Service Design (2nd Edition)
From Insight to Implementation
Over the past decade, service designers have played an essential role in creating comprehensive, customer-focused products and services. This updated edition of an industry classic highlights the practice’s evolution and broadened impact in the business world. You’ll benefit from new frameworks, tools, and methods, and learn from fresh case studies that demonstrate the value of service design across service ecosystems.
Who Should Read This Book
This book is a practical and theoretical guide to service design for professionals across disciplines—including interaction, user experience, product, circular, systems, and human-centered design, as well as business strategists, managers, and change agents. It’s particularly useful for designers, strategists, managers, and educators.
Takeaways
If you’re new to service design, this book will help you:
- Uncover the true meaning of service design.
- Learn how services differ from products.
- Prototype and measure services and journeys.
- Make the case for return on investment to an organization with service design and deploy it in a business setting.
- Show how to design with people, not for them.
- Understand how to work across time and multiple touchpoints.
- Understand the upcoming challenges facing service design.
If you’re a service designer—and maybe already familiar with the first edition of Service Design—this newly revised edition will help you:
- Learn updated best practices from fresh case studies and examples.
- See the benefits of new frameworks and blueprints that have evolved over time.
- Be ready for AI and its effect on services and service design.
- Demonstrate service design’s impact on such metrics ranging from pure ROI to share prices and cost savings and benefits.
Over the past decade, service designers have played an essential role in creating comprehensive, customer-focused products and services. This updated edition of an industry classic highlights the practice’s evolution and broadened impact in the business world. You’ll benefit from new frameworks, tools, and methods, and learn from fresh case studies that demonstrate the value of service design across service ecosystems.
Who Should Read This Book
This book is a practical and theoretical guide to service design for professionals across disciplines—including interaction, user experience, product, circular, systems, and human-centered design, as well as business strategists, managers, and change agents. It’s particularly useful for designers, strategists, managers, and educators.
Takeaways
If you’re new to service design, this book will help you:
- Uncover the true meaning of service design.
- Learn how services differ from products.
- Prototype and measure services and journeys.
- Make the case for return on investment to an organization with service design and deploy it in a business setting.
- Show how to design with people, not for them.
- Understand how to work across time and multiple touchpoints.
- Understand the upcoming challenges facing service design.
If you’re a service designer—and maybe already familiar with the first edition of Service Design—this newly revised edition will help you:
- Learn updated best practices from fresh case studies and examples.
- See the benefits of new frameworks and blueprints that have evolved over time.
- Be ready for AI and its effect on services and service design.
- Demonstrate service design’s impact on such metrics ranging from pure ROI to share prices and cost savings and benefits.
Testimonials
A clear and insightful introduction to service design—its value, methods, and practical application. The second edition adds fresh, relevant case studies and a timely inclusion of AI. It’s concise, engaging, and not about insurance! A must-read for anyone seeking a well-structured and accessible overview to get started with service design.
—Prof. Birgit Mager
Co-Founder and President of the Service Design Network
For the service designer seeking to shape not just experiences, but also the culture and operations behind them—this is your blueprint for meaningful change.
—Jamin Hegeman
Design executive and contributing author, This Is Service Design Thinking
The first edition of this book changed the trajectory of my life. It made me discover and fall in love with the idea that we can better serve others. This second edition is even better, with a decade of additional experience. It shows not only how service design can lead to long-lasting great services, but—even more critically—how our decisions can rehumanize services and lead to a better future for the public and planet.
—Daniele Catalanotto
Co-Lead Master Service Design, HSLU Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts
The book is positioned as a practical guide; it distills the essential frameworks and tools of service design into a format that’s approachable and readily usable. It offers straightforward explanations of core concepts, all structured to help multidisciplinary teams grasp and apply them quickly.
—Peter Fossick
Service Design Lead, Cognizant
This is a must-read for designers and leaders who see the complexity in today’s challenges and seek inspiration for creating better experiences and outcomes for people, organizations, and the planet. By including experienced voices and rich examples from the field, the authors strongly argue for service design while providing readers with practical steps to make meaningful change where they work and live.
—Patrick Quattlebaum
CEO, Harmonic Design, and coauthor of Orchestrating Experiences: Collaborative Design for Complexity
A modern classic. This updated edition cements Service Design: From Insight to Implementation as one of the seminal books in our field. Andy, Ben, and Lavrans deliver timeless guidance for anyone seeking to design services that truly matter. With this update, the book remains as relevant as ever and will continue to inspire service designers for years to come.
—Marc Stickdorn
Author of This is Service Design Thinking and This is Service Design Doing
This book captures the mindset and methods of teams working at a time when service design was still taking shape and brings it up to date. It offers practical mental models and tools, grounded in illustrated case studies, that remain relevant today. It is a useful resource for learning from real-world projects and understanding the evolution of the discipline. This second edition of Service Design: From Insight to Implementation is a valuable addition to any service designer’s library.
—Sarah Drummond
Director, School of Good Services
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Insurance Is a Service, Not a Product
Chapter 2: The Nature of Service Design
Chapter 3: Understanding People and Relationships
Chapter 4: Turning Research into Insight and Action
Chapter 5: The Network Society
Chapter 6: From Service Proposition to Implementation
Chapter 7: Prototyping Service Experiences
Chapter 8: Measuring Services
Chapter 9: Organizational Change
Chapter 10: The Challenges Facing Service Design
Read the first chapter
This is a sample chapter from Lavrans Løvlie, Andy Polaine, and Ben Reason’s book Service Design, 2nd Edition: From Insight to Implementation. 2025, Rosenfeld Media.
Chapter 1
Insurance is a Service, Not a Product
Insurance rarely comes to mind as an industry that provides a rewarding customer experience. The only time people find out whether their insurance company is actually any good or not is when they are at their most distressed and vulnerable. When they find out their insurance is awful, there is nothing they can do about it. They are at the mercy of small print they either did not read or did not understand, and they may end up spending hours on the telephone or filling out more paperwork. There should be insurance against mistreatment by insurance companies.
FAQ
These common questions and their short answers are taken from Lavrans Løvlie, Andy Polaine, and Ben Reason’s book Service Design, 2nd Edition: From Insight to Implementation (2025). You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.
- Is service design just systems thinking, customer experience, user experience, interaction design, or product design?
No. They are all close cousins to service design and will often be part of designing for services, but they are not the same. We often use the term user instead of customer in the book, sometimes interchangeably, but sometimes because there are contexts in which a service user might not be a customer or because a service user might also be a service provider (such as a teacher or a nurse). Some projects lend themselves to different language—customers, partners, clients, patients—depending on the project context. Interaction, user experience, and digital product design are often understood as design for screen-based interactions, but service design covers a broader range of channels than this. Some projects have a strong digital component, of course, so interaction, user experience, and product design have an important part to play, but so do industrial design, marketing, graphic design, systems thinking, and business and change management. Chapters 2, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10 reveal the key differences.
