The forest and its trees: understanding interaction design through service design activities

Abstract

Interaction design and service design have a lot in common. They both focus on improving the experience of people in real-world contexts. Service designers strategically plan the big picture of the experience while interaction designers focus on the tangible details within the user’s interaction experience. These two fields have a lot to offer one another and depend on each other to make a complete design. After all, a service experience is often a sequence of interactions that a person has with artifacts or people.

For interaction designers, understanding how their work fits into the bigger picture can be of huge benefit. If the objective of an interaction designer is to assist a person in the achievement of their goals and improve their experience overall, they should widen their perspective and embrace the totality of the experience. Arguably, what happens before and after a person uses a website impacts the overall quality of their experience just as much, if not more, than the interface design elements or physical quality of animations on screen.

Understanding the totality of people’s experiences needs to begin in school. Design professionals are too busy to constantly keep the macro and micro elements of the experience in mind. After all, that is why we have the distinct professions. An academic setting is an ideal space to enable interaction designers to consider a person’s broader experience and leverage that consideration into their work. In short, utilizing service design process, methods, and outcomes can improve interaction design students’ understanding of their user and, in turn, enable them to create more appropriate or innovative designs.

This presentation will provide an in-depth case study on the curricular use of service design processes and methods to help interaction design students understand their own work. The course which will be discussed, titled “Designing People-Centered Experiences”, is an advanced undergraduate (senior-level) course taught at Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana University, IUPUI. This course is a preliminary, 8-week course that initiates students into their senior capstone experience. It engages the students in a discussion about the current state of the design industry, how experience design is defined and what are its parts. In total, the course teaches students how to assess user need and, with that information, design experiences from the the broad strategy to the tangible interfaces. Topics covered will include a framework for how to describe experience design activities, assignment structure for the course, examples of student deliverables, assessment techniques, and insights on how to improve the course experience moving forward.