“A good service clearly explains its purpose. The purpose of the service must be clear to users at the start of using the service. That means a user with no prior knowledge must understand what the service will do for them and how it will work.“
(Lou Downe, Good Services – How to Design Services that Work (Bis Publishers: Amsterdam, 2020) at 56.)
Service design is about implementing a user-friendly service that meets the user’s needs efficiently and effectively. Consider getting a coffee from Starbucks. The experience is pretty good, right? You are greeted by a friendly barista who allows you to custom-order anything from the menu. It is ready quick and as you like it, with your name written on the side of the cup with a little smiley face. There is no reason that this type of design cannot be used in the legal context to improve mediation services. Service design means, “…we need to think in terms of designing for relationships and experiences that evolve and change over time, rather than just in terms of short moments of consumption or usage.”[1] Parties in the mediation process enter into an agreement to provide a specific service to the disputing clients and the lawyers who represent them. The mediator is a service provider and the provision of these services can always benefit from improved design.
Read about the three ways I propose a mediator could integrate Service Design into their mediation practice through my guest blog posted on the ADR Institute of Ontario’s website
[1] Andy Polaine, Lavrans Lovlie and Ben Reason, Service Design – From Insight to Implementation (Rosenfeld Media: New York, 2013).