The launch of MyServiceFellow, a mobile phone application for capturing touchpoints, reminded me of a great case study from 2002 in a book called Web Site Redesigns. Author Darcy DiNucci, then a design director at Method, documented the initial design research phase for a travel website. It began with a combination diary and camera study for 50 travelers:
Method sent the travelers out with a kit designed to capture their experiences, plus $125 for their trouble. The kit consisted of a disposable camera and a survey book the traveler could use to record any aspect of the trip that seemed noteworthy, plus an instruction sheet telling each participant how to use them. Each traveler was asked to tell their own story of their experience of business travel. By taking pictures of places, objects and moments, each participant would reveal how he or she perceived the travel experience.
What was recorded was up to each participant — the experience would be documented through the travelers own eyes, not by answers to a set of questions posed by an outsider. For each picture taken the participant created an entry in the survey book, noting the date, time, place, and observations about their state of mind, the situation, and why they chose to take the picture. [DiNucci 39-40]
The book includes samples from the survey design and a collection of photographs and descriptions from the kits they received back from the study. Of course Method used this mainly as inspiration for the website rather than to re-design the customer journey as a project itself. But the techniques can be a great match for the needs of service designers.
For me these low-tech approaches are more appealing than the more recent examples of technology I’ve seen applied to the problem. For one thing, it just seems easier to manage for the participant. Paper doesn’t crash. There’s no software to learn or password to remember. It’s a notebook. You write in it.
Disposable cameras are simple to use but for one recent study I experimented with letting the participants use their own camera if they preferred. There’s no reason not to consider cameraphones since the quality has improved in recent years. But there’s something nice about giving the participant a set number of exposures with a disposable camera that they can stuff in an envelope when they’re done. No CDs to burn; no files to upload. I’m also keen to try the disposable video cameras that are coming to the market. For some projects Flip camcorders might even be appropriate for limited use within organizations.
Like all design research, recruitment is an important component. Method used an external recruiting service to identify their participants and just over half returned the kits.
Designers should be closely involved with the recruitment process. For instance, in the diary study I mentioned earlier I found the best respondents for a cooking and recipe study by contacting local food bloggers. I also structured the incentives so participants received half up front and half upon return (they sent all of the kits back). External agencies almost never work out well other than as a supplement. It takes time, but recruiting is important enough to handle yourself.
DiNucci’s book is out of print but used copies are available online for practically nothing. The case studies are primarily focused on website design but the book is worth it for the diary example alone. It’s a well-written, detailed case study that incidentally could serve as a model for service designers to follow when writing their own case studies.
Be sure to check out Lucy Kimbell’s year-end round up of service design. She ends with some important questions for designers to consider in the coming year regarding politics, scope and knowledge as the community evolves.
She asks when we’re going to start talking about these questions. It seems like a yearly conference isn’t enough.
Peter Boersma isn’t buying it. Earlier this week he posted a withering critique of service design as part of his Experience Design 101 article at Design for Conversion.
Yes, Service Design is here. And it’s supposed to be new, even though every book or article you read acknowledges that the service industry (main examples: hotels, restaurants) have been designing their services for ages. So what is new: The inclusion and central placement of the digital channel in modern services that do not require face-to-face contact.
Some books will try to make you believe there is something new (like “Service Design – Designing Services with Innovative Methods” by Satu Miettinen and Mikko Koivisto) but a lot of it should sound very, very familiar for anyone who ever realized that redesigning a website and its FAQ section might have an influence on the types of questions a call centre might get.
Boersma invokes the strawman that service design’s value as a practice somehow lies in its novelty. Maybe I’m out of touch but it’s not immediately clear that anyone has been pushing that argument. I’m about 2000 miles away from my copy of Designing Services with Innovative Methods at the moment but that’s certainly not what I got from the book.
It’s true that the service industry has been designing their services for ages. Lucy Kimbell addresses this practice as “silent design” in her contribution [PDF 240k] to Design and Creativity: Policy, Management and Practice and it’s worth noting as a counterpoint to what designers bring to the table.
