From Spotify and GiffGaff's online services to Airbnb and Uber's physical services, companies are beginning to see the advantages of improving the user experience. Hwang Chang-gyu, Chief Executive of the KT Corporation, said last year in an interview for the Financial Times that "in manufacturing, if you come up with a quality product, that's it. But offering a service requires a more emotional approach, with broader perspectives and details to impress customers." Emotions are intangible and unmeasurable at best, compared to the more systematic approach that manufacturers can employ. The understanding of these emotions has led to a new field: Service Design.

Service design is still a relatively new discipline. Its earliest public use may be Harry Beck's mapping system, used in the London Underground since 1931, whereas the term itself only seems to date back to L.G. Shostack's "How to Design a Service" in 1982. In fact, one of the first dedicated degrees was the Royal College of Art's two-year Master's that started in 2012. It is only recently that the theory has gained respect and is being used effectively to aid the user experience. It is difficult to tell in these early years whether service design is as important as other aspects of design. Certainly in this technological age there is more need for it in situations where the user may have to make sense of a vast array of information.

So what is a service? "A service is something that I use but do not own," explains Mat Hunter in a video from 2015 on the UK's Design Council website. Mat Hunter is the Chief Design Officer at the Design Council, a charity that aims to "improve people's lives through the use of design," according to its website www.designcouncil.org.uk. He goes on to say that "service design is therefore the shaping of service experiences so that they really work for people." In that sense you could say that service design is the optimisation of any physical or virtual service that is used or rented by users.

One of the most notable designs in the last few years was the combination of all UK Government websites at GOV.UK, created by the Government Digital Service (GDS) in 2012. The director of Design at GDS, Ben Terret, told the Design Council that "GOV.UK gets 12 million visitors a week and almost everyone has to interact with government at some point, so it's vital that we make that as user focused as possible". The success of the website has been enormous, saving the Government �61.5 million in 2014, according to the GOV.UK website.

These savings as a result of the GOV.UK's simplicity are a good indication of its successful design, and led to it winning the Design Museum's Design of the Year award in 2013. Patrick Burgoyne, who nominated the project, said "it may not look particularly exciting or pretty, but that is not the point." However, does this make the website appear 'less designed' to the public? How can such a new discipline gain public respect when even the famous Dieter Rams' design principle that "good design is as little design as possible" is still largely accepted?

There may not be an answer to this question yet, and who knows whether there ever will be? It seems that service design can have a tremendous effect on the success of a product, and can be the deciding factor on whether it is accepted by its users. Who can forget the infamous 'Clippy' - Microsoft's Office Assistance - that infuriated Word users for years with its inability to help at the correct time, or to provide any useful answers at all? Certainly, digital assistants have improved hugely since the birth of 'Clippy' in 1997, but it is a perfect example of how forcing your best solution on users can have a negative effect.

It is an exciting time: Siri, Apple's assistant, is helping to build user trust and offer genuinely useful data, and apps such as Uber and Deliveroo can save city dwellers time and effort with their simple and intuitive designs. Services are beginning to pass the Uncanny Valley (a term coined by Masahiro Mori in 1970) - the negative and creepy effect of almost-human robots - as we enter an age of seamless human-robot interactions. It shouldn't be long before we start seeing service design being used for more inclusive services, rather than just apps for the fortunate.