For those who haven’t read Tim Brown’s recent article published on Harvard Business Review, here is the link to download it.

Everyone talks about how to become more innovative, etc, but not many people know how to DO IT. Tim Brown outlines a few key points to help people ‘think design’:

• be empathic: try to step on other people’s shoes (your customers, your colleagues, your superiors) to understand the world from their perspective
• Integrative thinking: desing thinkers can draw insights from many sources and come up with new ideas
• prototype: it’s really important to try and test different ideas and approaches early in the process. Mistakes are allowed. The earlier you make a mistake, the easier is to make changes and move forward. This iterative process is key to generate new and innovative ideas
• collaboration: teamworking and diversity is always welcome, and very fruitful

via IDEO

“Wimbledon is the place where magic can happen”
Andre Agassi

I’ve been living in Wimbledon for a while, so yesterday I decided to check what the buzz was about at the All England Lawn Tennis Club down the road. And yes, I got to see some really high standard tennis, but I was mostly impressed by the ‘Wimbledon experience’. I’ve been to a few football matches, concerts etc, however, Wimbledon can be put in a totally different league in terms of organisation, and the ‘how nice this is’ feel.

I didn’t have tickets, and after arriving at the gate I spoke to one of the 100’s knowleadgeble stewards, who gave me clear and to the point information on how to buy a last minute ticket. Fifteen minutes later I was watching a tennis game (well, I have to say that I got there around 7pm, so the queues where quite small).

At the Championships (on and off the tennis courts), everything was organised and managed with almost military precision. From environments, staff uniforms (designed by Polo Ralph Lauren), behaviours (everyone was really polite and knowleadgeble - making you feel almost ‘royalty’) to logistics (more than 10 simultaneous matches with 450,000 spectators), the show ran like clockwork.

Well, all of this requires a lot of effort and organisation, and most of all, experience. After all, Wimbledon has been around for more than 100 years, and one thing that they truly managed to do is to learn how to run the Championships.

Between Championships, the Club has regular meetings with officials from the local council, the London Borough of Merton and other interested parties to consider problems experienced during the fortnight and to monitor progress on remedies recommended.

More than 6,000 people work on The Championships. These include a temporary staff of several hundred who are directly employed by the AELTC.
from the Wimbledon website

Delivering ‘Wimbledon-class’ customer experience requires lots of effort, and more importantly, the ability to learn from mistakes and focus on continuous improvement. Only then, as Andre Agassi said, you’ll be able to make magic happen.

 When I was attending classes for my MA degree, whenever someone wanted to come up with an example of for innovation, the usual suspect was the iPod. And I’m quite sure that this is an analogy that almost everyone use. I can clearly imagine a conversation between two managers from a call centre in India (or any other type of business):

Manager 1: We need to innovate
Manager 2: Yes, I agree, but how?
Manager 1: I don’t know. Think of iPod…

Clearly, the iPod, and the whole business model around iTunes, established a ‘dominant design’ in the MP3 player and music industry. From now on, it is very likely that most competitors will folow the standards established by the iPod, instead of trying to come up with new and different ideas.

And now when the iPod hype was almost settling down, Apple came up with a new, radical innovation that is creating a new paradigm: the iPhone.

Apple is changing it’s strategy to sell phones, where from now on, handsets will be subsidised by operators, bringing the it’s price down. Apple is also expanding it presence in the market, going from 6 to 70. Not only the iPhone will rapidly get a large chunk of the market share worldwide, but aslo set a new standard in terms of how people relate to and use mobile phones.

Next time you go to a meeting to discuss innovation, you’ll probably won’t use the iPod example anymore. You’ll use the iPhone instead! And this, my friends, is a true shift in paradigms. I’m not trying to be an Apple advocate, but I guess there are some good lessons to be learned.

According to an article published by The Economist, “Apple is now turning the iPhone into a hand held computer, and allowing other firms to write software to run on it. Other handset makers are doing the same, but the iPhone’s operating system and programming tools are better than theirs. There is no doubt that Mr Jobs is trying to lead a third revolution in consumer technology in his lifetime”.

One of the challenges that service design faces is how to measure the effectiveness of services provided by companies. The ability to gauge how enjoyable (or not) an experience is can be a valuable tool for innovation. By knowing if a given experience is in fact attracting and retaining customers, companies can elaborate strategies more efficiently, such as focusing on the most profitable customers. Off course, CRM tools are always helpful, but I haven’t come across something 100% effective in terms of measuring service effectiveness yet.

I find the methodology employed by the Customer Satisfaction Index quite interesting, and it could be potentially used as a barometer to gauge experiences. The index is based on a set of causal equations that link customer expectations and perceived quality to customer satisfaction. The expectations are then compared with the actual performance of a service encounter. If the level of expectations is higher than the performance, then dissatisfaction occurs. If expectations meet performance, then customers are satisfied. On the other hand, if expectations exceed performance, the result would be enhanced satisfaction. With a few tweaks, I believe that this model could be adapted to measure service performance. Something to think about…

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

via nussbaumondesign

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.

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.

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?

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