Monday, July 2, 2018

Getting Started in Service Design, by Joe Marquez and Annie Downey

 
In this workbook intended to supplement Library Service Design: A LITA Guide (2016), authors Joe Marquez and Annie Downey provide tools for librarians who want to perform service design but need help getting started. They define service design as “a holistic, co-creative, and user-centered approach to understanding customer behavior for the creation or refining of services” (p. 1). Key themes in service design are discussed in Chapter 2, including clarity of purpose and function, meeting current needs and expectations, consistency of service delivery, consistency of communication, interaction costs, user autonomy, and more. The authors provide a set of questions to be considered regarding each of these themes, helping the reading understand the issues surrounding them.

Chapter 3 addresses project planning, with suggestions about how to identify problems, creating teams, identifying stakeholders, setting objectives and determining a project timeline. Chapter 4 gets at the heart of service design with no less than 18 tools that readers can use to assess their services. Tools such as a service inventory, ecology map, stakeholder map, surveys, space analysis, and more can be used alone or in combination with each other to evaluate a library service and identify ways to improve it. Illustrations of many of the tools are included, and lists of key points are provided in the margins. Finally, Chapter 5 provides instructions and recommendations about pulling all the data together and summarizing the findings in a written report.

This is a useful and practical book that will provide readers with the tools they need to undertake a service design project. It would be appropriate for those who need additional assistance after reading Library Service Design, and could also be used as a stand-alone workbook for those who have not read the earlier book. It is written in a clear and engaging style and includes a short bibliography for further reading.


Joe J. Marquez and Annie Downey. Getting Started in Service Design: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians. Neal-Schuman, 2017, 107 pp., ISBN 978-0-8389-1564-6.

This review was published originally in Catholic Library World: Dec2017, Vol. 88 Issue 2, p134-134.


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