India Post Services—A Speculative Service Design for Behaviour Change

Abstract

Service design has proved its potential in creating effective and innovative solutions, desirable by users as well as service provider organizations. Service design, which follows holistic and human-centred approach, exhibits an enormous scope to address complex, large-scale problems like designing citizen services that are experiential, efficient and effective. Citizen services involve complexity due to the diverse user base and their varying needs; rapid technological advancements and increasing demands of users. The involvement of multiple stakeholders, socio-political and environmental changes across the globe makes it more complicated. In order to explore the effectiveness of the service design approach, methods and tools for citizen services, we undertook a speculative case study of Indian Postal Services. The study was broadly divided into research, analysis, ideation and conceptualization stages. A mix of quantitative and qualitative methods was used for user research, and derived insights were taken forward through ideation workshops using tools provided by CraftChange—service design for behaviour change framework. Ideas were clustered to create a service ecosystem comprising of peripheral as well as core services for India Post. This study emphasizes on adopting differentiating practices, tools and methods while designing citizen services, to achieve greater adoption and sustained usage of the services. Service design for behaviour change approach towards citizen services seems to be promising to have more holistic, valuable and sustainable services for the users, service providers, associated organizations and the society and environment.