Service Innovation

Razorfish have just released their consumer experience report for 2008 and it makes interesting reading. (Link)

The first thing that hits you is the focus upon the importance of social networking. I read this report just after reading a BBC news article “Bosses should embrace Facebook”, (link) in which Demos report on how companies are increasingly having to relate to employee use of social networking solutions. Razorfish, based upon their own user studies, conclude that social networking forms a major part of our online lives. Demos note however that companies are concerned that employees “waste” their time on social sites, without seeing the potential it gives for innovation within the organisation. It seems to me that companies are trying to not see the facts, and are therefore missing out on considerable innovation potential, both within their organisations and in the services they provide.

The second thing that hits you is the total focus upon consumer experience throughout the report. For Razorfish, experience design is based upon a combination of a thorough understanding of customer needs, wants and desires, together with a solid understanding of company brand and offering. It is this I find most interesting, because I think together, this understanding is a strong springboard for creating relevant and powerful experiences for customers. It also coincides with three of the AT-ONE letters; Need, Offering and Experience.

Finally, two other important observations. First, the power of gaming, with some good advice and examples, particularly the Lipton game (link) which shows how engagement can be created from something as humble as a tea-bag. Secondly, the importance of visualisation.

Visualisation might suprise you, but I think that this is an overlooked area in online service-design. The examples they give might wake you up to the fact that the web has quickly evolved to become a visual medium (from a text medium) and that companies have buckets of transaction data that can be useful once visualised. Banking is a great example. It seems that online banking has really focussed upon putting offline banking services (ie. paper based) online without thinking of the added value that can be given through visualisation. This is one of the lessons from AT-ONE – each touch-point has its own unique potential, and the idea of cross-publication without considering these potentials, will lead to a lowest common denominator solution – i.e. text-heavy without the experiential aspects. And thats just something customers don’t want.

Tags: Experience, Social media, User experience, Visualisation

At the recent business days for the Norwegian Design Council (link), Tim Ogilvie from Peer Insight (link) described how design is moving up the value chain in the services era (link to presentation).

The presentation started off by commenting that we dont really need more things, but that we are looking for experiences and novelty – basically because all products fulfill our functional needs. Further, he claims that the focus in this decade (and probably the next also) will be upon services and customer experience innovation. (As an aside, he marked 1987 as the tipping point in which services passed goods in terms of economic output – has it taken us that long to realise that fact?).

He listed a series of things that are “in”, with Delivering experiences as top of the list, followed by customers, personalisation, IT, Internet and Design Thinking and many more. Continuing, he shows solid evidence that deep customer centricity was a key differentiator between success and mediocrity, citing examples of this as starting with unmet Needs, using ethnography, focussing upon the customer journey (Service Journey), low-fidelity service prototyping (Evidencing) etc.

In terms of how to improve innovation, he is a strong supporter of combining design and business, and claims that senior leaders must learn to work with and think like designers. In his summary, he concludes that the Services Era is different and that it is a great time to be a designer.

I greatly value the work that Peer Insight do in terms of combining business research with Design knowledge and am really happy that the elements that he recommends are the areas that we focus upon as central parts of the AT-ONE process:
– customer focussed (Need)
– experience based (Experience and Offering)
– service journey focus
– bringing design and business together

This give me confidence in the approach that the AT-ONE method takes and is some form of benchmarking for what we are doing. Coupled to this, the results of the work we are doing at the moment with our students (who are taking the service design course) gives me a positive view of AT-ONE as a useful tool for Service Innovation.

Tags: Customer, innovation, User, User experience

I guess I have hammered Starbucks a lot recently, so its nice to write something positive about the prime example of the experience economy. Starbucks has a very nice wizard (link) to help you choose your coffee. A wizard is an aid that breaks a complex decision process up into simple steps, and Starbucks have broken down the subtle traits of coffee into 5 steps. The interaction design is what I like most. Not only does the whole visual design make you thirst for coffee, but the questions and answers are informative and well formulated. Added to this is the use of sliders, which are a strong interaction tool (they give a feeling of control, and a strong combination of the visual to the physical – which users like). It aligns the whole experience around the pleasure of coffee. I also like the fact that the chalkboard they use doesn’t rub out totally. Its a small detail, but one that makes you remember where you have been, and adds a little more realism.

