# Understand the Service Design Process

DevFeed: [Understand the Service Design Process](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/understand-the-service-design-process-9065.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://ixdf.org/literature/article/understand-the-service-design-process>)

Author: Jodi Forlizzi; John Zimmerman

Published: 2026-08-10T13:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [UX Daily - User Experience Daily](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/ux-daily-user-experience-daily.md>)

Topics: [User experience (UX)](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ux.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/systems.md>)

Tags: [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/systems.md>), [ux](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ux.md>)

## AI overview

The article explains service design as a user-centered process for moving from a current service system to a preferred future state. It introduces stakeholder models, service blueprints, and customer journey maps as tools for representing and refining services holistically.

## Source excerpt

A user-centered design process maps the current state of the world and envisions preferred future states in the form of new computational artifacts. Service design relies on a similar process with some important differences. Most importantly, a service design process results in a system, a service concept and a strategy for transitioning from the current system to the preferred system. Unlike UCD and UX, which focus almost exclusively on the user, service designers discover solutions at the intersection of the service provider's and customer's needs. As a result, a service design gets expressed through a series of models that serve as a description of what a service is, how it meets the need...