Archive for January, 2008
The alumni magazine of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto has an interview with Experience Economy authors Joe Pine and James Gilmore. It’s from the Winter 2005 Experience Issue [PDF 8.6MB].
That [charging admission] points to the fact that time is the key differentiator between services and experiences, whether one charges for [...]
London service design consultancy Engine shares a high-level overview of service design methodology. Lots of user-centered design techniques and tricks from the ethnographic toolkit mixed in with a few service-centric innovations.
IDEO method cards are another good source that can be adapted to service design, or you can buy a set tailored to the discipline if [...]
There’s a little Brazilian restaurant near my apartment that I walk by almost every day. On each table is a curious little mechanical signal positioned between the place settings. It’s a simple dial that can be switched between two messages in Portuguese: A large red NÃO OBRIGADA (Not Required) on one half, and on the [...]
A recent comment about Marriott Hotels sparked the memory of a good idea from Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy. I avoided this book for a long time because it sounds like a philosophical treatise on consumerism. It’s not. Underhill talks about the science of shopping but throughout most of the book you could mentally replace [...]
The Carnegie Mellon alumni magazine came in the mail the other day and I finally got around to browsing through the cover story on Tuomas Sandholm, a professor at CMU who is working on improving the organ donation system here in the US based on an approach called paired exchange.
In the case of kidney [...]
Lots of juicy stuff to dig into from the syllabus for MSE430 at the Stanford d.school. They’ve put together a comprehensive list of links and resources from the class.
A couple of the more recent courses also look interesting, although most aren’t as well documented.
Peter Merholz interviews Scott Griffith, CEO of Zipcar.
There’s always an evolutionary process in the background. One thing that we’ve done is really started to employ what Toyota calls their kaizen techniques. Anyone in the company can raise their hand and say, “I see an inefficient process,” or “I see a user experience issue,” and if [...]
Legendary film director Howard Hawks once said that to make a great movie all you need are three great scenes and no bad scenes. It’s a pretty simple formula for success. What if we looked at service design through the same lens? It’s not a perfect analogy, but each service encounter is composed of touchpoints. [...]
Service Untitled is a traditional customer service blog that might be worth checking in on from time to time:
This blog will talk about quite a few things. There’ll be a mix of actual examples and how the involved company could make the service experience better, tips and advice for improving the customer service experience, examples [...]
Cross-cultural communication often highlights the existence of unspoken assumptions and unwritten rules. Alexandra writes about a recent experience with conflicting definitions of service design that brought the problem to the fore:
I quickly realised though that we were talking about services in really different ways…. Definitions are always useful and I get the feeling that in [...]
