Why Do We Need Service Design in Pakistan?
Ideate Innovation
There is a lot of talk happening around service design. People are paying quite some attention to it and it is now among the fastest-growing design principles in the world.
But why the sudden attention?
That’s straightforward — private and public organisations are now realizing how important great experiences are for internal as well as external users.
Any business or company that focuses on the customers is 60% more profitable, compared to the ones that pay little to no attention to the customers. Guess what? Service design is all about applying user-centered design to the services for people to use.
Recap to What is Service Design?
A service helps you achieve something, like making a reservation online, listening to music, and getting an appointment.
Service design aligns and connects the system, tools, and people. It aims to deliver the end-to-end journey of service. A great service design will always ensure the overall customer experience and how to deliver it successfully.
Service Design in Pakistan
In recent years, there has been a great shift in Pakistan regarding service design. People, businesses, and organizations are putting their time, effort, and money into service design.
Design thinking gained awareness in Pakistan around early 2008. This was the same time when IDEO, a design consultancy, invested in growing its presence through thought leadership. Though there is no evidence whether the evidence was applied in the later years, as examples of human-centered design across industries in Pakistan were limited. But the approach to design thinking has since been taught in various universities as part of communication design programs.
If you go on LinkedIn now and search for design thinkers, service designers, etc. in Pakistan, you will find more than 9,000 professionals who cite design thinking as their principal skill.
But having these many design thinking professionals does not mean that Pakistan has these many people who are actually qualified. This just means that about 9,000 people have only just grasped the trend of design thinking enough to put it up on their CVs.
The one very important question is, if Pakistan is using service design and design thinking, does it just not work? Or are we not doing it properly?
The answer is simple, we are not investing resources, we are not taking the right steps.
The biggest adopter of service design in Pakistan is the banking industry. They have certainly made some great investments in developing design labs and a vision of technology’s first future. But there are still several industries that have fallen short of their unwillingness to invest in customer experience for the netizens.
Why Services and Products Fail in Pakistan?
It’s very common in our society and culture that whenever a new service or product comes into view, it just tries to dig its claws in the society, disregarding the requirements of the consumers.
International brands may not make much effort in understanding the norms, cultures, languages, restrictions, etc. of our society and may fail in gaining a larger consumer base. However, even local manufacturers and business owners fail to understand this concept.
Pakistan is a country rich in culture, society, classes, traditions, and languages. Companies fail because they skip the most important part of service design, research.
“One solution for all” cannot work.
The next question, how do we make it work? Through research, field work, interviews, personas, etc. It is imperative to do the research, to understand what the users living in Pakistan actually require.
Ideate is the bearer of such research and insights. Here is why we believe service design needs to be prevalent in Pakistan:
- There is a wide range of personas to consider
- There are too many assumptions around what a user wants and needs
- Work on user experience is being, but just at the front; the core is left as is
- Needs of the users are not addressed