How HCI Adopts Service Design: Unpacking Current Perceptions and Scopes of Service Design in HCI and Identifying Future Opportunities

Title of the Paper

How HCI Adopts Service Design: Unpacking current perceptions and scopes of service design in HCI and identifying future opportunities

Bibliographic Information

• Subject Area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Service Design
• Keywords: Service Design, Human-Computer Interaction, User Experience, Value Co-creation, System Design, Design Methods, Multi-stakeholder Collaboration, User Behavior, Technology Evaluation, Advanced Design Strategies

Research Background and Problem Statement

• Identified Issues and Challenges:
  In recent years, service design has gradually emerged as an important approach to address the expanding scope of interaction design. However, the intersection of service design and HCI still faces the following challenges:
  • The definitions and boundaries of service design and HCI remain unclear.
  • Service design's business-oriented nature often conflicts with HCI's technology-oriented focus.
  • Service design has multiple definitions, particularly across different academic and industry contexts.
• Significance:
  The scope of technology design is increasingly expanding to include multiple stakeholders and value networks. Service design offers a clear framework to address these complexities. Clarifying the role of service design in HCI can help resolve the integration of user experience, system design, and economic models.
• Research Motivation and Related Work:
  The motivation of this study is to systematically examine the current state of service design applications in HCI and explore future research opportunities. The study builds on recent work in the intersection of service design and HCI, such as understanding the multidimensionality of service design and clarifying the boundaries and advantages of both fields.

Proposed Solution

• Proposed Methods or Solutions:
  This study conducts a systematic literature review of 179 papers related to the application of service design in HCI. The research aims to:
  • Explore the various dimensions and application scopes of service design in HCI.
  • Identify underexplored areas of design and research within HCI.
  • Envision future directions for integrating system-level service design into HCI.
• Innovations and Key Techniques:
  A framework is proposed that categorizes service design into four dimensions (customer experience level, backstage workflow, collaborative network level, and ecosystem level) and analyzes their adoption in HCI. The study's innovations include an in-depth exploration of service design definitions in HCI literature and insights into the integration of future technologies (e.g., social computing and artificial intelligence) with service design.
• Implementation Steps:
  • Use SCOPUS to search for literature with the keyword "service design" and filter for papers relevant to HCI.
  • Conduct content analysis of the literature based on the four dimensions of service design and other inductive coding.
  • Perform statistical analysis on the usage and temporal trends of service design methods.
  • Investigate the connection between service design and emerging technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, social computing).

Research Findings

• Specific Findings:
  • The study reveals various application scopes of service design in HCI, including user journey analysis, backstage workflow design, collaborative network design, and value co-creation models.
  • It finds that the application of service design in HCI focuses more on interaction levels (customer experience and backstage workflows) and less on system-level ecosystem construction.
  • Commonly used service design methods in HCI are summarized, such as interviews, co-creation workshops, user journey mapping, and service blueprints.
  • The study identifies design potentials for future technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence) and new economic models (e.g., platform economy and sharing economy) in service design development.
• Comparative Advantages:
  Compared to traditional HCI, service design offers a broader perspective, integrating socio-economic systems and multi-stakeholder collaboration networks while considering technology-driven economic models.
• Experimental or Evaluation Results:
  • The study finds that the number of service design-related papers in HCI literature has been increasing annually since 2010, with a significant rise in 2020, likely due to growing societal interest in AI technologies and their social services.
• Limitations and Future Research Directions:
  • Limitations: Service design, as an independent framework, has not yet fully matured in the HCI field, with some studies treating it merely as a subset of interaction design.
  • Future Directions: Research on technology-driven new economic models through the lens of service ecosystem design, adopting interdisciplinary approaches that integrate business and social sciences for more systematic design.

Summary and Future Work

This paper provides a systematic analysis of the current understanding of service design in HCI, offering a solid theoretical foundation and practical reference for further research on the integration of HCI and service design. Recommendations for future work include:

• Expanding the scope of research to examine how HCI practitioners use service design methods in real-world scenarios.
• Conducting more in-depth case studies to explore specific strategies and contexts for applying service design to address complex technological demands.