Difference Between Product And Service Design

The essence of any business that exists is the products or services that the business offers. Every operation in that business then focuses on those fundamental aspects of the businesses reason of existence. In order for the business to do well, it should have well-structured service and product designs.

Product and service design is the key element to customer satisfaction and competitive advantage. According to the Chartered Quality Institute when an organization designs its processes they structure a way by which it will operate. It spells out how it will implement its business strategy and how it meets its objectives when it has made and delivered to its customers. Designs have to be planned and need that there are resources, skills and

This is especially important since quality is measure by the customer’s experience of an outcome and not the attributes of an output (Andrzejewski 2007). Whatever is spelt out in the service or product design impacts the organizations operations and its overall success.

It is imperative that people involved in the designing stage in any business understand how, when and where to distribute the assets of the business so that it can achieve maximum operational, financial and market share performance. Service and product designers should know the organization and its business in such a way that they understand its objectives, constraints and its financial position. All the functional areas of the organization should be involved in the design decisions.

Service design and product design have numerous similarities but there are main elements of these two that spell out their differences as stipulated in table 1 below (Lopez-Ona

2. Service Design

When service components are planned and organized inorder to improve the quality of the quality of services and the interaction between customer and service providers it is called service design. According to the Service Design Network these component are people, infrastructure, communication and material. Primarily, service design focuses on the needs of a customer so that the service is user-friendly, competitive and relevant to the customers.

Service interfaces within the service design are designed for intangible assets that are useful, profitable ad desirable from the customer’s point of view. These assets are effective, efficient and different for the provider. Service designers visualize, make and choreograph solutions that are not in existence yet. They watch customer needs and behavior and turn them into potential future services. In the process they explore, generate and evaluate and redesign existing services which is as much of a challenge as developing new innovative services.

Product and service design will be discussed further