Live|work opened their first studio in 2001 but they didn’t create the practice out of whole cloth. They’re well aware of the history behind service design and they’ve been quick to credit authors such as Shostack and Bitner for their formative contributions to the field. People have been writing about the design of services since 1953. Before that, it simply wasn’t well-recognized that services were distinctive from products. Many designers are just now coming around to the idea that services can be designed but rather than criticize them for being late to the game we should embrace the idea that they showed up at all.
Part of Boersma’s derision comes from service design encroaching on UX turf. That much is apparent from his call center example. The difference is that rather than suspecting that a website FAQ “might” have an impact on a call center, service designers are absolutely certain. They go to great lengths to demonstrate the connections and then find ways to break down the internal silos between the website team and the call center team — and every other customer-facing aspect of the organization.
I suppose there’s nothing stopping UX designers from doing the same thing, or anyone else for that matter, but for service designers taking the holistic view is our raison d’être.
Chris Reaburn’s Service Encounters Online weblog is a fun read. It’s full of random anecdotes from his daily life, each with a bit of service-centric insight. There are shibboleths from the service marketing literature in practically every post but the writing is anything but academic. Definitely worth adding to your reading list. I found myself digging through the entire archive.
Here’s a nice post on queueing theory from Katherine Alsop, a UX designer in Australia. She documents a change to the “twelve items or fewer” lanes at a Coles Supermarket in Melbourne and explores the repercussions on human behavior. I’ve written about queueing a few times here at Design for Service but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a solution quite like this.
It’s interesting to see how other cultures support this type of thing. Last year I asked the community at metafilter.com for some insight into how queueing works around the world.
Lidia Tralli, a recent graduate from Politecnico di Milano, is the author of a new service design weblog. It’s been building momentum since September, but the content is in Italian and just showed up on my radar this morning.
In English the title of the blog seems to be Maid Service (and Service Design). Here’s a rough English translation by way of Google. Nice use of imagery too.
[via Lauren]
Here’s an interesting bit of backstage trivia from Target retail stores. They’ve apparently designed the terminals at the register with some feedback regarding the speed of service. The letter G equals fast (green) and R equals slow (red). They stack up the most recent ten transactions to show progress and encourage quicker checkout times.
It feels a little Tayloristic to me. But one employee commented that the whole setup “makes work feel like a game.” Others are commenting in another thread regarding the system details. They’ve built a lot of sophistication into it.
One important point is that since this is visible from the front-stage they’ve essentially written the scoring system in code so prying customers don’t realize they’re being evaluated.
Update: This button on the other hand probably shouldn’t exist, and definitely shouldn’t be on-stage
Service-dominant logic is one of those topics that’s been on my radar for a while. I feel like I should care about it, but for some reason I could never quite muster the will to investigate. Fortunately I stumbled across an old post on Lucy Kimbell’s blog that summarizes service-dominant logic and makes the concept a little more accessible. Now I feel like I’ve got enough of a toe-hold to dig a bit deeper on my own.
Earlier this week I received an e-mail about the 2010 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America. Apparently they’ve added a service design category to the mix this year.
Service design comprises three distinct interactions: person to person; person to machine; and machine to machine. There are three categories of revenue-generating services, non-profit services, and government services.
I’m not wild about focusing on person to machine interactions for a service design competition — and machine to machine interactions make me despair.
But looking through the entry process I’m struck by the obvious disconnect between product design and service design. The entry form asks for dimensions, weight, materials, software and technical specifications. It goes on to request a “glamour shot” that is “attention-grabbing, visually compelling or sexy.” Not the best strategy for dealing with the intangible.
They also ask for a short document or video to explain the project, but it’s pretty clear that they’re framing service design as a second-order discipline. That’s disappointing.
Based on the submission guidelines I can’t imagine how the judges could possibly evaluate a service. A quick scan through the archives uncovers a few projects that are in the ballpark and demonstrate the shortcomings of the form. Projects for Umpqua Bank, American Red Cross and the Transportation Security Administration. Is a glamour shot and a 900 character overview enough to capture a service?
