A design methodology for real services

Abstract

As we observe in practice, software services act mostly as interface components that provide electronic access to the actual services behind, and the characteristics of these two types of services are very different. The fact that the user will eventually use or take part in actual services motivates us to shift our focus from software services to a more holistic view in order to better design user-centric services. In this paper we discuss the real service concept, which is composed of software and actual services, and the important factors regarding them. We, then, propose a methodology to support the designer in specifying real services and their design artifacts. Finally, we apply the proposed methodology to a motivating example and discuss its advantages as well as some open issues in light of our experience.