All Look Same?
A Comparison of Experience
Design and Service Design
Jodi Forlizzi
Carnegie Mellon University | forlizzi@cs.cmu.edu
[ 1] Howard, J. “Rock
Stars Need Not Apply.”
Design for Service.
http://designforser-
vice.wordpress.
com/2010/03/28/rock-
stars-need-not-apply/
[ 2] Gutierriez, C. (2010).
“Service Design: A
Systematic Approach.”
Master’s thesis in inter-
action design, Carnegie
Mellon University.
can quickly become points of
departure. Asking these questions prompts the interaction
design community to consider
the similarities and differences between service design
and experience design, and
to reflect on whether service
design and experience design,
and for that matter, interaction design, are really all the
same. Can we and should we
articulate differences among
these fields? Can the methods
and knowledge of one successfully transfer to another?
[ 3] Wikipedia definition
of service design; http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Experience_design/
September + October 2010
[ 4] Bitner, M.J., Ostrom,
A., and Morgan, F.
“Service Blueprinting:
A Practical Technique
for Service Innovation.”
California Management
Review 50, 3 (2008):
66–94.
and culturally relevant solutions, rather than a focus
on increasing and improving
functionality of the design [ 3].
In the 1980s, early practitioners were inspired by the
field of operations research
to define the field of service
design and articulate how
service designs might be represented, or blueprinted [ 4].
How to design to support user
experience became of interest
to the design community just
a decade later. Interest grew
on both sides of the Atlantic,
resulting in user-centered,
product-centered, and interac-tion-centered frameworks that
drew from literature on art,
aesthetics, and cognitive psychology to explain the phenomena of experience and to guide
designers in how to design [for
an overview, see 5].
interactions
[ 5] Forlizzi, J. and
Zimmerman, J.
“Building a Unified
Framework for the
Practice of Experience
Design.” Extended
Abstracts of CHI09,
4803–4806. New York:
ACM Press, 2009.
I’ve come to a disarming realization: Everything old is new
again. Lady Gaga is the new
Madonna, the Tea Party movement mimics the protests of
the 1970s—except the left is
now the right—and the interest in how to design for service
seems much like the interest
in how to design for experience
that emerged in the mid-1990s.
The comparison of experience design (or UX, as it has
been labeled) and service
design seems to be a topic
of interest in the interaction
design community. Recently,
Jeff Howard took to his service-design blog to argue that while
service designers embrace participatory values, UX designers
do not [ 1]. This opened up a
huge can of worms, spurring
arguments about the character
and nature of service and UX
designs among current leading
practitioners in the field.
One question that comes
to mind is whether it is even
important to make a distinction between these two
subdisciplines of interaction
design, or if the difference
is purely semantic. While
I think it is good to have
foundational definitions to
help further the field, I also
Founding Definitions
A good place to start is with
founding definitions of both
service design and experience design. Service design
has been defined as an overall
transactional journey, constructed of smaller encounters between employees and
customers, customers and
technology, and technology
and employees [ 2]. A service
design is produced at the time
it is consumed; it may have
few to no tangible properties.
Experience design has been
defined as the practice of
designing products, services,
events, and environments
with a focus on the quality of the user experience
All Look Same
At first inspection, experience
design and service design have
many similarities. Historically,
both have drawn from other
fields to develop sensitizing
constructs for their fields.
Service design traditionally
drew from operations management research; interaction
design continues to draw from
consumer and cognitive psy-
