The ITT Institute of Design hosted a conference on Design Research. The conference touched the broader aspect of design research, and how it’s changing the way corporations seek new ways to innovate. You can check the videos of most presentations from the ITT website.
Shelley Evenson, from Carnegie Mellon, gave a talk on new ways of designing for service. The presentation focused on service design methods, and how they were derived from other areas such as interaction design, business process and participatory research
Dan Staffer, from Adaptative Path, posted a short piece on service vs. product design a while ago (actually almost 3 years ago), but it’s still relevant.
…service design is “the field concerned with the development of services to meet specific needs” (Shedroff) focusing on “customer experiences in industries such as retail, banking, transportation, healthcare, business-to-business enterprises, and education” (IDEO). John Thackara in his book In the Bubble makes the claim that we’re moving away from designing things (products) and towards more services, more joint ownership of things. And certainly even traditional product companies like IDEO seem to be pushing service design hard.
Daniel Pink recently published a career guide called The adventures of Johnny Bunko. He spent some time in Japan studying the manga culture, which obviously influenced his book. Instead of going through advices using the traditional, boring style that everyone expects to find in such books, he uses a manga-style story to explain six career principles that people should follow in order to be successful.
I really like the style of the book, it’s engaging, fun, and most importantly, memorable (which, I believe should be the aim of an ‘instructional’ book). What about using the same idea to produce an end-of-project report for your client? I bet that it would be much more interesting (and popular) as compared to a fifty-page word document.
And the video is amazing too! The publishers made a very smart move to market the book by editing a ‘teaser trailer’.
The podcasts from the 2007 Emergence Conference hosted by Carnegie Mellon School of Design are now available from the Emergence website. Podcasts include talks from Oliver King, Jennifer Leonard, Mark Jones, amongst others. The conference focused on how design can leverage and innovate service-related businesses:
All facets of the economy have a service component, from retail and manufacturing to non-profits and public service sectors. Emergence 2007 will explore how to best support and develop these services using topics and issues surrounding design, business, technology and social programs. This year’s conference will provide insights on current service design practices, business opportunities in services, the technology behind services, and its outlook for the future.
Carnegie Mellon School of Design has been doing a great job in pushing the boundaries of service design. Over the last two years, the school hosted the Emergence Conference, which brought together top professionals in the service design arena.
Business Week interviews Dan Boyarksi, head of Carnegie Mellon School of Design, who talks about why service design is becoming an emergent practice and the role designers have in helping companies to innovate.
Apple is developing a range of applications in partnership with other companies such as Intel and Cisco to enable the iPhone to interact with other devices. This surely opens a door to create a number of services and applications around the iPhone. For example, Cisco is developing a software that enables iPhone user to ‘flick’ documents to their desktop computers.
Looking ahead, iPhones could be used as electronic wallets or virtual keys to access other services.
Paul Bennett gave an interesting talk at TED about how being empathic towards customers can help you spot small things that make a big impact. Time and time again I get amazed by how simple solutions can have such a great impact on a service or product. Companies usually think that innovation is about spending billions in R&D, but sometimes the simple act of stepping on your customers’ shoes to spot simple, yet often overlooked solutions can make a great difference.
Sometimes I tend to think that design consultancies such as IDEO and Engine also play the role of corporate psychotherapists. Companies usually suffer from this ‘process centred’ obsession, and we just step in to make them realise that solutions are quite simple, it’s just a matter of changing the way of how you perceive things. Innovative companies are the ones that manage to make a leap from process centric to customer centric (sometimes with a bit of a help of user-centric psychotherapy)!
Claire Rowland, from Seren, did a presentation on Service Design at the European Information Architecture in 2007. The presentation offers interesting resources on service design methodologies and processes.
MIT is doing some really cool research on how to use mobile technology to map the flow of people in cities. Each blue dot on the picture above represents a mobile phone, which can be tracked in real time. One really interesting application could be public transport planning. If you know where people are, and if you can spot ‘migration’ patterns, it would certainly help increase transport efficiency.
I was going through my old notebook and came across some notes about an interview Sam Lucent (HP’s design chief) gave to Business Week. This interview was published a while ago (November 2005), but the concept is quite contemporary:
As products become much more complex, it’s not about designing the individual product, it’s about orchestrating this complex ecosystem to create a wonderful customer experience. So my job touches on all aspects — all the tangible, visual, real-world aspects of that experience. If you just think of a customer journey, it’s everything from collateral and point-of-sale to packaging to the industrial design, the user interface, and the area where interface and the software and the hardware come together, which we call product interaction. So it’s orchestrating all of those touch points
Sam Lucent had the foresight to understand that in order to achieve competitive advantage, companies need to engage customers in an emotional level by providing delightful experiences. By servitising their products, companies can not only create strategies that are difficult to copy, but also open new market opportunities. In most industrialised countries, the service sector accounts for approximately 70% of the GDP, offering a great potential for product-based companies to expand.
