I was all set to add another weekly pick to the library over at Service Design Books but it looks like someone beat me to it. The newest pick is Jon Kolko’s Exposing the Magic of Design. I haven’t read it but I’m familiar with Thoughts on Interaction Design and his other writing so I’ve added those links instead.
That’s the way Service Design Books is supposed to work. The initiative depends on a confluence of voices from many different perspectives. If you have a moment, head over and rate one book from the library. It should take less than 30 seconds. If you’re feeling ambitious, leave a comment, make a recommendation or add a tag. But the rating aspect is quick and easy and helps separate the wheat from the chaff.
Here’s a handful of books that I think are important but could use some crowdsourcing love: This is Service Design Thinking edited by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider, Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam, Managing as Designing edited by Richard Boland and Fred Collopy, and Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton.
The collection is organized by both rating and popularity. The books with lots of 5-star ratings become the “must reads” of the community. But without that consensus it’s hard to tell the difference between niche reads and the books we should move heaven and earth to add to our collective bookshelves.
Today it’s been four years since I began writing Design for Service. Things have been a little quiet around here over the past six months while I’ve had my head in a few interaction design projects but I’d like to turn that around.
So I’ve set a new challenge for myself. About a year ago I started working on an initiative called Service Design Books. It’s a co-created library of recommended reading for service designers. The collection has been gradually expanding with 80 books from nearly three-dozen contributors. Over the next six months I plan to add at least one new book to the collection every week. That’ll help me to focus a bit more on service design and whittle down the stack of reading beside my bed.
I’ve added a new RSS feed to the website to keep track of the reviews. Subscribe to be notified of new picks.
This week’s book is Bill Buxton’s classic Sketching User Experiences from 2007. It helped lay the foundation for my series on sketching in the performing arts.
Via Twitter, Joel Bailey points to a fantastically detailed post on the Qantas check-in process from earlier this month over at Dan Hill’s City of Sound weblog.
I’ve been reading Dan’s blog off and on since grad school and the posts are typically sprawling with content. In this case what he downplays as “quick notes” actually amounts to a richer account than most service design case studies. Through 31 photos and a series of diagrams Dan recounts his check-in at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport.
This type of post is interesting because of the gulf between what it captures and what it leaves out. Dan focuses on the touchpoints of the encounter as individual design elements, recounting the physicality of the RFID tags and the build quality of the check-in columns and then following the thread across touchpoints to the flimsy paper boarding receipt. These are the physical manifestations but like an iceberg they only hint at the larger system beneath the surface.
Apparently the new RFID check-in columns are less than reliable and this leads to a critical observation midway through the piece that the “service design aspects of systems are perhaps the most important, well beyond local interaction design issues.” I get the feeling that he’s talking about computer systems but the observation also holds true for the service itself on a systemic level. That is, the orchestration between touchpoints trumps an evaluation of any particular touchpoint.
Indeed, the individual elements don’t qualify as service design by themselves. The columns are examples of industrial design. The LCDs are examples of interface design. The boarding receipts and the new identity are examples of graphic design. They can each be critiqued as design solutions, as Dan has in his post. But the service only exists in their coordination.
Dan moves on to discuss the environmental aspects of the service later in the post. Here he focuses on the spatial organization and its expression over time. The flow between touchpoints and the integration of other human beings within the encounter is harder to capture with photographs. The diagrams help with this but I’m not sure we have the graphic language to really communicate this type of flow at a visceral level.
The final photos in Dan’s sequence focus on interactions with touchpoints rather than on the touchpoints themselves and taken as a whole this approach starts to shade more toward the service design end of the spectrum.
But the gulf I wrote about at the beginning of this post involves the parts of the service that aren’t possible to photograph. There’s an amazing amount of detail in Dan’s post. It’s difficult to imagine collecting 24 photographs of anything in an airport these days but no matter what type of camera you use or how much detail it captures a customer journey misses what goes on beyond the line of visibility. I think this starts to get at what Dick Buchanan meant last year when he observed that it’s impossible for human beings to experience a system.
Dan’s post isn’t meant to be an exemplar of service design. It’s filed under experience design and interaction design and he’s focusing mainly on the physicality of the interactions. But there’s power in that approach. As an exemplar for communicating the customer journey it’s worth considering the tangibility of this sort of treatment as an alternative to more traditional customer journey maps and blueprints.
The Matching Supply and Demand blog highlights an interesting article from The Economist on Delta Airlines. They’ve been experimenting with allowing passengers to bid on the privilege of being bumped from overbooked flights.
