a three-column layout for main content and up to five columns for buttons.
Typography
Text not only helps your interface present information, it also adds depth to the overall look and feel of the design. As it is your design’s main carrier of information, a subtle, clean font is best. Choosing the right typography for your site can be difficult, so keep the following rules in mind to avoid getting caught up in the complexity of it.
Creating typography guidelines can help you control how your font looks and, more importantly, how readable it is.
Set up rules and guidelines for your typography (like the ones as above) as soon as possible to help control the number of fonts you use, enabling you to pair interesting fonts quickly.
Aim for 14pt as a minimum font size for mobile devices and 16pt as a minimum for desktop. Fonts that are too small end up being unreadable and therefore not functional.
Use sans-serif fonts to display simpler information (e.g., Terms and Conditions or other legal language), as they’re easier to read than serif fonts.
Stick to a maximum of three different fonts. Anything more makes your interface look cluttered and directionless.
Make sure your fonts are readable. Favor readability over style, as an interface needs to provide functionality more than it needs to be “artistic.”
Color
Color wheels help you choose colors that work together because of their relationships.
In interface design, color adds visual cues and draws attention to key actions a user can take. Here are some general rules to follow.
Use a maximum of three colors: a primary, secondary, and tertiary. This helps you prioritize colors within a design and prevents too much variation. Your primary color should be your most prominent and reasonably bright color.
Consistency is key. Having all buttons be the same color helps the user easily find clickable links.
Use color perceptions to the best of your advantage. E.g., even though it’s not in your color palette, using red implies an alert or an error.
Some colors work better together than others. Using the color wheel will help you find the ones that work best with your selected color. For example, yellow works well with purple and blue because they are close to one another on the color wheel. This color relationship is called “split complementary.”
Always keep accessibility in mind. This ensures that as many users as possible can use your product. For example, white text on a yellow background is hard to read, especially for people with visual impairments. Use color-contrast checkers to ensure that your combinations pass the test.
Buttons and Interaction Elements
Adding color to buttons helps draw attention to specific areas of an interface, making it easier to understand.
Buttons and interaction elements such as carousels and image galleries encourage users to explore your interface and complete an action. Keep the following rules in mind when deciding how to design these elements.
Make your buttons clear and distinct from the rest of your interface to help direct the user to complete an action. Use contrast with color, shapes, and typography to highlight important information and key buttons they may find useful.
Always experiment. A carousel might be good for your product promotion, but it may not always be the best solution. Your goal is display information in the best possible way, so play around with different elements to discover what’s most effective.
Experiment, Test, and Reiterate!
Remember that your interface is constantly growing; you’ll always be testing and iterating to improve it. If you’re getting feedback that some parts are difficult to use, then try different colors, interaction elements, buttons, etc. until you find the best ones for your users. There is no shame in getting it wrong and improving your design.
A simple, usable interface is no easy feat, but if you follow these guidelines and principles — and keep your users at top of mind — you’ll be able to design one that helps you and your business grow.
Interface Design at General Assembly
At General Assembly, students learn to apply interface design in a variety of disciplines. As aspiring professionals in our Web Development Immersive, taught on campus and remotely, they design and develop interfaces for websites and applications. Coding students also explore interface design in our part-time Front-End Web Development course, as well as our self-paced, online HTML, CSS, & Web Design program. Students take on interface design from a user experience perspective in our full- and part-time UX courses, while students in our part-time Visual Design course dive into interface-related typography, color theory, and more.
Paolo Sta. Barbara is a multidisciplinary experience designer with a passion for innovative design thinking and problem-solving. With a background in animation and digital design, he focuses on designing experiences that are not only user-centric, but also crafted and memorable to use. After working with some of Australia’s top digital agencies, Paolo is now the lead experience designer for WiTH Collective (part of Isobar), working on a range of clients, including Qantas, Foxtel, and NRMA. He also teaches various visual design workshops and courses at General Assembly’s Sydney campus.
