Design for Service

The Heathrow Terminal 5 meltdown is a good example of the interplay between service design and system design. It illustrates how services are built on top of systems and how people perceive process and outcome characteristics differently.
To characterize this as “not their finest hour” would be an understatement, but no one is complaining about the [...]

Idris Mootee explores the structure of service design. I’m not sure if this is simply an obvious analogy, or if I should ask for my post back. Let’s see: Howard Hawks quote? Check. Movie scenes as touchpoints? Check. It’s a pretty simple formula for success? Check. James Heskett’s service bookends? Check. Parallels to the world [...]

Alexander Kjerulf shares five reasons why “the customer is always right” actually results in poor customer service.

It makes employees unhappy
It gives abrasive customers an unfair advantage
Some customers are bad for business
It results in worse customer service
Some customers are just plain wrong

I touched on this a bit in my earlier post Fire Your Customer, but [...]

Marc from 31Volts is running an experiment to compile elevator pitches for service design. It’s called One Line of Service Design. He’s not really looking for definitions so much as examples that help focus in on the discipline:
I thought it might be a good idea to create an list of simple and easy to use [...]

I started writing Design for Service one year ago today. A few months went by before I realized that I had inadvertently stolen the name from Shelley Evenson’s inaugural Service Design course at Carnegie Mellon. Sorry about that. I learned a lot in that course, but Service Design was a much younger discipline in 2004 [...]

Naomi Epel’s Observation Deck is a collection of 50 catalysts for inspiration contributed by authors from around the world. It takes the form of a 160-page book describing the tactics and a deck of 50 cards for randomly selecting a direction. The Observation Deck was conceived as a tool for writers but the techniques can [...]

Library Journal has an interesting article from 2003 about an experiential approach to library design at the Cerritos Millennium Library in California:

Both circulation and the number of visitors have skyrocketed, but the quality of the library experience matters as much as the numbers to Pearson [the founder]. He loves to tell about the teenager on [...]

The BBC has an overview of What Makes a Good Airport in anticipation of Heathrow’s new Terminal 5. They mention some aspects like consistent signage and efficient queuing, but one thing they don’t mention is seating. Probably because Terminal 5 doesn’t have any. Last year Dan Lockton wrote an overview of the new terminal that [...]

From the Wall Street Journal:
In the past few years, more than a half-dozen small hotel groups have been cropping up in Britain and across Europe, offering cost-conscious accommodation. Though their rates and services vary, all are shrinking costs by cutting unessential amenities, which, depending on the property, can mean space, check-in staff, or natural light.
Describing [...]

The Profitable Art of Service Recovery by Christopher Hart, James Heskett and W. Earl Sasser is the newest addition to my service design research collection. The 1990 HBR article is a terrific overview of service recovery.
Mistakes are a critical part of every service. Hard as they try, even the best service companies can’t prevent the [...]