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.

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

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

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.

Product servitisation: the new frontier

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!

The art of bending time (and it’s impact on customers’ perceptions)

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.

Bill Moggridge’s keynote presentation

Bill Moggridge 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!

via CIID

from ciid.dk posted with vodpod

IDEO eyes open

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 perception is actually the reality

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”…

Health Vault - the facebook version for healthcare?

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.

Service Transparency

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.