“Learning design gives you the skills to define the experiences that affect everyday lives. More importantly, you’ll learn to innovatively solve problems and stay a step ahead of the ever-changing landscape around you.”
Paolo Sta. Barbara, Visual Design Instructor, General Assembly Sydney
“People decide whether or not they like a product in 90 seconds or less. 90% of that decision is based solely on color.” — 99designs, online graphic design marketplace
Color has a predictable and quantifiable physiological effect that influences our perception and behavior. It’s about emotions, and whether you realize it or not, the colors used in a design strongly affect the emotions of your users.
At the core of all product design is visual communication. What users do with a software application depends nearly entirely on what they see. The color of elements like buttons, toggles, input boxes, navigation, and the primary sections of the application can play a significant part in how users understand and interact with the software.
In our user experience (UX) and visual design classes at General Assembly, we spend a lot of time discussing how, when, and why to influence our users with everything from information architecture to user interface (UI) and interactions. To say the use of color is just one of those ways is to underestimate its power over everything from the user interface (UI), to graphics and transitions, to the subconscious message you’re sending to your users.
Color Is Subjective and Culturally Defined
It’s commonly believed among most designers that the color blue conveys a feeling of trust, calm, and masculinity; that yellow makes you think of creativity, summer, and positivity; and red is the color of passion.
Blue is often thought to be for boys, pink for girls, and white for purity.
But wait — be careful!
Not all colors mean the same thing in all contexts, or all cultures. Not only is color subjective — it is also contextual and culturally defined.
Color has a different meaning depending on how it’s used, and by whom. Red can be the color of love and valentines, or of serial killers and cult leaders. Red can be fast like a race car, cool as an icy-cold Coke, or dead as a zombie.
Colors are culturally created; in America, the color white often signifies purity, chastity, and virtue, and so is the color of a wedding gown. In India, widows wear white saris as a sign of mourning, and brides often wear red to signify prosperity and fertility. An American may see green and think of the great outdoors or jealousy (“green with envy”), whereas the Chinese are likely to also think of sickness or infidelity — and both cultures associate the color with eco-friendliness and wealth.
How you use a color — what palettes you put together — must be thought through carefully, and with sensitivity to the culture in which that brand or product will be displayed.
Building and Testing a Color Palette
While the psychology of color may help to explain why someone feels a certain way about a certain color, it isn’t the only determining factor in selecting a color palette for a brand or product. The entire design, including UX, UI, branding, and logo, all work together with color to convey a subconscious message to your customers. To effectively leverage the power of color, designers have to think holistically across the brand, as well as in detail about particular uses of the palette, and the context in which it will be used.
Even more specifically, at GA, we teach designers to ask, “What emotions do we want our brand to promote or project?”
So how do we figure that out? By using a few handy tools like mood boards, usability testing, and palette generators.
Creating a Mood Board
One way to begin developing a color palette for your product is to start with a mood board. A mood board is an arrangement of images, ideas, inspiration, and products intended to evoke or project a particular style or concept that you associate with your product or want people to associate it with.
Mood boards are an excellent way to play around with themes, images, and colors in context. From there you can start to put together a working palette to test with your customers, stakeholders, and users.
Here are some of the contradictions you’ll find across designers’ thoughts on building color palettes:
Some designers recommend limiting the palette to three colors, while others say four or five.
You’ll also find colorists who say you need a neutral, a bright, and a dark for any workable palette.
Others caution designers to stay with the same saturation and brightness values but select different hues.
Contradicting that, some advocate for all one hue and vary the saturation and brightness.
What to do, what to do? The answer is: It depends. Sometimes just knowing basic palette theory will help you with your own. Here’s a breakdown of the five most common color harmonies:
Monochromatic colors all have the same hue, but vary the saturation and brightness. This palette comes across as sophisticated and subtle, and it’s great for when the content is the focus and the UI elements need to fade to the background.
Triads come from three opposing points on the color wheel. When the saturation and brightness are kept the same, the hue variations are complementary to one another, and will liven up your designs.
