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How services work now

Services today are composed of small component pieces joined together through data or user experience to form a seamless user journey that helps a user achieve their goal.

The goal that a service helps you to achieve can be very large – like buying a house – or it can be very small – like getting lunch. Either way, it will be broken down into smaller parts that help you achieve that overall goal.

Services in the internet age are not only defined by the user who’s looking for them, but composed of ‘small pieces loosely joined’ as David Weinberger predicted in 2002. For example, when you’re embarking on the goal of buying a house you might find that you need to complete several very distinct steps in order to be able to achieve it – like hiring a surveyor. Those steps themselves will then be broken down into smaller tasks. For example, when getting a survey done, you might need to first book a time for that survey to be done, then pay for it and review the final result.

In that way, each service is broken down into steps, and each step into a series of tasks. Each one of these steps or tasks will probably be called ‘a service’ by the person running it. What defines the edge of a service is very dependent on your context, so if all you do all day everyday is provide surveys, it’s easy to think of the service as providing surveys.

While it’s important for each step and task to be well-designed, it doesn’t mean that these things are services. The only person who gets to decide what the service is, is the person who has the goal they need to achieve – and that’s your user. It’s your job to orchestrate all of the pieces of this service in as seamless a journey as possible, even if you don’t provide the whole service yourself.

Designing services that are defined by user needs can seem like a daunting prospect. These services could be very large, and involve multiple different organisations to string together. It’s important therefore to have some sense of how to break down a service into its component parts so that each ‘loosely joined’ piece can be designed in the context of the whole service.