Service Innovation

A recent article in the New York Times (link) highlights the frustrations we all have with services. They refer to a consumer reports survey (link) in which people were asked about everyday annoyances, with 10 being the most annoying, and 1 the least annoying. I guess it doesn’t take much to guess that high up on the list, and second only to hidden fees (a score of 8.9) comes, yes you guessed it, failure to get a human on a customer service line at (8.6). Even the annoyingly wrong weather man scored only 4.3.

Not only is this a shocking number, but more than this, its a strange comment on society that we accept this terrible service. If we translated this to the product world, to say, unreliable products, then there is no way that we would accept such poor results. We would move on to a competitor. Its strange, but we have an acceptance for poor services, in the same way that we had an acceptance of unreliable products twenty five years ago. Since then, thanks mostly to the Japanese quality circles, we just expect products to be reliable. It is no longer a problem for us, and we just expect products to work nowadays.

I strongly believe that in 25 years time, we will look back on things like this as being the period in which services came good. We are in a period now where customer focus and customer experience is coming to services, and in the same way that competition raised the bar in products, the same will happen in services. Service leaders will gradually lift the level of service, so that in the end, poor service will stand out as an outlier and not the norm. Lets hope the consumer reports study in 2030 reverses the numbers, and that the most annoying thing for consumers is the weather forecast.

Tags: Experience, Touch-point, Trend

I re-found a treasure today whilst looking up the bakery that tweets as its produce comes hot out of the oven (link). Its the global rich list and a very nice (and so old its retro-trendy) website that does one thing incredibly well. It makes you step back and think about your own financial situation and puts things into perspective. All it does is rank you on the list of the worlds richest people. As a humble academic, I didn’t expect much, but was surprised to find that I am in the top 0.61% of the world. This gives an ambivalent feel good/feel bad experience at the same time, and luckily, there is an outlet for the feel bad, through the give to charity link.

What I like about it is its simplicity compared to the power of the message. It caters to our innate needs to position ourselves in relation to others and does so in a good way. I wish my bank statements reminded me of this each month, or even my tax statement. In a period of nudge (link), this is a perfect example of how to design a simple, yet effective, nudge experience.

Tags: Emotion, Engagement, Experience, Interaction-Design

I am working in the project planning the 2010 Government design competition in Norway, which will be focused upon healthcare. I am also hungrily looking for references related to user experience. Today I found some really useful documents that show how the NHS in the UK is really beginning to focus upon a patient-led health service.

The first document I found is  a pdf titled: “Now I feel tall - What a patient-led NHS feels like”. (link). This gives a useful overview of the field, argues why improving the emotional experience of patients matters, and the main drivers for improving patients’ emotional experience. The documents makes a nice distinction between feelings during the service journey, and the feelings that result from the experience. This nicely takes into account the research showing what we recall when describing experiences,

The second document I found is called Creating a patient-led NHS (link). This document focuses upon the challenges of implementing a patient-led NHS in terms of strategy and tactics. I found a nice description of a future service vision that was both pragmatic and descriptive at the same time.

Finally, a quite detailed document from the Kings Trust in the UK: Seeing the person in the patient by J. Goodrich (link). This argues for the benefits of patient-centric approach, describes the dimensions of patient-centred care and a framework for the analysis of factors underlying patients’ care. It also includes the following quote from Gilbert 2006 ( Stumbling on Happiness. New York: Knopf.) regarding who can tell you about the patient experience:

If we want to know how a person feels, we must begin by acknowledging the fact that there is one and only one observer stationed at the critical point of view …she is the only person who has even the slightest chance of describing ‘the view from in here’, which is why her claims serve as the gold standard against which all other measures are measured.

Finally, a practical and pragmatic approach to how to go about designing for the patient experience is the Experience Based Design (EBD) approach, which gives a nice step by step guide to how to design for experiences (link).

I think that the NHS is on a fantastic trajectory, and I really hope that the recent election and power change does not disrupt it.

Tags: Emotion, Experience, Health, User experience

At this years annual innovation conference run by the Norwegian research council, the AT-ONE project was invited to run a two hour workshop to give an introduction to service design and the AT-ONE method. We had 17 participants from a broad range of disciplines and companies and had a busy two hour session.

We chose to focus upon using touch-point cards (link) for innovation in primary healthcare. The touch-point cards were used to identify relevant touch-points for different stages in the service journey using the methods that are described on the cards.

