Design for Service

Yesterday’s post on prostitution reminded me of a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell from a couple years ago on homelessness. He was writing about the difference between managing an intractable problem and solving it and how doing the latter sometimes flies in the face of logic.
The students at Köln acknowledge that they’re only managing [...]

A couple years ago I wrote a post on my obligatory weblog exploring the concept of agency in interaction design by looking at the phenomenon from a service design point-of-view. It seems a little more apt over here on Design for Service:
From 2006. I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of agency in interaction [...]

I stumbled across a nice overview of service design on the Max web design blog: Service designers visualize, formulate, and choreograph solutions.
The author hits all the service design bases (touchpoints, front and back stage, etc.) but what caught my attention was how he frames the discipline. This is one of the few discussions I’ve [...]

Sorry for the dearth of postings last week. I’ve been on the road for a few days due to a death in the family.
On my way home from the funeral it occurred to me that, as a service, visitations and funerals are second only to weddings when it comes to co-design. They’re one of [...]

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 [...]

The Bank of America near my home has a new facelift. They’ve replaced the old ad hoc stanchions for queuing with more substantial metal and glass barricades, and installed new carpetting, but the most obvious change is the addition of three new widescreen TVs above the row of tellers and a huge screen at the [...]

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 [...]

The London Business School has released a paper on Innovation in Experiential Services [PDF 564K] with some great examples that bridge service design and experience design.
The paper references nearly 100 case studies from companies like Royal Caribbean, Virgin Atlantic, American Girl Stores, the Apple Retail Stores, Build-A-Bear Workshops, Joie de Vivre Hotels and the Disney [...]

Back in October I devoted a post to understanding the concept of experience but in light of the “fundamental mistake” I was accused of last week I think it’s worth re-examining the subject.
Here’s my central thesis: Not everything that happens to us is an experience. In fact, most things aren’t.
Our lives are mainly composed of [...]

David Siegel’s book Creating Killer Websites was probably the most influential web design book of the 1990s. It’s anathema these days, but Siegel introduced concepts that fundamentally changed how websites were built. Besides the technical heresy of single pixel GIFs and table-based layout, Siegel advocated experience design principles for the web.
An entry to your site [...]