I came across this interesting design research tool called modemapping, a proprietary research tool that helps to organise and communicate research data. By using this visual representation of observation and ethnographic research results, designers can spot patterns that indicate unmet needs. Check the tool in detail at the Karten Design website.
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
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
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)!
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.
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.
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customer journey, user-centred research | Tagged: design research, design research tools, ethnographic research | 
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Posted by Erick
