Over on the Work Play Experience blog, Adam Lawrence makes a great observation about sequence in service delivery. He recounts an example from his commute. The train attendant walks down the aisle offering coffee to the passengers, but they generally ignore him until it’s too late:
But if you watch the rows behind him, you will see a dramatic effect. About five seconds after he passes, people smell the java. They look up with bright caffeine-addict expressions, their hands groping in a tight back pocket for change. They lean out of their seats, ready to order and… the guy is gone.
One day he happened to turn around because he had forgotten something and unexpectedly sold his entire batch of coffee within three rows. People were ready to buy.
What Lawrence extrapolates from this is that the passengers needed to be primed by the smell of the coffee before they engaged. Something similar happens on airplanes. The flight attendants wheel the food and beverage cart from the back of the plane all the way to the front (or sometimes vice versa) before they start serving. That way passengers have a chance to notice the cart and mentally prepare for a purchase before the attendants come back around to them.
The analogy I draw is from music. A grace note is a short, separate note that occurs immediately before a longer run of notes. If a musician were to simply launch into an extended passage, the listener might be apt to miss the effect of the first few notes and struggle to catch up. The grace note engages attention and makes the sequence more impressive. I often use the visual equivalent of this principle in interface design to delineate animations; it works exactly the same way.
In popular usage, a grace note has come to mean something of relatively little significance. But as Lawrence’s example demonstrates, they can make or break a service.
Here’s an interesting example of the honor system applied to payment. Customers add up how much they owe themselves and drop their money into a fare box:
The thought was, someone can pour his own coffee, grab his own bagel, cut it himself, throw the money in, and walk out. We don’t touch 60 per cent of the transaction.”
Many more examples in the comments of this thread.
[via Boing Boing]
Jason Weisberger reports on an unfortunate attempt at service recovery. Weisberger bought a $5000 camera through Amazon and was disappointed at how the camera was shipped. He complained to the camera store directly and they blew him off. So he gave them negative feedback:
Rude on the phone. Really, Really, poorly packaged. I think they could have used enough bubble wrap or packing materials when sending a $5k camera. It was shifting around in the box. Would not buy from again.
At that point, the people at Cameta Camera realized they had a problem. They should have picked up on that a good deal sooner but once they finally took action their approach to service recovery came off looking like a bribe. They offered him $75 (the cost of shipping) on the condition that he retract his feedback.
From a service recovery perspective, they could have offered him the refund when he initially called and smoothed out the problem. It was an outcome error (poor packaging) that could reasonably have been balanced with a financial response. But after they compounded the problem with dispassionate customer service they created a process error, not an outcome error. And financial compensation is never adequate for a process error.
They probably deserve to be publicly pilloried at this point, but if they had responded to Weisberger’s feedback with a sincere apology, they might have been able to contain the damage by avoiding a rant on his blog and the subsequent exposure.
[via Boing Boing]
I noticed the other day that I hadn’t received a postcard for Emergence 2008. I didn’t read too much into it, but today I see that they’ve canceled the conference this year.
It’s too bad; they had two solid conferences under their belt and an opportunity to build on that success. A one year break doesn’t sound like much, but when you consider that this is a student-run conference and students are only at CMU for two years, a break like this causes a gap in institutional memory. By 2009, the students who helped with Emergence 2007 will be gone and the new students will have to start from scratch.
Pixar’s Brad Bird shares a nice example of sociopetal design in an interview with McKinsey Quarterly.
Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center — which initially drove us crazy — so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.
[via kottke.org]
Sorry for the dearth of postings last week. I’ve been on the road for a few days due to a death in the family.
On my way home from the funeral it occurred to me that, as a service, visitations and funerals are second only to weddings when it comes to co-design. They’re one of the few examples in American society where people expect to be intimately involved with the details of service delivery. There’s a cultural “script” that shapes the encounter, but the details of the burial and the ceremony are deeply personal and unique.
Gerald Buckely writes about his attempts to board an American Airlines flight by scanning a PDF of the boarding pass displayed on his iPhone. I’m amazed they let him try it (Southwest Airlines turned him down) but it worked so there’s the potential for a new co-created touchpoint in airline travel.
[via intuire]
The New York Times has an interview with a social psychologist named Daniel Gilbert who talks about the difference between experiences and products.
Another thing we know from studies is that people tend to take more pleasure in experiences than in things. So if you have “x” amount of dollars to spend on a vacation or a good meal or movies, it will get you more happiness than a durable good or an object. One reason for this is that experiences tend to be shared with other people and objects usually aren’t.
I laughed when I read the followup:
Q. Have you just expressed a very anti-American idea?
Gilbert deftly shoots down that notion:
Oh, you can spend lots of money on experiences. People think a car will last and that’s why it will bring you happiness. But it doesn’t. It gets old and decays. But experiences don’t. You’ll “always have Paris” — and that’s exactly what Bogart meant when he said it to Ingrid Bergman. But will you always have a washing machine? No.
I think this is a nice counter-argument to the idea that we have an easier time embuing artifacts with emotional meaning than intangible services or experiences.
Chris Noessel explores the synergies between Service Design and Cooper’s Goal-Directed Design.
Most people think of Goal-Directed Design techniques as focused on product design, but they work equally well for services. A service is comprised of the various “touchpoints” between a customer and a business. Touchpoints include public-facing systems such as web sites and web-enabled software, but can include other channels as well, such as brick-and-mortar stores, points of sale, interactive voice response systems, email and postal mail, too.
It’s a good exposition, but I’m surprised to see Cooper making it. They’re a dyed-in-the-wool software design consultancy and service design seems like an odd cultural fit. On the other hand, Chris is a graduate of the Interaction Design Institute at Ivrea where a lot of early work in service design took place.
Either way it’s bittersweet to see the discipline filtering into the mainstream. Just the other day I read on a blog that service design is HOT. We can do without the bandwagon.
It looks like Don Norman’s got himself a little of that Service Design religion. He recently gave a lecture on the subject at the Institute of Design in Chicago:
The overarching topic was that service design is the same as what the business world calls “operations” and that there is so much opportunity in this area. Operations, though, doesn’t get this yet. Business-driven operations mostly focuses on optimization and efficiency in driving down costs but this is so often done in silos with short-term profits in mind, leaving huge opportunity to optimize what’s most important — profits — by looking at areas for designing meaningful experiences that improve long-term customer retention in the front stage of the service and enhancing the many employee-to-employee interactions in the back stage.
From a glance at his website, it looks like Norman is viewing service design through the lens of the Kellogg School of Management and the McCormick School of Engineering. It’s not particularly surprising, but seeing service design reduced to operational concerns and stripped of the moral imperative of a triple bottom line is a little disappointing. It’s also not clear how far a School of Engineering would go toward embracing principles of co-creation. On the other hand, Norman conflates experience design with service design (using Disney as an example of the later) so he’s casting a wider net than I would expect from a purely operational perspective. It’s a tossup.
I’d really like to see a transcript or podcast of this talk. It was an hour and a half lecture so I’m sure he covered a lot of ground.