Airlines typically offer flight vouchers at the gate to encourage passengers to delay their travel to account for overbookings. The gate agents increase the value of the offer until they recruit enough volunteers or until the flight boards, at which point they begin bumping passengers involuntarily.
Delta’s scheme is to have passengers bid against each other during check-in, driving down the cost of the vouchers. The Wall Street Journal has more on the program.
The New York Times has an interesting article about queue management at Walt Disney World. They use a combination of methods to subtly nudge people away from crowded attractions and to entertain those waiting in line.
Employees watch flat-screen televisions that depict various attractions in green, yellow and red outlines, with the colors representing wait-time gradations. If Pirates of the Caribbean … suddenly blinks from green to yellow, the center might respond by alerting managers to launch more boats. Another option involves dispatching Captain Jack Sparrow or Goofy or one of their pals to the queue to entertain people as they wait. … Disney has also been adding video games to wait areas.
For more on queues, Don Norman spoke about how Disney approaches the problem during his lecture at the Institute of Design back in 2008. More here, here and here.
Sorry about letting things go dormant around here over the past couple of months. I’ll try to pick up the slack in the new year. What have I missed?
Last weekend Richard Buchanan from the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western gave a terrific keynote at the Savannah College of Art and Design to close out the COINs and Design Ethos conferences.
I’ve transcribed the keynote and posted MP3s of the lecture and the question and answer section at the end. There’s also a full video of the event if you’ve got an hour or so to watch.
I’ll have more of a summary later this week. Quite a few topics of interest for service designers (and CMU alumni too).
Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider have put together a nifty tool called the Customer Journey Canvas [PDF 220K] as part of their upcoming book on service design thinking. Their A3-sized design is nicely done and inspired by the canvases in the must read Business Model Generation book.
This tool supports the audit of existing services and covers not only the period of time associated with the encounter but also the pre-service and post-service phases of the journey. Customer journey maps are typically focused on the front stage encounter from the customer’s point-of-view but as an audit it’d be great to see a complementary version demonstrating the connections with the back stage supporting processes.
They’ve released the customer journey canvas under a creative commons license so I’ve taken the liberty of slightly reformatting it for US printers using tabloid paper.
The Center for Hospitality Research at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration has an interesting paper on service scripting [PDF 700k] from 2008.
A service script, as defined in this study, is a detailed guide for front-line employees to follow during a service encounter. A script includes a predetermined set of specific words, phrases, and gestures, as well as other expectations for the employee to use during each step of the service process.
The study is less about the design of scripts and more about how guests react to scripted encounters in a hotel setting as opposed to more extemporaneous approaches. There are also some citations on script theory to follow up.
Tip: Choose File > Print in Google docs to save the PDF.
[via Michael Dixon]
The last time I flew anywhere the flight was 35 minutes late before it had even taken off because the airplane was nowhere to be found. Not a great beginning to a five-hour flight.
Once we were airborne the pilot came on over the intercom and apologized for our late departure and sympathized with the folks who had connecting flights. I was worried about missing my connection but he said he was going to deviate from our flight plan and something about the jet stream and tailwinds and permission from the airline to run the engines a little faster than normal. The long and the short of it was that he was going to do his best to get us there on time. When we touched down he was as good as his word. I was impressed.
Fantastic service recovery isn’t an accident. Mistakes are an inevitable part of service delivery but the best services are systematically designed to recover with grace. In fact a memorable recovery can build even more goodwill than an encounter that goes according to plan.
Next week Fabian Segelström and I will be running a workshop on service recovery at the SDN conference in Berlin. It’s in the first block of workshops on Thursday. We’re going to go through the basics of service recovery and demonstrate a tool we’ve been working on for designing effective solutions.
This topic is interesting to me because it starts to dig into the “managing as designing” side of service design. We’re going to be looking at service recovery from three different perspectives. Not only the front-stage customer service perspective but also back-stage operations and HR perspectives. We’re drawing from the service management literature on recovery and Fabian has written an overview of the findings from that research.
If you’d like to take part in the workshop then we have a request. Be on the lookout for service failures as you travel to Berlin. Airports, hotels, restaurants and taxis — anywhere along your journey. We’ll have plenty of examples of our own but we’d like to include your perspective in the workshop by deconstructing the first-hand problems you each encounter.
Hopefully your trip to Berlin will be flawless. But if you see someone go above and beyond the call of duty to fix a problem we definitely want to hear about it.
Nick Remis and Izac Ross are enrolled in the BFA service design program at the Savannah College of Art and Design. As part of a team of eleven undergraduate students they collaborated on a 10-week service design project for the Woodville community garden in Savannah, Georgia.
I interviewed Nick and Izac about their work by telephone earlier this summer on June 8th, 2010.
