I'm curious
Service design is the practice of shaping how a service works for the people who use it and the people who deliver it, across every channel and over time. You do not need to know the vocabulary yet. These are good first encounters: a short introduction, a couple of well-loved books, a podcast and some examples of the practice in public.
Start with these
Nielsen Norman Group's short introduction to service design: what it is, how it relates to UX, and the core concepts of frontstage and backstage.
Fifteen principles of good service design, drawn from Lou Downe's time leading design across the UK government. Short, plain and opinionated.
The practical companion to service design, covering research, ideation, prototyping and implementation with a large method library. Widely used as a course text.
Marc Fonteijn's long-running video series and podcast of conversations with service design practitioners, aimed squarely at people doing the work.
The UK government's manual for designing and running public services: the Service Standard, guidance on discovery, alpha, beta and live, and on user research and service design.
International organisation supporting the development of service design practice, with local chapters, an academy, a journal and an annual conference.
Questions you might have
Then keep going
The UK's national strategic body for design, home of the Double Diamond and the Systemic Design Framework.
A community-authored set of principles that put the people affected by design at the centre, foregrounding lived experience and community-controlled outcomes.
A volunteer-run weekend where people in cities around the world prototype new services around a shared theme. No experience needed.
Ten principles for designing government services, starting with 'start with user needs'. Short enough to read in five minutes and widely borrowed outside government.
Nielsen Norman Group on what interviews can and cannot reveal, including fallible memory and rationalised accounts of past behaviour, and why they pair with observation.
Mapping what a person does, thinks and feels as they try to get something done across a service. Nielsen Norman Group's introduction covers the anatomy and the pitfalls.
GOV.UK Service Manual guidance on learning about user needs through existing evidence, interviews, observation and the people who support users.
Author of Good Services and co-founder of the School of Good Services. Formerly Director of Design for the UK government.
A volunteer-run festival of talks, workshops and open studios in London, running alongside the London Design Festival each September.
A self-paced online course from the Interaction Design Foundation covering the fundamentals of service design.
London's long-running service design meetup, going since 2015, with roughly monthly talks for experienced practitioners, newcomers and the curious alike. Also a podcast and a YouTube channel of recorded talks.
Recordings of talks from the Service Lab London meetup on YouTube, going back several years. A good way to hear practitioners describe real work.
The Government Office for Science's introduction to systems thinking for complex public sector problems, bringing together guidance, tools and case studies.