Service design is a user-centered approach, but it defines users in quite a different way from UX design and other disciplines. In UX design, when we talk about “users”, we are almost always talking about customers, or at least an end-user who is “outside” the service. Crucially, service designers gather the experiences and needs of not only the customer, but also users “inside” the service. They also work with stakeholders on both the customer side and service side to co-create possible solutions and service improvements.

This is a great time for the design researcher. Within user-experience design, service design, and to a lesser extent, industrial design, user research has gone from being an outsider activity, to being tolerated, to being the norm. Across industry events, conferences, online forums, school curricula, and professional practice, there’s a tacit agreement that designing for the user is the preferred way to think about design.

Portigal, Steve. Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights

Lean is about not wasting people’s time, then there are certain principles to our craft that we should be confident enough to realize as true. There are whole books written on design for these reasons, regardless of what an “art” some might think it is. It is literally a waste of my time to test whether something should be red or blue when I know that red is problematic for the margins of us who are colorblind and should be inclusively considered when it comes to products being out in the world. I do not care that blue performs better on some sandboxed tests. The marginal are never going to come out of tests in the majority.