To be honest it doesn’t even seem adequate for graphic design and industrial design. What’s the baseline for a legitimate service design competition?
In my quest for large-group participatory techniques one of the most promising by far has been Future Search.
Future Search is a planning method designed by Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff and first published in the mid-nineties. It involves groups of 60-80 stakeholders working together and in small teams across various sessions over the course of three days. For larger groups it can potentially accommodate as many as 300 people working in parallel conferences.
As collaborative methods go this one is on the far end of the co-creation spectrum. Weisbord and Janoff advocate a particular structure with a hands-off approach to facilitation.
Service designers can learn quite a bit from these techniques but the method itself isn’t a design tool and despite occasional forays into that area its founders contend that their approach is not appropriate for short-term problem solving. Instead, they frame Future Search as a way for groups to find common ground on a vision and roadmap five to 20 years out.
They’ve published a number of case studies that are worth skimming through to get an idea about how Future Search might be adapted to the types of problems service designers face. Their work with the Federal Aviation Administration [PDF 212k] and IKEA [PDF 876k] are good examples.
Whether the techniques are used for acute or chronic problems the principles remain largely the same. Here’s an excellent overview from Future Search in Education [PDF 68k] from the book Future Search in School District Change:
- “Get the whole system in the room. By whole system we mean diverse stakeholders who have the authority, resources, expertise, information, and need to act right away if they choose.
- “Explore the whole before seeking to fix any part. When people put in what they know, all will gain an understanding of the whole that none had coming in, making possible actions built on a shared frame of reference.
- “Put the future and common ground front and center. Problems and conflicts become information to be shared, not action items. The agenda is a search for shared goals and mutually supported plans.
- “Invite self-management and responsibility for action. Groups can do much more than what is customarily asked of them. Each time leaders or consultants do something for a group they deprive everyone else of ownership.”
The Future Search Network has a good overview of the techniques involved with a typical conference. It’s a rigid structure with an established time-table but Weisbord and Janoff encourage participants to “trust the process.”
The timelines and mind maps should seem familiar to most service designers but some exercises like “prouds and sorries” are further afield. Working in stakeholder groups and in mixed groups attendees form a collective understanding of the system and begin to imagine future scenarios. The conference culminates in a reality dialog where participants confirm common ground while acknowledging disagreements. Attendees form voluntary groups to discuss action plans and follow up after the conference.
The goals for a Future Search are four-fold:
- A new understanding of the whole by all present
- Shared vision based on common ground
- Joint implementation plan with authority and commitment
- New networks and projects beyond the conference
Facilitating a holistic understanding of the system is a key area of interest for service designers and any techniques that can bring about that understanding should be in our arsenal. The principle of having the “whole system” in the room is something that seems particularly important and shows up again and again in participatory literature.
Future Search also draws a fair amount of criticism. Angela Oels addresses some of the friction arising from the rigid structure of the conference in her chapter of the book Public Participation and Better Environmental Decisions:
Participants are expected to follow the instructions of the facilitators in an unquestioning way, often without understanding the overall purpose of a conference task. This has made a number of conference participants feel as if they were subjected to a large “social experiment.” Also, the procedure prescribed for the identification of the common ground (aggregation rule) was regarded as unfair by a majority of conference participants, as key issues were filed away as “unresolved differences” without further discussion.
The conference only addresses those issues on which everyone agrees. It isn’t a forum for debate or coercion. Any conflict that isn’t immediately resolved is tabled in the interest of moving forward. Oels points out that this results in a lowest common denominator outcome, but Weisbord and Janoff counter that the design results in real rather than reluctant alignment and demonstrates a preference for action.
Future Search isn’t a panacea and the authors readily concede that it isn’t a design tool. But designers can gain insight from these techniques and those of similar large group planning methods. Robert Jungk’s Future Workshop method predates Future Search by twenty years and his book (published in 1987) draws on some of the same principles. For working with large groups this literature should be on our radar.
