Advancing Inclusive Service Design: Defining, Evaluating and Creating Universally Designed Services

Service Design (SD) may be viewed as the merge of digital, intangible and physical touchpoints to form holistic user experiences. It is a fast-growing discipline; however, universal design (UD) awareness is lacking. At some point during their life, most people will experience a mental or physical condition that limits their capacity to perform certain tasks. As such, service designers should be able to address the needs of all users, contribute to social inclusion and facilitate maximized independent living abilities. This article explores how UD can be ensured in SD. The contributions are: 1) A working definition of a Universally Designed Service, 2) Generating and piloting two new SD methods to assess the UD of services in accordance with the working definition, and 3) Generating and piloting two new SD methods to promote inclusive user need insights and synthesis and consideration of both edge-case and mainstream needs in the design process. By demonstrating four inclusive service design methods and the usefulness of the proposed definition, this paper advances efforts to define, evaluate and create universally designed services.