Adaptive Path’s Subject to Change: watch the movie, read the book

I’ve recently posted a post about a new book published by Adaptive Path’s folks called Subject to Change. For those who want more details, and don’t have the time to read the book, here’s a taster about their customer centric approach to create new products and services. It’s a bit long, but it’s worth it

more about “Adaptive Path’s Subject to Change: wa…“, posted with vodpod

via nussbaumondesign

Service design at the ITT

Nice blog post from the folks of the ITT Institute of Design. It gives a good overview of why service design is becoming so important in the new ‘experience economy’, and gives a glimpse of tools and methodologies, with a focus on service blueprinting – a map of how different service elements (people, touchpoints, systems) should be interconnected to enable positive experiences.

It’s all about people

I was re-reading bits of Wally Olins’ On Brand book, and again, I get more and more convinced that people play a key, if not the most important role in delivering great services:

In order to get an effective service brand, people have to be taught to live the brand they work with. For the customer, the person who represents the brand is the brand. If he or she doesn’t perform properly, the relationship between the brand and the customer may collapse. The skills required to teach staff to live the brand have much more in common with managing people than with conventional marketing manager

This is why with a product brand you can spend 75% of you time, money and energy trying to influence consumers and 25% on everything else, while with a service brand you have to spend at least 50% of your time and money influencing your own people. The priorities are the other way around. In a product brand, the customer comes first. But in a service brand, your own people come first.

At Engine, we’ve done a few projects to get employees to live the brand. We’ve helped Orange to train their staff in Spain to behave in an Orange way through a highly interactive training workshop. More details on this project here.

Brand tags

Noah Brier launched an interesting online project called brand tags. The idea is to explore people’s perceptions of brands by asking them to type the first word or phrase that comes to their head when presented with a random logo. What’s really cool about this project is that it enables the creation of a massive mental model of a given brand, in the form of a tag cloud.

I’ve compared the tag clouds of two airlines:

Virgin Atlantic: branson, fly, fun, british, cool, innovative.

American Airlines: 9/11, bad service, bankrupt, boring, crash, delay, old

Which one would you choose to fly with?

New ways of designing for services

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

Service vs. product design

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.

Check the complete post here.

The adventures of Johnny Bunko – and the art of engaging you audience

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’.

Emergence Conference podcasts are now available!

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.

happy listening!

Designing services podcast

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.

you can download the podcast here

iPhone as a service enabler

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.

via Forbes magazine

It’s all about stepping on your customers’ shoes

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)!

from www.ted.com posted with vodpod

Claire Rowland on Service design

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.