Service Design And UX

Service Excellence = Design × Culture   As a designer and scholar interested in service innovation, I was intrigued when Amazon recommended Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss (Harvard Business Review).   One idea from the book resonated with me: Service Excellence = Design × Culture. This deceptively simple expression underscores a critical insight: service excellence is not achieved through design or culture alone, but through their interaction.   The authors argue that service excellence depends on deliberate trade-offs across four “service truths” (P6): 1. service offering: Which specific attributes of service are you competing on? 2. Funding mechanism: How is excellence paid for? 3. Employee management system: Are employees set up for success? And 4. Customer management system: How are customers managed and trained?   Design is often the visible dimension of service, such as spaces, furniture, and interfaces. Because of the tangibility, the design is relatively easy to modify. We can renovate an office, replace furniture, or update a digital interface.   Culture, by contrast, operates more quietly yet powerfully. It functions as a form of what might be called “absentee leadership”, shaping behavior without constant oversight (P8). Culture is embedded in rituals, events, performance metrics, and shared norms within offices or labs. A strong culture can sometimes compensate for weaker design, while a poorly aligned culture can undermine even the most sophisticated service innovation.   As the authors note, “Culture doesn’t just tell you what to do. It shows you how to think.” (P8). David Kelley, co-founder of IDEO, described the firm’s ethos as “enlightened trial and error”—a phrase that encapsulates IDEO’s culture of rapid prototyping, experimentation, and learning (Perry, 1995; P161).   The enduring question the book raises is not simply what service excellence looks like, but how it is sustained: how cultures of service excellence are built, shaped, and what happens inside organizations that consistently achieve this elusive goal (P163).   More books and inspiration: https://lnkd.in/eCskR5yE

Culture is and should be something we include when designing for behavior change. This great book by Erin Meyer called The Culture Map can help you get your mindset right on culture. Culture matters because it helps us get more context on how our solutions are going to work in different places, the norms and culture in one place may not work in the next. I learned this not only by reading books like these but by first-hand experience, as I have lived in 10+ cities including Singapore, Dubai, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Madrid… and every place taught me something different about how people make decisions, communicate, and respond to change. The same message, design, or behavioral intervention can land completely differently depending on the context. What you may think is motivating or respectful in one culture can feel confusing or even off-putting in another, so never copy paste generic strategies. Culture shapes what people pay attention to, how they evaluate information, and how they build trust, all things that matter when we’re trying to influence behavior or design for adoption. Here are 4 areas you can think about and include in your archetypes or change frameworks: 1) Communication: low vs high context 2) Evaluation: direct vs indirect negative feedback 3)Persuading: principles-first vs applications-first Scheduling: flexible vs linear time These may sound simple, but they influence everything from how feedback is given, to how quickly teams make decisions, to how people experience time pressure or structure. When we bring culture in early, not as an afterthought, but as part of our behavioral framing.... we design with more realism, it also helps us anticipate friction, design around norms, and build strategies that actually fit the environments they’re meant for. This is how we approach culture and change projects in our advisory and consulting work. Have you read this book, and implemented some of the learnings?

Service Design often presents itself in terms of value rather than culture and power. A good way into the latter is to to audit service interactions for who has to identify themselves and how. This Baudrillardian dystopia is an extreme example: https://lnkd.in/gSpizvSr. Services are interactions between people who are not in a relationship. (I do not 'service' my family, and imagine designing friend interactions [hence, clankers].) If people engage a service regularly, i.e., give their custom to people, a relation might form as those involved in the service come to know each other. This means that how people, who do not know each other, begin a service interaction is a crucial aspect of how that interaction will go. Which services require the service provider to say their name or display their name? And is it just their first name, or their full name? And with a re-articulation of their being a representative of their employer? And which services require, or at least encourage, the service recipient to introduce themselves? The latter is an ironic difference between digital and in-person service design. Digital services almost always demand that you fill in a profile before any engagement with the service, even though the app will treat you like a number and only send bots to interact with you. You have more chance of getting respectful anonymity by trying to find the in-person service. Identifying yourself can be a source of (cultural) power or a way of ceding power; just as identifying the organisation of which you are merely a delegate can grant you authority, or allow your personhood some autonomy from what the organisation is making you say and do. And all of this plays out not just in frontline service provision, between 'customers' and workers, but in internal interactions within any sizable organisation. Are you, for example, able to make a complaint in your organisation about being bullied by a boss anonymously? At the moment, my university is doing 'consultation' on unwisely drastic organisational change. To provide feedback, you must provide your name, something that does not feel safe given jobs are on the line. Of course, identifying yourself and how you identify yourself is very culturally specific. A great way for a multinational to demonstrate its colonialism is by making service workers present themselves in ways that violate local mores. As we struggle through a period of persistent identity theft, deepfakes, and the pervsity of violently nationalistic anti-identity politics, the way we educate Service Designers about the cultural politics of how people commence service interactions has implications not just for dignity but also life or death.