Analogous colors sit next to each other on the color wheel. The closer they are in hue, the more they will blend together. It takes careful balancing to find the three that work happily together without clashing.
Complementary and split complementary are colors that sit opposite from each other on the color wheel. These colors make a great contrast for each other and work well with any product that wants to pop.
Color Theory and Branding
Finding the perfect color for your brand depends on your product, the emotional response you’re hoping to evoke, the color trends of the year (or season, or moment), and cultural aesthetics and values. Once you’ve got a few possible palettes together, start designing with them and test your creations:
Throw some logos, UIs, and social media posts at your customer base and stakeholders, and ask them what they see and feel.
Pull out your mood boards and do some A/B testing.
Ask your user group to give a thumbs up or thumbs down for each sample image or color group or logo.
It won’t be hard to see what people are loving and leaving this season, and which palettes will evoke the response you want.
Color Theory at General Assembly
During the full-time User Experience Design Immersive course at General Assembly, which I teach in San Francisco, we spend time working through both the science of color theory — how RGB color systems differ from CMYK color systems, and when to use each — as well as how to use color in product design to achieve business goals.
In GA’s part-time Visual Design course, students learn the fundamentals of color theory and color schemes, and learn how to apply them to designs for the web, like websites and interfaces.
“Color theory is an integral part of being a product designer, and these designers are in demand for everything from websites to apps, to wearable and usables.”
Susan K Rits, UX Design Immersive Instructor, General Assembly San Francisco
Composition is how we see information. It influences the relationships we see between objects, perceptions of complexity, and affects our desire to engage with content. Learning composition as a visual designer will allow you to make information appear in ways that convey different meanings, or leave different impressions, like sophistication, affluence, cleverness, or strangeness.
If someone asked you to write down your phone number, you might instinctively group the numbers into two groups of three and a group of four. This is a system developed by designer Ladislav Sutnar, who used the psychological principle of “chunking” to group information in ways that are easier to remember. Composition is constantly shaping our perceptions around familiarity, relationships, and ease of use. If you see a row of clickable buttons near the top of the web page, you might assume they share a common function, likely navigating through that website. Simply by placing the buttons in that location and in that proximity to one another, a designer has leveraged composition to imply function and orientation of the design.
The Gestalt Principles, Continuation, Complexity, and More
Let’s see composition in action: How many triangles are in the following image?
Optical illusions like this one use composition to subvert the mind’s expectations of how forms relate to one another.
Many people guess three or more, but the real answer is zero. You’re looking at a series of V shapes and Pac-Man-looking figures. Your mind is following the Gestalt principles of proximity (which states that objects near one another share a common relationship) and figure-ground (which states that the mind will choose a foreground and background). Being aware of how the mind instinctively derives meaning from visuals is a critical part of understanding how to leverage composition in powerful ways.
The Gestalt principles were first developed in 1890 by a school of German experimental psychologists who were interested in qualifying how the mind perceives information. While their initial list of principles has since been greatly expanded, even learning the basics will help a visual designer think critically about compositions and how to influence perceptions.
Beyond simple optical illusions, composition affects things in our everyday lives. Consider the following designs.
In the first example, the design utilizes a phenomenon known as continuation. By deliberately cutting off the bottom row of images and text, it suggests to the user that there’s more to see below. Users know they can scroll, so they’re likely to do so instinctively and continue exploring.
An example of continuation, a Gestalt principle that helps to inform a user there is more to interact with.
In the following example, however, the design neatly ends its grid within view. Many users in this scenario would not attempt to scroll. If this were the homepage design, some users may confuse an even grid of shows to be all the website has to offer if they aren’t familiar with the service.
A complete grid view can imply that this is all of the content the products often…even if it isn’t.
As Steve Jobs said, “Design isn’t just what it looks like, it’s how it works.” The composition a designer chooses influences how a user perceives something works.
Like most elements of design, the more complexity you add to a composition, the more difficult it is to balance. Simple designs with large type and clear focal points are often perceived as more accessible and easier to understand. They are often faster to make. However, more complex compositions can also make for longer consumption.