Nike+ is another great example. They’ve managed to migrate from this ‘company/product centric’ campaign - Just do it, to a networked and co-created way of evolving the brand. I just love seeing all these paradigms being broken! Welcome to the service economy!
I saw this interesting post on Gerald Buckely’s blog: he tried to use his iPhone as an e-boarding pass on a flight from San Antonio to Dallas. And it worked!
”I asked the gate agent if he thought the PDF of my boarding pass would scan. He said, “I don’t know. Let’s try it.”
And, it worked great!
I asked him if AA had tried rolling anything like that out yet. He said not to his knowledge. He was impressed in the quality of the resolution of the barcode. Then a couple of other guys huddled around and got to thinking their Blackberry’s could display PDFs too…”
This is what I call co-creation! Innovation is all about spotting latent needs from consumers. This is clearly one of them!
I really like the way Virgin communicates to customers. They always use plain English, and most importantly, they make every contact feel as a bit of fun. I was having a problem with my internet modem, and received a new one by post. The letter that came with the new modem said:
“We’re are sorry you had problems with you modem; this little box of goodies will help!
… All you need to to now is follow the instruction below…
Ok, here it goes:
…Replace you new modem, using the spanner. It’s there to help unscrew and screw the white cable without too much elbow grease!
Virgin also has a great attention for details. When my broadband pack first arrived, I got this massive box containing all the equipment I needed. To be honest, opening the box and setting my new broadband up was quite exciting (I have to confess, I was feeling like a kid opening a Christmas gift). And then I noticed the ‘caution’ label on the box, which added a bit of fun to whole experience.
Sometimes, small details make a big difference. Next time you have to design something, or get in touch with a customer, try to make it a bit fun. It won’t add anything to your costs, and it surely will have a great impact on your customer’s experience.
I first saw this video from NTT DoCoMO a couple of years ago, and although the prospect of having this kind of technology around us soon us quite exciting, what really strikes me is how powerful those videos are to tell a a story.
Good storytelling is not only about communicating a vision or a concept. It’s about establishing an emotional connection with your audience.
In his book ‘Why we buy - the science of shopping‘ Paco Underhill describes a few techniques to ‘bend time’, and change the customers’ perceptions of a particular service encounter.
Bad times are whenever the customer is made to wait. Most people agree that one of the key factors for determining the quality of a service experience is the waiting time. The shorter, the better.
The interesting thing is: the way you perceive time though your ‘internal clock’ may differ from real time. When people have to queue up for up to a minute and a half, their sense of how much time has elapsed is fairly accurate. If waiting time is a bit longer than that, they may feel that the actual waiting time is much longer.
Underhill outlines a few tricks to bend the perceived time:
Lots of interactions: the time a customer spends after an employee has initiated contact seems to go faster than time spent before the interaction. Having someone simply acknowledging that the customer is waiting, and offering a plausible explanation, automatically makes the waiting feel shorter.
Orderliness:
People like to wait in a orderly manner (specially the British!). If customers see that they will be helped soon (e.g. a system that says that waiting time is about 3 min, or a orderly queue), they will relax, and the time spent waiting seems shorter
Diversions:
Entertaining customers while waiting always makes that ‘dead time’ less painful. People waiting for at a hairdressers for example, always seem to be not so bothered, as they flick through magazines. Or in restaurants, when they offer you a drink or some nibbles while you wait to get seated.
Derrick Story interviewed the authors of ‘Subject to change’, recently published by the Adptative Path crew. If you don’t have time to read the book, you can get a sneak preview by listing to the interview’s podcast.
The book talks about how products and services need to be designed through empathic understanding of the user, and how thriving products and services are not stand alone propositions. Successful products and services are build around supportive ecosystems that provide the right environment, staff behaviour, tone of voice, etc.
Bill Morggridge delivered a really cool talk during the Service Design Symposium, hosted by the CIID. It’s really interesting the way he explains how design has evolved over time. Just after graduation, back in the 60’s, he thought he would spend his whole life designing kettles and washing machines.
