Design for Service

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Over the weekend, I decided to visit the Olafur Eliasson exhibit (Take Your Time) on its last day at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. It turned out to be a compelling synthesis of experience design principles.

Eliasson nimbly merges art, science, and natural phenomena to create extraordinary multisensory experiences. Challenging the passive nature [...]

The prosaically-named SERVQUAL scale for measuring service quality originally contained 22 separate metrics for evaluating services. Recognizing that the scale was too complex the authors grouped the attributes into five categories: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. It was a step forward but it wasn’t until 1992 that they hit upon a clever mnemonic for [...]

I was intrigued by the concept of “experience report cards” in the Joie de Vivre podcast earlier this week so I did some digging and came up with an actual example. It’s from the new 2007 edition of The Experience Economy (a response to Pine and Gilmore’s classic 1998 book of the same name).
The authors [...]

Peter Merholz interviews Chip Conley of Joie de Vivre Hotels about how they create unique experiences at dozens of boutique hotels around California. Conley describes a tool called “experience report cards” which seem akin to service usability in terms of quantifying the intangible:

Each of our hotels are graded twice a year by someone who goes [...]

Demos, the “think tank for everyday democracy” responsible for last year’s excellent Journey to the Interface, has published a new report called Making it Personal [PDF 504K] about self-directed services in the UK:

This report advocates a simple yet transformational approach to public services — self-directed services — which allocate people budgets so they can [...]

I didn’t realize examples of service evidencing were quite so rare until I was faced with illustrating the concept for a project I’m working on. I posted about service evidencing last week but the only really clear, public example I’ve found is from a Live|Work presentation at Doors of Perception East in 2003.
Chris Downs [...]

Simon Clatworthy from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design writes an introduction to service evidencing, a prototyping strategy for creating a sense of tangibility around service concepts early in a project. There’s a nice example from Live|Work, who appear to be working with the school on the project.