A Skill for Many Careers
Combined with typography and color theory, a mastery of compositions can help a visual designer compete in a range of design job markets from editorial layouts to app design. For example, visual designers at large tech companies like Facebook and Google often specialize in designing icons, user interface details, and general page layouts. They collaborate with engineers, product managers, and other specialized designers (like user experience) to apply visual principles in ways that further the goals of the user and the business. Visual designers in publishing, advertising, and lifestyle brands often focus more on ads, page layouts, or book jackets. Using composition in these settings means a visual designer is either making an object more eye-catching or easier to digest dense information.
While the roles may have different mediums to focus on, the principles of composition remain true for all visual designers.
Composition in Visual Design at General Assembly
At General Assembly, we teach composition primarily in our part-time Visual Design course, which I teach at GA’s San Francisco campus. However, some of its concepts overlap with our user experience design courses, since composition can also implicate how something works to a user. Students can expect to learn by doing at GA: They’ll analyze their favorite web pages and apps to detect how subtle choices in composition influence their understanding of functionality and impact an interface’s feeling.
Shawn Sprockett is a design manager at Postmates, design advisor to Axiom Zen, and an instructional lead for General Assembly’s Visual Design course in San Francisco. His work has spanned a wide breadth of industries over the last 10 years, having worked with brands including Victoria’s Secret and Airbnb, and trained under legendary designers like Milton Glaser and Stefan Sagmeister. Shawn has also been a part of big business transformations like Conde Nast’s shift to mobile publications and IBM’s implementation of design thinking at scale. Shawn has an MFA in design and entrepreneurship from the School of Visual Arts. His recent projects are at the intersection of artificial intelligence, behavioral psychology, and generative design.
“Visual design is everywhere, always informing our behavior and perceptions. Understanding visual design changes the way you look at the world, and a mastery of it will give you superpowers that open the door to new careers.”
Shawn Sprockett, Visual Design Instructor, General Assembly San Francisco
The Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, “Life’s a journey, not a destination,” may be somewhat of a cliché, but it perfectly reflects the purpose behind customer journey mapping. Customer journey mapping (also known as customer experience mapping) is the strategic process of capturing and communicating complex customer interactions. User experience (UX) designers use it to illustrate the customer’s processes, needs, and perceptions across their interactions with our services, products, and organizations.
For example, when designing for Starbucks’ mobile ordering app, a journey mapping exercise would likely include a customer’s actions before they use the app, during their ordering experience, and after they’ve picked up their order and are headed back to the office. This UX design strategy is essential to understanding users and solving real design problems.
By focusing on a customer’s experiences throughout their journey with a product or service (e.g., clicks on a Facebook ad, signs up for a product mailing list, or Googles your company), rather than jumping ahead to the end solution (the present experience with the app or website), designers can deliver positive experiences and form a deeper understanding of their customers.
Customer journey mapping is an ongoing practice — a collaborative process that’s boundlessly more useful than a highly polished deliverable. Cross-functional teams who use it can include marketers, executives, engineers, customer support professionals, product owners, and more. By working together, they gain a shared understanding of how customers feel and think, and their relationship to the service. Engaging in a customer journey mapping session builds knowledge and consensus across the organization, and ultimately outlines the shared reality of customers’ experiences.
Customer Journey Mapping in Action: Case Study in Health Care
The key to understanding any customer journey is empathy. From anxieties and fears to joy and delight, the emotions tied to our products and services are what we’re looking to uncover. That’s how industrial designer Doug Dietz, the creator of the MR Adventure Discovery Series, was able to design a more successful MRI experience for children undergoing the scan.
Consider a typical MRI scanning experience, with its loud, strange noises, dark, confined tube, and cold, hard scanning bed. The apprehension, fear, and anxiety that patients, especially children, had surrounding this important medical ordeal was inhibiting results, requiring rescans and sometime sedation. By mapping the anxiety curve of the parent and child’s journey from home to the hospital, learning about their fears upon discovering a need for an MRI, and their reaction to the scanning room itself, Dietz learned why the machine experience had almost no chance of being pleasant.
