"Let's improve UX."
Many companies rally around this idea and focus on refining app screens or customer service manuals. Yet even after polishing every customer-facing interface, some services fail to improve—or worse, the frontline collapses under pressure.
Why?
Because they overlook an obvious truth: services are delivered by humans.
Drawing from the lecture "Everyone's Experience" at FOURDIGIT Service Design School, this article explores how to design services that are truly sustainable.
1. Service Quality Is Determined by People
Imagine a restaurant. For guests, a "good experience" means tasty food, smooth service, and a pleasant atmosphere. But what if, behind the scenes, the kitchen is poorly laid out, order slips are hard to read, and the air conditioning barely works?
Staff become frustrated. Mistakes increase. Service slows down. Food quality drops. And inevitably, the customer experience suffers.
Waiters, too, are part of the service. They are human. Their sense of pride, loyalty, and motivation toward the restaurant directly affects how customers feel.
Digital services are no different. Behind an app are customer support teams, engineers running systems, and staff managing operations. If the experience of the people providing the service (Employee Experience) is poor, that friction will surface as a degraded user experience.
UX design is not just about customers. It is about designing the experience of everyone involved in delivering the service.
2. Employee Experience (EX) Is Not Just "Perks"
Employee Experience is often mistaken for office design or benefits. In service design, it means something else.
The premise is simple: improving employee experience improves service quality—and ultimately business success.
- Are internal tools easy to use and resistant to errors?
- Can staff access customer data smoothly?
- Are manuals intuitive and practical?
In one apparel company's DX project, the team radically redesigned the management systems used by store staff and headquarters. Creating an environment where employees—who take pride in their brand—can work comfortably and confidently led directly to better service for customers.
In services, staff can sometimes become the most impactful interface a user encounters.
3. Managers and Executives Need "Experience" Too
Let's zoom out further.
Manager and executive experience is also a design target. Leadership is about decision-making—but if data is fragmented or frontline realities are hidden, good decisions are impossible.
Dashboards that clearly show the state of the business, reporting lines that convey what's really happening on the ground—these are critical touchpoints that must be designed.
Good service design improves not only frontline execution, but also the experience of running the service itself. Creating an environment where leaders can make healthy, informed decisions is part of service design in its broadest sense.
4. Conclusion: Every Experience Is Connected
Service design starts with users and aims to deliver the best possible experience—while succeeding as a business and being implemented in society.
But services do not exist in isolation. They are built, delivered, and sustained by employees, managers, and executives. Ignoring the experience of those who provide the service ultimately undermines business success itself.
Designing services means extending imagination beyond users—to the everyday work and lives of everyone involved.
This article is based on content from FOURDIGIT Service Design School.
For more information, please feel free to contact us.