The only minus I have, is that I really think they should have had a buy button at the end of the dialogue, or even a try button. This would give closure and could open for a dialogue between Starbucks and the customer. “Click here to order a trial package for $xx” with the opportunity to get customers to give feedback “how was it for you…”. That could really make the most of the wizard, to open up a strong dialogue between Starbucks and the customer.

Tags: Experience, Interaction-Design, Interface

I have been writing about the differences between products and services recently, and started to focus upon the aspect of time. Product and graphic designers traditionally haven’t had much practice designing for time – things that happen in sequence during service provision, or a long term relationship lasting years. The focus has been upon the instant, visual appeal of a product. Service designers however have to relate to time, and in this, lies a huge potential for using the principles of storytelling.

One of the things that time allows for, is the build up of drama along the service journey. This can have a negative side to it, like stressed queueing at the post-office but it can also be used to build a good story, in which the dramaturgy is carefully designed. An example that comes to mind here, (again) is the experience of getting a good coffee in a specialist coffee shop.

You go into the cafe, and the aroma of roasted coffee builds an expectation. This expectation is built upon during the ritual of the coffee production. The sounds, and activities used to make the coffee are important in raising the expectation (yes, they are making coffee just for you). This reaches a high-point when the coffee cup is placed in front of you, and the milk is poured in. The milk is carefully poured in, ending with a shake of the hand to create a delicate pattern on top of the coffee, just before it is handed over. This is a very important part of the ritual, and one in which a close connection is made between the barista and the customer. Its a communication of a deep love for coffee, and attention to detail from the barista and a shared moment of something good – a gift to you the customer. This peak, is then followed by the first taste of the coffee, still a peak, and then consuming the coffee over time, to bring you back down to normal.

The service-journey above follows the rules of storytelling perfectly (from Aristotle (link) to Freytags triangle (link)

I have written about how Starbucks has lost a lot of its appeal, and I think that its partly because they have automated out most of the positive aspects of the coffee “story”. The baristas cant communicate their skill to the customer any more, the automation of the process makes it invisible to the customer, so they dont feel like an individual or feel cared for etc.

So, when you next look into your service journey, go into a little more detail and see where there’s a sequence in which you can add ritual and apply the principles of storytelling. I think there is great potential here to rethink things as wide apart as receiving a ticket from a ticket machine to picking your car up from a garage.

Over at Work/Play/Experience (link), Adam Lawrence goes into the area of design and dramatic structure in a little more depth.

Tags: Experience, ritual, Starbucks

This might be a little off track for service-design, but I think its worth noting that Google is launching a new browser tomorrow, code named chrome. There are two reasons that I am commenting it here. Firstly, I think that the whole concept of what a browser is, needs rethinking. More and more, we are using browsers to complete complex dialogues as part of services, and we can see a gradual migration from applications that are run through the operative system to applications that are run within a browser. A tighter coupling between the browser and the application makes a lot of sense, and rethinking the browser concept is well overdue.

The second thing, which excited me just as much, was the fact that the launch was announced through a cartoon. Not an ordinary cartoon though, one drawn by the legendary Scott McCloud. McCloud is author of the book “understanding comics” (link) – a wonderful description of how comics work, presented as a comic in which he appears as a character to explain why comics work. This book is standard reading for all designers and service designers.

The comic strip is a very strong medium for evidencing new services, communicating service journeys, or for describing future service scenarios. It uses a standard language for communicating possible futures, and is an almost universally understood way of describing activities over time, in which emotional aspects can be included.

Have a look at the comic here and see for yourself.

Click on the image to see it full size.

Tags: Evidencing

Over at common craft, they have created a really good explanation of social media that shows how users can create value and radically change existing business models and customer expectations. The video uses ice-cream sales as a vehicle for explaining social media and shows that it can work on or off the internet.

What I like about the video is not only that it explains in a clear and effective way, but it is also a great example of storytelling. The use of visual cues in the story to underline the point of each section makes a real pleasure to watch.

In the AT-ONE project, we are working on making tools to actively include people as actors for the actor section of the method. As we move from a value chain approach to a value network approach, creating a network diagram with people (customers/users) at the mid-point changes the way companies view themselves and their roles in todays market. Using the ice-cream story is a great way to do this.