Book Review - This is Service Design Thinking

Service Design has been an interesting topic for me for a some time. Finally I wanted to get more understanding about it and its basic. That's the reason I got my hands on a book that was saying to be "the book" for service design -This is Service Design Thinking by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider.

I was super excited to start reading about the wonderful world of service design. I read and read and read and became really bored. First hundred pages of the book the authors are trying to say WE ARE IMPORTANT. I knew it already, designing good services is important and doing it structured way with service design must be even more important. After this start, I wasn't anymore really sure. If someone needs to state in so many different ways that they are important, maybe they really are not.

In the middle section book got better. It told in short articles, bit like blog posts, methods to do service design. Unfortunately these were quite simplistic and didn't dig into most of those properly. If you think of a book like Gamestorming, that's about ten times more useful for these methods than this book.

My hopes was for the last section of the book, examples of service design. As the whole book, that turned out to be a disappointment too. Examples were not really interesting and the way those were presented was quite dull. In one of the examples the designed service never got in to use, but they stated project was still a success. I think the exact opposite. Service which was designed but never got live, is a failure, real big failure.

Book was planned by top service designers and that might have been that the reading experience also failed. They tried in top of everything to renew the concept of a book with coloring, icons and lines going here and there. That made the book complex to read. Maybe there would not have been need to renew a such a working concept that a book is.

I honestly don't recommend this book to anyone. I want to believe Service Design and the people behind service design. This book does no good to the practice. There must be better books about the subject than this one.

I don't think I learned anything about this book. At least not in the positive way. Do yourself a favor, mark this to the "no go" list.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen