Touchpoint Vol. 11 No. 2 - Experience Prototyping

Touchpoint Volume 11 No. 2 October 2019 The Journal of Service Design ISSN 1868-6052

Pictures Unless otherwise stated, the copyrights of all images used for illustration lie with the author(s) of the respective article

Published by Service Design Network

Printing Hundt Druck

Publisher Birgit Mager

Fonts Mercury G2 Apercu

Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes Guest Editors Ruben Ocampo Ellen Sundh Nathan Lucy Markus Edgar Hormess Project Management Moira Douranou Art Direction Miriam Becker Jeannette Weber Cover Miriam Becker Jeannette Weber

Service Design Network gGmbH MĂźlheimer Freiheit 56 D-51063 KĂśln Germany www.service-design-network.org Contact & Advertising Sales Moira Douranou journal@service-design-network.org For ordering Touchpoint, please visit www.service-design-network.org

f ro m t h e e d i t o r s

Experience Protoyping

Prototyping sits deep in the service designer’s DNA. Hypotheses, conjecture and assumptions are no match for seeing a real user or customer interact with a prototype, to determine what works well and what needs to be improved. And prototyping sits firmly within the ‘service design doing’ realm - as opposed to the ‘service design thinking’ one - because it’s the moment where we make our concepts tangible.

In this issue, we focus specifically on experience prototyping. That is, the approaches and challenges, known and new techniques, and strategic benefits of carrying it out consistently and at scale.

Prototypes can take on many forms and be built at different scales. They can be on-screen or constructed of cardboard. They can be full-size mock-ups of a restaurant or a hospital’s operating theatre, or something made of childrens’ toys and constructed in minutes. And, as one article in this issue touches upon, they can be built in VR, delivering a life-like, visual simulation of a physical environment.

In the pages to come, you’ll get immersed in this most visible - and many would say most engaging - aspect of service design. It’s the moment when the Post-its give way to cardboard, figurines, click-throughs and mocked-up spaces.

Service designers have told me in the past that they sometimes feel guilty for reducing or cutting-out their prototyping activities. I hope the articles shared here reinvigorates a passion for prototyping, and inspires us to do it more often, and in new ways.

And to briefly mention a large-scale experience that we’ve effectively proto­ typed 11 times previously (and take our learnings to improve each following iteration), this issue will be published to coincide with the SDN’s Global Conference 2019, being held this year in Toronto. I hope to see some of you there.

Jesse Grimes for the editorial board

Jesse Grimes, is Editor-inChief of Touchpoint and has twelve years’ experience as a service designer and consultant.

He is an independent service design practitioner, trainer and coach (kolmiot.com), based in Amsterdam and working internationally. Jesse is also Senior Vice President of the Service Design Network.

Ruben Ocampo is the founder of Conic, a Chicago-based innovation consultancy. For 20 years he has used design to address complex challenges in the U.S., Australia, Europe and Latin America.

Ellen Sundh is a creative technologist at McKinsey Design.

She is both a developer and a designer, specialising in rapid prototyping, user testing and customer-centred technology.

She has more than 20 years of experience developing cutting-edge applications combining physical and digital.

Nathan Lucy is a senior design strategist at Booz Allen. He helps government agencies improve policies, design and implement services, and measure experiences.

Markus Edgar Hormess is the Co-founder of WorkPlayExperience, a ser­ vice innovation consultancy.

He users strategic prototyping to help organisations tackle complex business problems and make cultures more agile and human-centred.

Birgit Mager, publisher of Touchpoint, is professor for service design at Köln International School of Design (KISD), Cologne, Germany.

She is founder and director of sedes research at KISD and is co-founder and president of the Service Design Network.

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18 feature:

Experience Protoyping

20 Simulating AI-enabled

2 imprint 3

from the editors

6 news 8

kerry’s take

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Prototyping Journeys at Scale Kerry Bodine

10 cross-discipline 10 Impacting Unspoken

Expectations in the Built Environment Andrea Haydon, Kevin Huse

14 Design Research for

Exploratory Innovation Projects Veronika Ritzer

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Services Using a Human Element Abhay Vohra

22 Bodystorming Healthcare

Kara Chanasyk 26 High-Fidelity, Low-Burden

Experience Prototypes Jennifer Sculley, Nathalie Cacheaux, Pooja Chaudhary, Zane Elfessi, Michelle Kurzynski, Kim Erwin

32 Board Games: Experience

Prototyping in Miniature Emily Eagle

34 Lessons Learned from

Experience Prototyping in the Field Ketut Sulistyawati, Ukasyah Qodratillah Ananda Putra, Nathaniel Orlandy