But as technology evolved, and life became more complex, he realised that designers needed to design the systems that actually surround a product. For example, how to make a train journey more delightful? Designers need to not only worry about making a comfy seat, they actually need to think about the whole customer journey, and how systems, processes, people impact a customer’s experience. Welcome to the amazing world of service design!
The folks at IDEO launched a the IDEO eyes open, a website to enable ’social network’ of stories about great experiences:
Ideoeyesopen.com is about casting a wide net to find inspirational experiences in the unlikeliest of places—the things we do and see everyday.
Michele Dougherty published a really interesting post about the airport experience. Working for a company that specialises in producing film titles, she drew an interesting parallel between the airport experience and the process of creating a film title sequence:
“When Fred asked me to think about a place or experience that embodied some of the key elements involved in creating film titles, a few places sprung to mind. But none seemed quite as compelling as the airport.
The three main things I focus on when I start a project are: choreography, typography, and telling a good story (which is largely dependent on the previous two things in my line of work). Upon thinking about this assignment, I realized that the airport is chock full of all three. Not to mention, it’s an intriguing place to observe how they all come together in a highly staged narrative experience with literal steps that must be taken—which is remarkably relevant to the kind of timing and delivery moments that are so critical to the kind of work we do.”
I particularly liked the idea of choreography and typography when creating, or innovating customers’ experiences. At the end of the day, it’s all about staging a story.
The latest edition of the Economist published a special report on digital nomads, or “how wireless communications is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places”. I’m still digesting this report, and will post a comment on this shortly.
The report included a series of contributions from ethnographers and all sorts of user-centred researchers, including Jan Chipchase, who made an interesting video of a day in his life, and how it was affected by technology. This is really useful tool to uncover latent needs and understand people’s motivations when relating to services, products and the society. At Engine, we are using video more and more, as this proved to be a very rich media to support our research.
Dubberly Design Office developed a a really cool tool to model and map innovation:
“The model is built on the idea that innovation is about changing paradigms. The model situates innovation between two conversations. Innovation transforms old into new. It is a process in which insight inspires change and creates value.”
You can download the full size model (PDF format) from here
There is a great buzz in the blogsphere about how Starbucks lost it’s ‘cool’. Personally, I think it’s not my coffee shop of choice. There is a Starbucks about 5 min from where I live, which I’ve never visit. I prefer to go to a small, friendly and cosy local café just on the opposite side of the road. Why? Funny enough, because I can get the experience that Starbucks used (and promised) to offer on the early days.
Starbucks need to reinvent themselves. They’ve just launched My Starbucks Idea, a social forum to enable them to listen to the customers’ voice, get some really good customer-driven insight and co-create a new service. Why bother with CSI, KPIs and all of that? Great idea!
Chase and Dasu conducted a research on how to create better experiences by applying behavioural science. For decades, cognitive and behavioural scientists have studied the way people behave in social interactions, and their findings are extremely helpful for experiential design. One of the key aspects of behavioural science is that in any interaction between a service or product and a client, the perception is actually the reality. In other words, what really matters is how the customer interprets the interaction.
According to behavioural scientists, people are not able to remember the whole set of events when they recall an experience. Only a few significant moments stick to people’s mind. In other words, they remember snapshots, not movies. When assessing past experiences people usually prefer a sequence that improves over time. For example, gamblers prefer to lose £10 first, then win £5, rather than win £5 then lose £10. The ending of a sequence of events is also crucial for the overall recollection of the experience. A great ending will usually recur in good memories.
According to Chase and Dasu, there are five principles that when applied may contribute to improve the perceptions customers have of a service experience:
1. Finish strong:
the end of a transaction or the last stage of an experience is the moment that remains in the customers’ reminiscences. For example, composers such as Beethoven always finish the symphonies in exhilarating movements. In the airline industry context, having someone to help in the luggage reclaim area would considerably improve the passenger’s perception of his or her trip.
2. Get bad experiences out early
people are happier if a sequence of events evolves from bad to good. Waiting in the check in queue is always unpleasant. But if the airline company offers a reward such as a cup of coffee or even apologies for making a passenger wait, it can turn a bad experience into an acceptable one.
3. Segment pleasure, combine pain
people prefer to win small amounts several times instead of a greater amount once. They also prefer to loose a larger amount once rather than smaller amounts several times. Companies should break pleasant experiences into multiple stages, and combine unpleasant ones into a single stage. For example, passengers always have to go through several steps when calling a help-line. Cutting the number of steps would reduce the perceived time.