Cross-Border Multi-Cultural UX is one of my biggest passions. After consulting organizations in 50+ countries, I began to collect examples of how Hofstede's 6 Cultural Dimensions impact cross-cultural UX: 1. Power Distance Index → Cultural interpretation of institutions Though vastly different regions, users in Australia and Qatar share respect for government institutions. These countries emphasize citizens’ responsibilities over their preferences, resulting in more disciplined behavior on government websites. In Australia, you can vote online but will get fined if you don’t vote. 2. Individualism vs. Collectivism → Cultural interpretation of self-image Western countries tend to have an individualistic emphasis on “I.” In contrast, there’s a collective “we” focus in Eastern countries. For example, our UX work for a Middle Eastern CPG brand catered to female buyers who typically shop for their families. Consumers prioritized their families’ individual needs over collective needs, building shopping lists organized by family members. 3. Masculinity vs. Femininity → Cultural interpretation of gender norms Similarly, masculine and feminine perceptions and motivations differ between Western and more traditional Eastern cultures. We once worked with a Western designer who almost chose an image depicting a woman with tattoos wearing short sleeves for a client in the Middle East. This would have been perfectly fine in many regions but perceived as inappropriate there. For our work in seven states of the Persian Gulf, we had to go as far as to tailor keffiyeh (traditional men's headdress) on pictures for each region. 4. Uncertainty Avoidance Index → Cultural interpretation of security Trust and security are paramount in Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Japan, and Germany. Germans have high uncertainty avoidance and seek multiple reassurances about security, privacy, and return policies on e-commerce sites. The opposite is true in Swedish and Dutch users. The fewer rules, the better. “I will deal with the problem if and when the problem arises” is the typical approach. 5. Long-Term vs. Short-Term Orientation → Cultural interpretation of gratification Eastern cultures are open to delayed gratification. Users in China and South Korea tolerate lengthy forms and high interaction costs if it leads to better long-term outcomes. Americans, however, expect instant gratification and would be easily annoyed by what’s considered a norm in China. 6. Indulgence vs. Restraint → Cultural interpretation of needs and preferences Sometimes excess is considered a good experience. I liken this to Banchan's side dishes in South Korea and the bento box in Japan. “The more, the better” is often followed for UX in Asia (despite otherwise low indulgence preferences). The bento box has even become a design trend for organizing content of different types and “flavors”! Western users are overwhelmed by this type of density in UX. Their golden rule? Less is more.

On a recent project in Japan, I watched a team pause over a gesture that would last no more than two seconds. It took me straight back to my student years there. With debates swirling about Asia’s dominance in the Top 50 hotels, that moment reveals something critical. In the finest Japanese hospitality teams, a micro-gesture is treated with the same strategic weight as a major decision. This is not formality. It is philosophy. And it is an operating system that global leaders are increasingly eager to understand at a deeper level. Commentary often stops at Omotenashi; the concept of anticipating needs. Yet the real drivers sit deeper: 🔹 Kodawari: disciplined refinement of micro-exactness until the emotional outcome becomes reliably repeatable. 🔹 Shuhari: mastery of form that enables intelligent deviation. 🔹 Mitate: reframing the expected to elevate perception. 🔹 Ma: intentional spacing and pause used a design tool. These are not cultural anecdotes. They function as conceptual management technologies. They shape consistency, emotional accuracy, and the guest’s sense of coherence. We use these principles inside two frameworks that anchor our UHNW advisory work across Asia and other global markets. 🔹 Precision Luxury This is a management discipline focused on eliminating experiential variance. Each gesture, sequence, sensory input, and tonal shift is a controllable variable that can be optimized and codified. Precision Luxury is Kodawari in applied form. Emotional outcomes are engineered through systematic refinement rather than surface polish. This separates service that functions from service that becomes a form of presence. 🔹 Devotion Architecture This is a strategic construct that uses the standard of regard as a performance measure, since UHNW clients judge luxury by how reliably they are honored, not by how much they are offered. Devotion Architecture draws on Shuhari, Mitate, and Ma to create environments that feel attuned, dignifying, and coherent. These principles also mirror the current ILTM Cannes conversations, where belonging and wellness have shifted from amenities to expectations. Asian properties excel because they convert cultural constructs into operational methodology. Their advantage is not a trend. It is a coherent philosophy practiced with organizational discipline. UHNW travelers feel this immediately, often before they consciously register why. As global benchmarks shift, the next era of luxury will not be defined by architecture or amenities. It will be defined by the strength of an experience operating system capable of producing emotional precision at scale. This transcends the idea of doing something “special” for a guest. Asia did not simply rise in the Top 50. It demonstrated what is possible when philosophy and execution share the same intent. Luxury is not evolving by accident. It is being redefined by those who treat experience as their core operating system. The rest are simply hosting guests.