38 Evaluating Video Prototypes

with Emotion Analytics Bruce Wan

44 Yes, No, Maybe: Experience

Prototyping at Scale Adam Cochrane, Joydeep Sengupta

48 Creating a Structure

for Organisation-wide Prototyping Monica Tisminesky

52 An Exciting Time to be a

Wizard Minwoo Kim

54 Feeling the Future

Aileen Heinberg

c ontents

72 56 Breaking Down Service

Prototyping Mauricio Manhaes

Buys product

Found product Researched product

Goes to store

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62 Prototyping the Bank

Goes home

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Branch of the Future Jack Jarvie

Problem with product Complaint

66 Experience Prototyping for

Predictable Behavioural Outcomes Anne van Lieren, Marzia Arico, Melvin Brand Flu

70 Tools and Methods 72 Building Service Design

by Playing with Purpose Michael Phillips

76 Manytyping: Seamless

Mixed-tool Prototyping for Multichannel Services Adam Lawrence, Peter Sloth Madsen

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80 Insights from Delivering

In-house Service Design Training Roman Schöneboom

82 education and research 82 Ecosystems, Blueprints and

Journeys – Oh My! Joan Ball

88 inside sdn 88 Congratulations to the

Service Design Award 2019 Finalists

91 Pioneering a Chapter

Co-ordinator Model

86 profile 86 Eleonora Carnasa

92 Touchpoint Journal –

Launching Event Series Touchpoint 11-2

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Meet the Keynote Speakers of our Service Design Global Conference 2019

This year our Service Design Global Conference (SDGC) will once again bring the best of the best to­gether to celebrate all that is new and noteworthy within the practice of service design.

More than 30 speakers will bring their inspiring stories to the conference, as part of a two-day journey on how to help build the bridges necessary to design a world that reflects the nature of the practice it is built upon; one that is human-centered, co-creative and value-driven.

In this article, we proudly introduce our expert keynote speaker line-up for the conference:

to date comprise Fogo Island Arts and three innovative businesses, including Fogo Island Inn, whose operating surpluses are returned to Shorefast for reinvestment in further community development work.

In her Talk “Design in Service of Place: Community Business on Fogo Island” Zita Cobb will describe the work of Shorefast on Fogo Island, including the Fogo Island Inn. Shorefast is a registered charity that was established to grow another leg on Fogo Island's economy. By investing in art, design, and community business, Shorefast and Fogo Island Inn have built a worldwide reputation for exceptional, place-specific design and hospitality.

assistant, plus several internal platforms aimed at connecting people to relevant contextual data. Prior to joining Capital One, Steph pioneered Lean Content testing and co-founded FastCustomer, Work Design Magazine, and onenicething.com. An Ohio native, Steph loves video games, CrossFit and BBC programmes.

In her talk “Designing for Trust”, Steph will share how one organisation pioneered emotionally-compelling design that impacted cultures on a global scale.

Tom Szaky

Steph Hay Zita Cobb

Zita is founder and CEO of Shorefast and Innkeeper of Fogo Island Inn. Shorefast uses business-minded means to help secure economic and cultural resilience for Fogo Island in Newfoundland, Canada.

Shorefast’s notable achievements 6

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Steph is VP of Conversational AI Design and Integrated Experiences at Capital One, where she leads a team of human-centred designers who specialize in AI, machine learning and ecosystem products.

Her work includes ‘Eno’, Capital One's gender-neutral intelligent

Tom is founder and CEO of TerraCycle, a global leader in the collection and repurposing of complex waste streams. TerraCycle operates in 21 countries, working with some of the world’s largest brands, retailers and manufacturers to create national platforms to recycle products and packaging that currently go to landfill or incineration. It is also the lead company in a new circular shopping platform called Loop that will enable consumers to purchase products in durable, reusable packaging.

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In his talk “Loop: Solving for Disposability while Maintaining its Virtues”, Tom will discuss the theory of waste and how through business we can eliminate the idea of it. He will also touch upon how one can find other areas of value, whether in packaging or products, beyond just the material value, and hopefully be inspired that our future can be a world where the concept of waste doesn’t exist and our prod­ ucts can be more exciting, more convenient and better than ever.

Jesse Wente

described ‘Ojibwe dude’ with a national and international lens, he encourages audiences to consider diversity and inclusion into the future view of their organisation, industry and country.

In his talk “How the Arts can Bridge the Gap Between Cultures”, he will focus on how art can help the world understand and appreciate the differences that too often lead to conflict because its essence is not bound by cul­ ture, race or religion. In other words, we need to start bridging the gap. Art is doing just that.

Launching the SDN Academy – A New Initiative of the Service Design Network

Jesse is a sought-after Ojibwe broadcaster, curator, producer, activist and public speaker. He is a columnist covering film and culture on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio's Metro Morning for 21 years and is also culture columnist for CBC Radio’s Unreserved. He has programmed for film festivals including Reel World, ImagineNative and TIFF and is currently head of TIFF Cinematheque, overseeing TIFF’s historical film programme. A self-

The SDN Academy is a new global educational initiative recently launched by the Service Design Network in response to the industry’s growing demand for quality training for service design professionals at various stages of their careers. The SDN recently launched the SDN Academy website (www. sdn-academy. org) to showcase the breadth of our course offerings and to allow interested participants to easily register online, as well as request ondemand training services. Following a series of successful trainings at the SDN’s event space in Cologne, Germany, we also welcomed Designit’s Munich office to become a partner to help deliver courses via their venue, and we will shortly

be offering trainings at Berlin and Vienna satellite venues as well.

To further internationalise our programming, we have set up a series of trainings throughout Europe as well as in South Africa, and will offer our first North American courses during the SDN’s Global Conference in Toronto on October 9th. With a growing interest in continuing education coming from SDN chapters, corporations and academic institutions from around the world, the opportunities to further enhance the SDN Academy’s international footprint are very promising.

It is thanks to our global community of SDN-accredited Trainers and Master Trainers that we can deliver this education to the growing community of service design practitioners, as well as expose other professionals to the perspectives and tools of service design. Armed with top-notch knowledge and training, coupled with the successful completion of the SDN’s rigorous accreditation process, we are fortunate to have some of the best educators on the market!

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Prototyping Journeys at Scale

I first learned about prototyping when I was a web designer back in the mid 1990s. Paper prototyping and, later, stubbed-out interfaces with little to no back-end functionality allowed user experience designers like me to figure out what worked (and what didn’t) before more costly development began.

As I evolved my career from a focus on making technology easier to use to one of helping organisations be easier to do business with, I discovered how the principles of prototyping — such as faking the back-end and reducing risk through quick learnings — could be applied not just to individual channels, but to entire journeys.

One of my favourite examples of journey prototyping comes from Continuum. Several years ago, the global innovation design firm was working with Audi to create a ‘car on demand’ service: A customer would request an Audi, have it delivered to their location, drive around to her heart’s content, and then have it picked up again when she was done.

To learn more about customers’ needs and expectations for this service, Continuum worked with Audi to create a service prototype.

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Naturally, they provided real Audis for the customers to drive.

But the rest was pure prototype: The Continuum team created a stubbed-out mobile app interface for customers to order their cars; built a bare-bones back-end management system from just a spreadsheet; purchased matching shirts, slacks and tennis shoes to create a uniform; and got a couple of burner phones to serve as a call centre.

From the customer perspective, it looked and felt like the real thing — a fully operational service.

But in reality, the experience was, as Lee Moreau, VP of Design at Continuum, describes it, “glitter and duct tape.” This type of prototyping brings vital qualitative data into the service design process.

And now, I’m watching the practice of prototyping evolve once again. The emerging field of journey

analytics is enabling organisations to prototype journeys at scale, bringing quantitative insights fuelled by thousands, if not millions, of data points to business decision-makers.

For the past two decades, data gathered along the customer journey has been typically iso­ lated to a single channel. For example, when customers visit a self-service digital community to find answers on how to fix their products, analytics data from that community platform might allow a manufacturer to understand what products customers own, what answers they found, and how much time they spent looking for help. However helpful that may be, it still leaves the organisation guessing as to what their customers did prior to jumping online, what they did next, and how well they supported them in achieving their overall goals. In other words, traditional analytics tells us little, if anything, about the journey.

As the fields of customer insights and measurement have evolved, multiple platforms have emerged that allow organisations to aggregate various types of data for each phase of a journey. For example, a retailer could pull together a sentiment analysis of its online community conversations, post-support call satisfaction rates, and its contact centre’s top call reasons to get a more complete view of the support phase in a particular journey.

Such aggregation is a major step forward in customer insights,

k e rr y ' s ta k e

because it allows organisations to determine which phases of key journeys are performing well and which ones need significant experience improvements. How­ ever, this aggregated data still leaves gaps in an organisation’s understanding of the entire journey — and decision makers are forced to take their best guess on how these journey elements combine to influence customer behaviour.

This is where data connection comes in. A handful of tech providers now provide the means to import customer feedback, customer behavioural data, operational data and financial data from disparate systems and sources — and connect it all to see just how each interaction and touchpoint in a journey influences the next. For example, a bank could track how many prospects visited an offer landing page after receiving an SMS or email, how many of those site visitors applied for that offer via either the website or the branch, how many in each of those groups had their applications approved, and what the additional revenue was from those who eventually signed up.

This type of connected data across multiple points in the customer journey can help organisations understand customer’s past behaviour along key journeys — and how well the organisation supported customers’ goals and tasks. Again, with thousands or even millions of data points.

And while it’s helpful to look back with the goal of understanding what’s worked and what hasn’t in the past, prototyping is all about looking forward: How can we make this service better in the future?

Kitewheel is a journey manage­ ment platform that supports just this type of prototyping. Once an organisation’s various data sources have been imported, Kitewheel allows that organisation to run ‘experiments’ on the historical data. So, before launching a new set of communications, interfaces, and logic rules designed to lead customers down a particular path, a decision-maker could see what’s likely to happen based on how customers behaved in the past. Kitewheel users can further adjust their prototypes based on certain assumptions, such as a 20 percent increase in a particular type of customer.

Kitewheel also allows for realtime journey prototyping in a live production environment. Say a customer has taken some action, such as visiting a web page, and the organisation wants to encourage them to take a specific next action, such as signing up for a service.

Should they send a text message to the customer, email them, call them — or just leave them alone? Kitewheel users can track what happens next in all four of these scenarios, and its machine learning automatically shifts customers to the most effective journey once it’s determined a path that’s statistically most effective.

Kerry’s take In a world where organisations of every sort need to keep a keen eye on business metrics and outcomes, service designers can no longer be content with envisioning new jour­ neys and hoping for the best. They must also track journeys through implementation and be­yond — examining actual customer behaviour, measuring business outcomes and prototyping improve­ments – to see which design varia­t ions will best achieve desired business results.

Journey management is the future of service design — so dip your toe in the water and start experimenting with journey prototyping at scale.

Kerry Bodine is a customer experience expert and the co-author of Outside In. Her research, analysis and opinions appear frequently on sites such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company.

Follow Kerry on Twitter at @kerrybodine.

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Impacting Unspoken Expectations in the Built Environment In the rapidly-changing world of today’s academic library, perhaps nothing is evolving faster than the library service model itself. Students belonging to the so-called ‘Generation Z’ now enter university expecting its library to be a seamless provider of immediate information and assistance, in addition to serving Andrea Haydon is a design strategist at RATIO and coleader of the SDN Indianapolis chapter. Andrea brings a unique skill-set to RATIO’s process. She has public workshop experience and uses a combination of ethnographic research tools to understand the organisations RATIO works with and make recommendations that influence the design process.

Kevin Huse is Principal and Academic Library Expert at RATIO. Kevin’s focus is the programming and design of academic libraries, learning centers and public libraries throughout the United States.

He has a national portfolio and is a strong advocate for the library as the technology hub for campuses and a student destination for collaborative learning, research and socialising.

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as a central location for social interaction. In other words, a place for research, learning, tech support, group work and individual study, hanging out with friends and serendipitous ‘collisions,’ lazy exploration and immediate resolution.

Traditionally, bunker-like resource desks staffed by professionals often resulted in an intimidating envi­ron­ ment that was not easily approach­ able. In fact, we’ve heard librarians jokingly refer to this set-up as “Fort Reference” and “the ‘R’ word”.

This has evolved into the model commonly seen today: that of the ‘ask space’, where resource desks are downsized, interactions are more casual, and new services are readily accessible.

Despite these changes, today’s methods still allow room for improvement.

The project At Saint Louis University (SLU), in Missouri, we were asked to re-imagine how a library’s design could support

this emerging model of overlapping amenities and tiered service.

Working alongside librarians, administrators and the university’s IT group, our firm envisioned a new kind of library space which came to be called ‘OPEN:re:SOURCE’ at the university’s Pius XII Memorial Library. A key feature of this renovation is a new ‘technology commons’ that reimagines the academic library service model. Inspired by the Genius Bar within Apple stores, the ‘AskSLU’ concierge service features walk-up information desks where library patrons can receive technical support from both students and faculty.

First insights Based on stakeholder input, our own research and industry findings, we

Credit: Sam Fentress

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‘Ask space’ with one-on-one, peer-guided support

identified the biggest challenge would be to blend the staff and cultures of two siloed university departments: Traditional Library Services and Academic Technologies.

Many universities have found it challenging to seam­ lessly bring together these entities in a partner­ship that supports the student experience in an accessible, seamless model. The Academic Technology Commons successfully reimagined the traditional library service model in a blend of services borrowing from both hospitality and retail models.

