Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its users.

Service design is about designing an experience from a service perspective. It’s like user experience (UX) design is for designing from a digital perspective. How they differ is that service design uses omni-channels, meaning that all experiences are not necessarily digital, but the user might be in contact with the brand through different touchpoints, such as the website, phone, store, etc. Service design takes a wider view and a holistic approach to designing the experience, while UX only concentrates on the digital specifics of one channel.

Service design walks well hand in hand with branding and business design, because they all look at the holistic picture of a company or a organisation. Service design is often looked into with Systems thinking perspectives.

Service design is appropriate, exact, feasible, scalable and financially viable: A service designer will think about the appropriate way to deliver the service not only to the user, but also to the business and to the systems that are going to support that. They are very exact in how the service delivery should respond, because it is very apparent when there is a service experience failure.