Design for Service

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Robert J. Glushko and Lindsay Tabas from UC Berkeley wrote a paper last summer exploring the tension between front stage service design and back stage system design.

Service designers with a “front stage mindset” strive to create service experiences that people find enjoyable, unique, and responsive to their needs and preferences. Front stage designers use [...]

Adam Lawrence reports on a new type of car dealership over on the Work Play Experience blog. Rather than selling cars from a particular manufacturer (Mersedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen), they focus on a particular segment of the market:

At familycars.de the concept is far smarter. They sell only family cars — from a bunch of different manufacturers, [...]

Somehow I think things could be worse…

After Heidi [Klum] challenged designers to rethink the uniform for US postal workers on Project Runway, she says that flight attendants, baristas, and cashiers are constantly asking her to do something about their horrible attire.

[via styledash]

Aaron Oppenheimer posts a nice two-by-two comparing urgency and frequency of product and service encounters. He maps four quadrants for interaction: primary, secondary, auxilary and emergency encounters.
We use this line of thought to understand the difference between [...] using a product on day one and [...] using it on day 100. It’s a very useful [...]

Business Week has a new article by Ziba’s Sohrab Vossoughi on the silver bullet of experience innovation:

There is still one frontier that remains wide open: experience innovation. This is the only type of business innovation that is not imitable, nor can it be commoditized, because it is born from the specific needs and desires of [...]

Here’s another emergent service I’d never heard of before. Apparently, people who live near Wrigley Field in Chicago sell their parking spaces to Cubs fans on game night. There aren’t any official rules governing the service, but most of the residents honor a “dibs” system for snagging cars.