4. build commitment through choice
people are happier when they have more control over the process. Having the opportunity to make some choices, such as choosing a meal between two options, and being served whenever they want would greatly enhance the perceived quality of the service.
5. give people rituals
people usually are more comfortable when dealing with familiar rituals and activities. These rituals provide a standard, and customers base their evaluations on these standards. For example, passengers expect to find the same level of comfort in every aircraft of an airline. Sometimes older aircrafts are not so well equipped as newer ones, making passengers feel the flight unpleasant.
I guess that’s why people usually say: “save the best for last”…
“It’s remarkable how often business strategy, the purpose of which is to direct action toward a desired outcome, leads to just the opposite: stasis and confusion. Strategy should bring clarity to an organization; it should be a signpost for showing people where you, as their leader, are taking them — and what they need to do to get there. But the tools executives traditionally use to communicate strategy — spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks — are woefully inadequate for the task. You have to be a supremely engaging storyteller if you rely only on words, and there aren’t enough of those people out there. What’s more, words are highly open to interpretation — words mean different things to different people, especially when they’re sitting in different parts of the organization. The result: In an effort to be relevant to a large, complicated company, strategy often gets mired in abstractions.” Tim Brown
I spent easter in Normandy where I had the most exhilarating gastronomic experience of my life. We found this tiny restaurant on top of a cliff, next to a lighthouse facing the Normandy beaches (which was quite difficult to find, but it gave a bit of an ‘adventure’ feel).
The owner, a lady whose dream was to convert her country house into a restaurant (which she obviously accomplished) was the perfect host: always smiling, making you feel completely at home.
The food was perfect. My only thought after finishing the desert was: “I’m in heaven…” The price was very reasonable: 38 euros for a 4 course meal.
The service was great, no long waits, really polite and nice waiters.
As a service designer, I would give this restaurant a perfect 10 out of 10 in terms of the experience I had (in every aspect). Yet, they didn’t have anything ’special’ going on, no fancy designer furniture, no Michelin stars kind-of-thing, no English speaking staff…
The point I want to make here is: there is a certain element of magic that make customers have a great experience. And yet, we don’t know exactly how to define it. My guess would be: to make magic happen you need to have great products, great services, but still, leave some room for a few ‘imperfections’. Just like anything we see in nature.
Microsoft launched a really cool service called Healthvault. It allows users to upload detailed information about their health and share it with friends, family and health professionals (hospitals and doctors).
” HealthVault isn’t just a Web site - it’s the hub of a network of Web sites, personal health devices and other services that you can use to help manage your health. HealthVault lets you store the information in one central place on the Web. You’re in control of what information you store and can decide who else can see, change, or help manage it. HealthVault never lets other Web sites or programs see or change the information in your HealthVault record without explicit permission from you or a record custodian invited to share your records.”
It also has an interface that allows you to upload information from a number of devices, such as blood pressure and heart rate monitors.
I can imagine that this might bring peace of mind for lots of people. Imagine how nice it would be to check how your granny (who lives far away) is doing. Just log on the website and check info such as glucose level and blood pressure. Should something get a bit out of control, the system triggers an text message to you. Well done Bill Gates.
I was watching a TV documentary yesterday about Frank Gehry, and what really struck me is his approach to prototyping as a creative process. Frank and his team use lots and lots of really low-fi, quick and dirt prototypes to translate their ideas into tangible shapes and formats. So far, nothing new.
The interesting fact is that Frank and his team always work with different types of prototypes simultaneously (models in different scales or different media) to remind them that those models are only representations of their ideas. In some way, this helps them keep their minds focused on the real building, avoiding going off on a tangent and designing something suitable for a model maker, but not for humans.
Service design also relies on a number of prototyping techniques: storyboarding, role-playing and acting, amongst others. But I guess that the message here is: the use of several types of prototypes simultaneously might help you get the bigger picture. A single prototype has limitations, and the use of different media and techniques might help you cast a more holistic view of the solution you might be looking for.
Last week the CIID (Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design) hosted a Service Design Symposium. The presentations seem to have brought good discussions to the table. One of the topics that emerged during those discussions was the creation of tools and techniques to gauge the value (and more especifically, the monetary value) that service design can bring to companies.
Service design is still a young practice with lots of areas that remain unexplored. Service metrics, or methodologies to enable service designers to measure the added value of service design, is still something that needs further exploration.
CIID will be posting the materials presented during the symposium, so watch this space.
For more info on the conference, please visit the CIID website
I’ve recently written a viewpoint on how companies can establish emotional connections with customers by being more transparent. You can check the full story at the Engine website.
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