From this newly realized understanding of what made the MRI a negative experience on their health-care journey, Dietz and his team were able to design a better solution. The outcome is a whole new sensory experience, a completely redesigned MRI room based on a pirate ship, submarine aquatic adventure, or outdoor camping trip complete with sights, sounds, and tasks all related to each adventure. A scary experience was turned into some children’s favorite part of the hospital.
Customer Journey Mapping at General Assembly
At General Assembly, students in our full-time User Experience Design Immersive course learn customer journey mapping as a way to validate their user research and apply a broader understanding of previously defined personas, another tool in the UX toolkit. In their class projects, both with real-world and fictional clients, students use the user data they collect to validate their team’s assumptions about a user’s journey and add new findings from their research. Students break the journey up into steps, indicating the touch points and emotions that users experience during those steps.
In addition to the user research, students sharpen their communication skills by running a team workshop that includes stakeholders from other disciplines, like marketers, developers, and customer support. Creating a customer journey map is a group activity and students learn the necessary skills to get non-design stakeholders, like project managers and executives, to participate in the process and arrive at a shared understanding of the customers. Students practice customer journey mapping in each of their team projects, so they can accurately identify a problem and uncover the needs of users.
Jared Rogers is a User Experience Design Immersive instructor at GA’s Austin campus. His extensive UX career centers on education, tech, and media industries with both agency and in-house design experience. Some of his notable clients include IBM, AT&T, Stanford University, and Meredith Corporation.
“There’s a high demand for UX roles. Companies of all sizes value what UX research and design can bring to the table. With Austin growing as a technology hub, these UX generalist roles provide value for any business.”
Jared Rogers, UX Design Immersive Instructor at General Assembly Austin
A service, unlike a product, is intangible — you can’t hold it or touch it. Rather, it’s a series of intertwined, specifically orchestrated activities. Services unfold over time across steps and channels. Also unlike a product, both the production and consumption of a service happen simultaneously. The service is the interplay between the customer and service provider.
Service design is a practice that contributes to delivering a great user experience. In fact, the quality of the service is frequently what makes or breaks a person’s experience with an organization. Whether service design is being used to improve existing services or create new ones, it takes into account the needs of both the customer and the service provider.
Why Does Service Design Matter?
Service design is a big deal because we engage with services much more than we engage with specific products. We take public transportation, go out to lunch, manage our money, go to concerts, get medical help, pay our taxes, register our cars, and so forth. Certainly, there are tangible products and tools that we — and service providers — use in the process, but that’s only part of it. From the service design perspective, it’s that overall exchange we care about — and that exchange needs to work for all parties. We certainly notice when it doesn’t, and we, as customers, simply look elsewhere the minute it fails.
The more complex and interconnected our world gets, the more opportunities there are for service failure — making good service design more critical than ever. Service quality often suffers due to the complexity of linking systems together in a way that makes sense to both customers and service providers. Service designers must come to the rescue, and many designers who previously focused on designing digital interfaces are now turning their attention to services.
Where Service Design Intersects With UX and Product Design
Service design is becoming a high-profile skill in industries such as financial services, health care, social services, and beyond, popping up in ads for product design and user experience roles. However, it’s nothing particularly new. When talking about UX design, many people’s first inclination is to think about digital products. But UX design is as much about physical products and services as it is about digital services. It’s also about ensuring that an organization has the processes and skills in place to deliver on the promise.
Although they ultimately have a slightly different focus, at the highest level, the philosophy of service design and UX design is the same:
It’s holistic. It involves considering all channels and players involved, and understanding what happens before, during, and after any interactions.
It’s user-centered. It puts the experience of all of the people involved at the heart of every decision made.
It embodies design thinking. It uses the designers’ approach and methods to balance people’s needs (desirability) with what’s doable (feasibility) and what’s appropriate for the business (viability).