The results were very positive and confirmed many of the expectations and earlier experiences  we have had regarding the cards.

1. The visual and tangible aspect of the cards was highlighted as very useful, not only allowing visual orientation, grouping etc, but also as a common reference for all.

2. Participants were enthusiastic, and the idea generation process couldn’t go fast enough. People had queues of ideas to discuss and note down.

3. The role of designers in each group was important. We had placed a designer in each of the three groups, to facilitate the process and to draw out ideas, and this  was seen as a really useful way to continually integrate ideas into experiential solutions and visualise them.

Here are some of the quotes from the evaluation afterwards:

Everyone can use these cards, and they open up the process

The difference between innovating the whole service and its parts became apparent, particularly the interplay between these. The service became more interesting when we moved from the whole to the parts

Makes you both concrete and experimental at the same time. I have found a new way to trigger associational processes

A good way to draw out the overall system, to then dive down later into individual touchpoints

I’m really happy that the cards are receiving such positive reviews. We also identified a couple of new touch-points to add to the list, so will be updating these soon.

Tags: Touch-point, Visualisation

Monika Hestad over at Plan (link) sent me a link to Kevin McCullaghs thoughtful comments (link) to the design thinking session organised by the Economist (link). This was remarkable for several reasons.

Firstly, that the Economist has organised something big around design thinking (for a detailed view on Design Thinking, look here).  Secondly, Kevin has some very good discussion points about the hype around the term. I particularly like this quote:

In fact, design thinking always meant different things to different players. For some it was about teaching managers how to think like designers; for others, it was about designers tackling problems that used to be the preserve of managers and civil servants; and for others still, it was anything said on the subject of design that sounded smart. To most, it is was merely a new spin on design. All its proponents were, however, united by their ambition for design to play a more strategic role in the world than ‘making pretty.’ Who could argue with that?

But what caught my eye, was this image that was included in the post, of someone visualising a mind map.

This is a great example of one of the skills that designers bring to workshops - the visualisation of process and/or solution. The thing I like about this image, is that it reminds me of a few designers I know who just can’t write words on flip-overs - they have to draw them. Not because they want to look cool, but because the content and form of the image says a lot more than the word alone. Anders from LiveWork is one of these, and it is interesting to see how his visual representations draw people into discussions.

During our interviews validating the AT-ONE method, visualisations are often highlighted by our industrial partners as a major element that designers bring to innovation. This is not a discussion of making things look pretty, its about making shared meaning in a group, something that has incredible value. To visualise an idea, the designer does not just draw a word. Instead, the designer integrates multiple aspects of a solution and finds a visual form that communicates this strongly - often translated into a customer perspective. This allows a team to create a common understanding and is why designers are a central part of the AT-ONE workshop process. When it comes to design thinking, I think this is what it looks like.

Tags: Design Thinking, Visualisation

Today, five years ago, the first Youtube video was uploaded. A very short video of one of the founders at the zoo. Its still online.

Its amazing that in only five years it has become such a central part of our viewing habits on the net and perhaps is the best example of a user generated content based service that we know of. Its also amazing that many companies still don’t consider user generated content when designing new services.

Tags: User-needs, Web 2.0

Mosse, my colleague at work, sent me a link to this interesting discussion regarding the ability of facebook to be a successful persuasive technology with resulting behaviour change. We are both interested in how the combination of ubiquitous technologies, social media and service design can be combined to nudge behaviour, particularly in public services such as health.

The discussion suggests that facebook has the potential to become an important behaviour changer, but that it falls down on one major element - its ability to trigger action from the user. To support the argument, the blog links to the fantastic work of BJ Fogg (link). BJ, has been working in the area of persuasive technology for at least 15 years, and has published well and widely. He also has a nice open approach to sharing his work. He has created a model for behaviour change (link) that has three major elements:

1. Motivation

2. Ability/Simplicity

3. Triggers

Using the model by Fogg, the blog shows that Facebook has weaknesses when it comes to making the applications simple enough to make the transition to trigger activity. In addition, they claim that Facebook does not have the ability to create relevant triggers that are timely. In other words, Facebook has problems with both the ability axis, and the triggers.

