SDN Team
Author - SDN Team

We asked leading practitioners giving talks and workshops at the Service Design Global Conference to answer the 3 key questions. Today we asked Robert Neal, a design consultant at Qualia, to give us his take.

1) Can you explain what service design is? And how your company implements it / uses that field?

Many practitioners delineate service design from product design. More acutely that service design is the analog for services that product design is for products. I think that's right. Qualia is an experience design consultancy so we focus on three main areas: service experience design, user experience design, and branding. We have the pleasure of getting to cross from product design to service design both across clients and within projects where products and services are both essential offerings.

2) What do you believe is the greatest opportunity for your company using service design? 

A large part of Qualia's offering is in applied cognitive and behavioral science and not in a superficial, pop-sci way. Our company produces original research in applying well-researched science to service experience design in a principled way. This is still a nascent field and we see no limit on the amount of research we can do in applied behavioral science for service design and experience design in general. As we produce more and more research each new client of our's will get more value from this body of research and expertise and we'll be able to deliver ever more demonstrably effective results. 

3) Can you share three tips for implementing service design in their own practice?  

It's difficult to come up with widely applicable tips for such a broad and nuanced field as service design. But when designing for humans I think it's useful to keep in mind that (1) humans are not purely rational agents (2) researching and experimenting are invaluable tools but can lead you in the wrong direction if done improperly and (3) you should always question assumptions but don't let that block you from making improvements to your service.

Robert J. Neal is a board member at service design consultancy Qualia where he serves as a consultant for applied behavioral sciences in service design and user experience design. He is an active researcher in applied cognitive science and is also a frequent speaker. 

Read Robert Neal 's full biography here.

And find out more about his SDGC16 workshop/talk "Why Our Customers’ Brains Fail and How to Design for It"  here.

Related Community Knowledge

Meet the service designer Meet the service designer: Natalie Kuhn (she/her)

Meet the service designer: Natalie Kuhn (she/her)

Along with fellow service design pioneers in the New York City area, Natalie Kuhn helped establish the SDN New York Chapter. In the years since, her team and chapter have been recognised with awards for their chapter activities, and she has been involved with the global SDN's efforts around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, as part of a taskforce established in 2020. She also manages to find time for her day job: Managing service design at US banking giant Capital One. Here, she chats with Touchpoint Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes about her roles and ambitions.

Continue reading
Meet the service designer Patti Hunt:  Meet the service designer

Patti Hunt: Meet the service designer

Patti Hunt is the founder and director of MAKE Studios, a service innovation company based in Hong Kong. For this edition of the Touchpoint Profile, she had a chat with Jesse Grimes, the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, about her work with multi-national corporations, NGOs and start-ups in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as the unique challenges posed by practicing service design in Hong Kong.

Continue reading
Meet the service designer Eleonora Carnasa: Meet the service designer

Eleonora Carnasa: Meet the service designer

Eleonora Carnasa is a Bulgaria-based service designer and founder of Fabrica 360, a design and innovation agency. In this profile, she had a chat with Jesse Grimes, Touchpoint’s Editor-in-Chief, about her efforts to grow service design in Eastern Europe.

Continue reading
Meet the service designer Luis Alt: Meet the service designer

Luis Alt: Meet the service designer

Established in 2010, Livework’s São Paulo outpost is a service design pioneer in one of the world’s top-ten largest economies - Brazil. Since then, the team has worked with an enviable roster of clients, but also experienced the challenges of carrying out service design before it became widely recognised. In this edition of the Touchpoint Profile, Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes speaks to Luis Alt, one of the studio’s founders.

Continue reading