EXPERIENCE DESIGN AND SERVICE INNOVATION - 2025/6

Module Overview

This module explores the dynamic intersection of experience design, strategic design thinking, and service innovation, with a focus on creating meaningful, user-centric services across physical and digital touchpoints. Students will examine how service design principles can be applied to develop customer-centric experiences that drive value, loyalty, and differentiation, particularly in sectors such as hospitality, travel, retail, and other high-contact service industries.

Through a combination of theory and hands-on practice, students will engage with strategic design thinking as a process to address complex service challenges and opportunities, aligning innovation efforts with broader organisational goals. Emphasis is placed on understanding user behaviour, needs, and emotions to design service experiences that are not only functional but also emotionally resonant and contextually relevant.

The module also explores the role of digital technologies in transforming service experiences, including digital touchpoints, platforms, and data-driven personalisation. Students will apply service design tools such as journey mapping, service blueprinting, prototyping, and co-creation to develop innovative solutions that integrate both physical and digital dimensions of service delivery.

Module provider

Surrey Business School

Module Leader

ASHTON Mark (Hosp & Tour)

Number of Credits: 15

ECTS Credits: 7.5

Framework: FHEQ Level 7

Module cap (Maximum number of students): N/A

Module Availability

Semester 2

Prerequisites / Co-requisites

None

Module content

Indicative content includes:
¿ Foundations of experience economy and service innovation
¿ Strategic design thinking and value creation
¿ Customer journey mapping and persona development
¿ Service blueprinting and touchpoint orchestration
¿ Digital experience design and data-driven personalisation
¿ User experience (UX), Interaction Design (IxD), and AI driven customer experience
¿ Co-creation and participatory innovation approaches
¿ Emotional engagement and service aesthetics
¿ Hospitality and high-touch service contexts
¿ Experience metrics and service performance evaluation
¿ Inclusive, ethical, and sustainable service design

Assessment pattern

Alternative Assessment

N/A

Assessment Strategy

The assessment strategy is designed to:
enable you to demonstrate your ability to develop/apply an innovative solution to a service journey within service organisations. You will be required to show that you have both the relevant design tools and appropriate methodologies to manage this process and create innovative solutions or improve current ones optimising the learnings from this module.

In addition, the assessment strategy will enable you to prove that you are building up your knowledge and understanding of service design and the opportunities technology provides to innovate service journeys.

Thus, the summative assessment for this module consists of:

Strategic service innovation project where students will design and present a customer-centric service innovation for a selected industry context

You will be required to undertake secondary or digital primary research with a small group of service users for a selected service organisation to understand their current frustrations/friction points/perceived limitations of the existing service experienced/provided. With the results, you will apply a contemporary service design model/technique of your choice, to develop/apply an innovative solution -or improve a current one- to an entire customer journey for the same service organisation, able to create new business value for all stakeholders, including society and environment. You will need to present the findings using a service blueprint and other tools shared in the module.

Individual learning e-portfolio
You will be required to critically reflect on and evaluate your own learning, which should include your in-class activities and service design workshops. You will be required to produce a one-page mind map of your own learning and expand this to illustrate how it will be applied in the workplace in your future careers.

Formative assessment:
You will be required to contribute to the activities and service design workshops to demonstrate the development of your knowledge and mastery of academic research as well as demonstrate awareness of current industry trends. Feedback will be provided as outlined below.

Feedback:
¿ During the first activity, the assignments and the feedback process are explained
¿ Feedback is also provided during and after the in-class activities and service design workshops
¿ As the activities are built around topic-specific exercises in a group setting, students not only benefit from lecturer feedback but also receive peer evaluations;
¿ The pre-assignment service design workshops are aimed to equip you with the tools and techniques required for your summative assessment and are an integral part of this module. During these sessions, you will work in groups on a task which reflects the requirements of the assignments and receive feedback on your work
¿ Once marking is completed, you are provided with feedback, which contains detailed generic feedback as well as a breakdown of marks. This enables you to assess your own performance compared to your peers

Module aims

• Provide students with a systematic understanding of the service design techniques that can facilitate the purposeful imagining of new, and improvement of existing, service journeys.
• Develop students¿ capabilities in strategic design thinking for service-led innovation
• Equip students with practical tools for designing customer-centric and digitally enabled service experiences
• Develop understanding on how innovative technologies can best be designed into these journeys to provide new value for a balanced range of stakeholders
• Enable students to apply service design approaches to drive innovation in complex organisational settings

Learning outcomes

Methods of Teaching / Learning

The learning and teaching strategy is designed to:
provide you with a battery of techniques and models to facilitate service design in innovative and customer-focused service organisations. The module will provide you with a combination of the necessary conceptual knowledge, an awareness of the contemporary challenges and considerations to be made, and practical skills to design, lead and manage experience design and service transformation in future roles.
The learning and teaching methods include:
¿ interactive lectures with supporting materials from a range of perspectives within service design, design thinking, innovation, and digital transformation to provide you with a holistic framework of knowledge
¿ hands-on service design workshops, exercises, practical examples, and topical case studies to critically discuss and apply theoretical knowledge to contemporary industry practices
¿ a group-based service innovation lab in which students develop an innovative service solution -or improve a current one- to an entire customer journey for a service organisation
¿ supporting guest service design workshops by practitioners
¿ a field trip to experience innovative servicescape design
¿ formative feedback sessions

Indicated Lecture Hours (which may also include seminars, tutorials, workshops and other contact time) are approximate and may include in-class tests where one or more of these are an assessment on the module. In-class tests are scheduled/organised separately to taught content and will be published on to student personal timetables, where they apply to taken modules, as soon as they are finalised by central administration. This will usually be after the initial publication of the teaching timetable for the relevant semester.

Reading list

https://readinglists.surrey.ac.uk
Upon accessing the reading list, please search for the module using the module code: MANM608

Other information

Surrey Business School is committed to developing graduates with strengths in Employability, Digital Capabilities, Global and Cultural Capabilities, Sustainability, and Resourcefulness and Resilience. This module is designed to allow students to develop knowledge, skills, and capabilities in the following areas: Digital capabilities: This module focuses on developing students¿ capabilities in service design techniques and models by which current and cutting-edge digital technologies can be designed into existing and new service journeys, therefore delivering service innovation through technology to create business value. Students will learn how to use Smaply, a service design software, to design and map service journeys. Also, students will use the virtual learning environment (VLE), SurreyLearn, video conferencing platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. These include accessing teaching and learning materials and engaging with their instructors and peers in a number of formats (i.e., online, face to face). Students will be encouraged to use the discussion boards for communication. Employability: The assessments in this module require students to extract business insights from existing/potential service users and to develop an innovative solution to an entire customer journey for a service organisation that creates new business value for all stakeholders. These analytical and design skills will prepare students to be successful managers in the digital age. Global and cultural capabilities: Students will learn how to interpret results of service success in diverse businesses and accounting for sectoral, national, and regional differences to consider how to improve/redesign service journeys. Resourcefulness and Resilience: Students will be required to use a range of sources to identify relevant organisations and their service results, conduct independent research, network with relevant service users, and work to develop innovative service solutions. Finding these solutions through unstructured problems is the key learning aspect of this module that will develop students¿ resourcefulness and resilience. Sustainability: Students will learn how to reflect on ethical, inclusive, and sustainable considerations in designing services for diverse users thereby supporting sustainability in the service sector.

Please note that the information detailed within this record is accurate at the time of publishing and may be subject to change. This record contains information for the most up to date version of the programme / module for the 2025/6 academic year.