This is an interesting analysis, and one that makes me think that maybe the iphone app model is better suited. Not only is the interaction design pleasurable (something not in BJs model), but it has the ability to create more context sensitive triggers. Maybe the ipod app solution fits the bill better.

p.s. BJ Fogg has also some interesting views on what he terms Mass Interpersonal Persuasion (MIP) here.

Tags: Experience, Nudge, Persuasion, User experience

Peter Morville, him of the polar bear book on Information Architecture (link), and later Ambient Findability (link) has just written and interesting and informed piece about Ubiquitous Service Design (link). I’m always amazed about how compact and well linked his posts are, and this one is no exception. He introduces  a great many terms, but starts with Shostacks article about how to design a service from 1982 (link).  The blog entry skirts the differences between products and services before jumping deeply into service design in a period of ubiquitous computing. In one of his images, he suggests that information architecture builds a bridge between service design and user experience, and this is where his story breaks down for me.

I think he views services as information-based solutions, in which information has to be categorised, sorted and presented in specific forms (primarily on the web on a pc). That is fine for some services, but for a great many services this does not take account of the multiple touch-points that a service journey includes. The implication of this, is that the holistic experience is not just a matter of information architecture, but  also about behaviours, objects, interfaces and buildings - multiple touch-points. All of which have to work together to give a holistic experience that supports and strengthens the brand strategy of the company. I disagree with the implication from his diagram,  that user experience and service design are far apart. I think that what he really is drawing is the back-office/front office  divide, or line of service visibility, as Shostack calls it. In which case, there will be multiple bridges, each representing a touch-point (and only some of which are supported by information architecture).

But, the thing that caught my eye is further down in the blog post, his description of experience maps. Here he acknowledges the importance of visualisation as a means of eliciting innovations. He quotes from Dave Gray:

A picture can connect the strategic with the tactical in a way no other communication form possibly can

He presents an example of a book purchasing map, which doesn’t map the experience, but which opens up for exploring innovation possibilities through various ways of using the map. In other words, the map is a tool to elicit innovations, and one that does so in a different way from words.

This, to me, summarises much of Service Design, and the use of design as part of cross-functional teams. The designer not only has a role in terms of innovating/designing the customer experience, but also has an important role in terms of using visualisation as a tool, such that the team as a whole can innovate. Not only this, the designers ability to sketch out resulting ideas, adds a level of closure to an idea generation session. This gives the designer a triple role - innovator, facilitator, documenter, and underlines their importance in the team.

During the AT-ONE project, we have placed a lot of emphasis upon the designers multiple roles in the fuzzy front end of innovation. I think Peter has described this in a roundabout way, which puts him on a nice convergent tragectory with Service Design. It will be interesting to follow his journey.

Tags: Brand, Experience, Interaction-Design, Touch-point, User experience, Visualisation

Spotify managed to tempt me to click on an advert for changing my mobile phone subscription which took me to a nicely simple way to tailor a subscription (link). It uses sliders to allow me to choose precisely the combination I want for phone minutes, SMS, MMS and Internet use.

I have always liked sliders as an input medium because they combine physical movement with real time feedback of results, in this case, cost. This creates a strong interaction loop with emotional benefits. Ben Shneiderman (link), one of the founders of the Human Computer Interaction discipline has pointed out their benefits for about 20 years, but they don’t seem to be taken up often enough.Using these sliders puts me in control, and allows me to explore different alternatives in real time. Not only this, it expresses a direct desire from the company to let me do this, without trying to hide costs or confuse me. I choose, I feel in control, I am responsible and I feel that I have tailored something to my needs. In short, I feel that Chess are serving me and are willing to listen to what I want, rather than suspecting that someone is tricking me into something they want me to have.

Again an example of how interaction behaviours in services influence our experience of the service, and our opinions about the service provider. Simplicity in practice, and brand building at the same time.

Tags: Brand, Experience, Interaction-Design, Interface, User experience

I recently discovered the fun of bump, an iPhone app to transfer businesscards from one phone to another. Like NFC, which Timo has researched in the Touch project (link), this solution is based upon simple, yet effective user interface basics. The user is in control, a physical action is required by both to complete the transaction, and the interaction process is simple to plan and execute. But what makes this more than a simple app is its magic. I still don’t know exactly how it works, and since the app is not available in Norway yet (although a Norwegian language version is available) I haven’t tried it out. But, the magic of bump as an interaction design solution elevates it from useful and usable to desirable.

Tags: Desirability, Interaction-Design, Interface, Touch-point, User experience