It’s increasingly the differentiator between companies. As a product or service becomes a commodity and the barriers for consumers moving between providers are lowered (think financial services or telecommunications), it’s the quality of the service and experience that determines whether people embrace your offering.
Designing Services = Designing Businesses
In a feature-rich, constantly-on world, thoughtful service design gives organizations a unique opportunity to distinguish themselves from their competitors. Businesses are now innovating and redefining themselves based on their service in several key ways:
Improving routine services, like renewing a driver’s license or getting a cell phone plan. In the case of a driver’s license (where there’s no competition), delivering better service is good for everyone. In the case of a telecommunications provider, it can be the difference between retaining or losing a customer.
Totally overhauling an experience, such as Disney’s introduction of its MagicBand to park visitors. The MagicBand wrist band facilitates payment, placing orders, making restaurant reservations, entering your hotel, finding the rest of your party, and even delivering greetings from Disney characters who know you by name. The technology is one thing — but it’s the people and processes that make this all happen.
Revolutionizing an industry, like the way Airbnb and Uber reimagined accommodation and ride services by upending who provides the services, how they are acquired, and the interchange between providers and customers.
Going from product to service, like how Square provides small-business loans to customers using its point-of-sale solution, or the aircraft jet engine manufacturer Rolls Royce offers support services based on the fact that it’s already collecting usage data.
How Do We Approach Service Design?
Service design requires big-picture thinking. This means not merely focusing on designing the particular products and tools used in the interchange between customers and service providers, but also understanding and optimizing how everything and everyone fits together — who does what, when and how they do it — to achieve a desired result. As service designers, we talk about the “line of visibility,” and study both the “onstage” activities (what the customer sees and hears) and the “backstage” activities (services, processes, and tools used behind the scenes), and we choreograph the interplay.
As illustrated in the figure below, when designing (or redesigning) a service, we take a top-down approach, starting by focusing on the desired experience, and from there considering the interactions, touchpoints, and procedures needed to create it. Armed with this knowledge, we are able to determine the best products and tools to use, and we design these to optimize the overall experience.
To be successful, we must:
Have a clear understanding of the reason and demand for the service, and the ability of the provider to deliver.
Focus the design on customers’ needs, ensuring that the service will be valuable and efficient.
Treat “unusual” circumstances and typical situations as equally important in thinking out the requirements to accommodate them, as that’s when service often breaks down.
Design with input from users of the service, and collaboration with all relevant stakeholders providing the service.
Prototype the service before developing it in full.
Start with a minimum viable service (MVS), and use an iterative design process based on feedback and analysis to refine and add to the service.
Service Design at General Assembly
User experience design students at General Assembly learn to think holistically. UX is not merely user interface (UI) design; it’s about the before, during, and after use. UX design involves applying user-centered design techniques like research and low-fidelity prototyping to ensure that you’re solving the right problem before polishing the solution. When you learn about UX design at GA, whether it’s through our full-time Immersive program, part-time course on campus or online, or a short-form workshop or bootcamp, you learn to think about the overarching ecosystem you are designing for. Students train to recognize that people’s experiences are formed over time, based on interactions across individual and broad touchpoints. They also learn how our roadmaps allow us to focus in on figuring out how to get there from here.
Susan Wolfe, who teaches GA’s User Experience Design Immersive in San Francisco and Sydney, has practiced UX design, run consultancies, mentored project teams, and introduced UX design practices and cultures into organizations around the globe. She has established and managed in-house UX teams within software, hardware, and services companies in the Silicon Valley. In her work, she takes a holistic service design perspective and applies the most appropriate user-centered design thinking techniques to identify issues and ultimately create the optimal experience.
“Merely going digital doesn’t guarantee success. The world needs UX designers now more than ever to ensure that the needs and desires of the users are balanced with the goals and objectives of the organizations.”
Susan Wolfe, UX Design Immersive Instructor at GA San Francisco and GA Sydney