Co-creation begins with a progressive attitude Open communication during workshops revealed that both groups had a shared motivation to find a triage/consultation student experience focused model with an architecture solution that invited interaction and lingering, and both also expressed a progressive attitude towards integrated academic technologies. However, a cultural shift in collaboration would be necessary in order to create shared spaces.

To promote active, collaborative dialogue between the design and planning team and local project decision-makers, the design team exchanged knowledge in real time though the use of many technologies – electronic and analog – such as Sketchup. Rather than separate meetings for discovery followed by the traditionally-insulated design process within architecture, the process engaged stakeholders face-to-face to generate meaningful conversations and design concepts in the moment, and brought everyone on the same page.

Our process included workshops and visioning sessions with students, staff, and faculty, as well as on-site visits to recently-design precedent libraries in North Carolina and Michigan, where service experiences have been transformed. Many have deconstructed the service desk, moved to a student-led service model, and blended library services with technology and student success.

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Stakeholder input This combination of nimble tools, skilled expertise and local knowledge realises greater creative potential,

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Generation Z: The true digital natives We also found that in service interactions of all types, members of Generation Z expect instantaneous results first at their mobile device and assume an equally smooth transition to a peer-based academic and technology partner. They are the first true digital natives, so throughout our project we put a priority on technology that emphasises both the usefulness of robust digital tools as well as the need for complementary, face-to-face interactions.

Leading institutions By looking at outside influences, we were able to increasingly see key touchpoints within the academic library through a service lens. How did students interact with library staff? How did students find the resources they need? What was their journey through the space?

We also looked at archetypal service models from leading industries to explore how the student journey could be improved.

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The department store model – a destination-based — service and expertise — The Apple store model – an active triage approach, branded and high-tech — The museum and parks and recreation model – an exploratory and roving experience This resulted in a lounge-like atmosphere that borrows from those outside influences such as retail and hospitality environments, tying SLU’s multifaceted programme together to heighten the experi­ ence and engage patrons.

Well-conceived service design In the OPEN:re:SOURCE environment, students are now free to explore digital and collectionbased resources, Academic Technology Services, an innovation lab and fully-equipped maker space as well as make use of traditional library services.

Previously, students would avoid the reference desk and avoid eye contact with the professional library staff. In this more open model, the help zone has become a high-demand hangout space.

Any traces of the traditional help desk formality were eliminated, breaking down the purely transac­ tional relationship to create a ‘guide on the side’

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experience for students, while still ensuring experts are present and accessible when needed.

Tied together by a custom-developed service model, the space features modern technology such as 3D printers, laser cutters and a wide variety of spaces that support different learning modes and group sizes.

While these services are not necessarily new, the delivery (and the environment that supports them) is what makes OPEN:re:SOURCE uniquely suited to the needs of its patrons, faculty and administration.

Outlook Although the academic library is ever-changing in response to new expectations, new technologies, new educational philosophies and new research needs, it remains an essential part of the university experience and a central part of campus life. One thing is for certain: as the needs, skills and preferences and experiences of incoming students evolve, the library – with all its services – must evolve with them.

Credit: Sam Fentress

Key takeaways Successful co-creation of shared spaces and — experiences requires a cultural change — Generation Z have higher expectations than previous generations

Leading institutions are looking to incorporate — best practices from other industries — Well-conceived service design methods will be a differentiator for university enrollment and retention

Today’s libraries are not only about accessing physical and digital information, but also provide a collaborative location for creating and using new and emerging technologies

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Design Research for Exploratory Innovation Projects Leveraging the creative potential of design research Compared to other research efforts carried out in innovation contexts, design research has a unique freedom to adapt methods, creatively interpret and project several years ahead.

Exploratory innovation projects in particular need this subjectivity to maximise inspiration.

Veronika Ritzer leads design research projects at BMW Group. Before joining the automotive industry, she worked for consultancies such as IXDS and spent a few years at the Tokyo Innovation Lab of the telecommunications firm Orange, researching the relationship the Japanese have with technology. She also teaches human centred design in academia.

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As the popularity of Design Thin­ king and human centred design have grown over the years, they have impacted different entities within organisations, from market research to strategy, product development, brand, technology research and IT, service development to design.

They have brought with them a recognised catalogue of methods and techniques that is not only applied by designers and researchers, but by project teams with various backgrounds and levels of experience.

Yet, the questions asked and the projects themselves differ. Even within product development departments, the most common design research methods are used for a broad range of projects.

While this versatility is one of the strengths of design research, adapting these methods to each and every project is what design research practitioners describe as a key success factor.

Unfortunately, this is often neglected in reality, as it needs experience to adapt them effectively. Also, the idea of a defined method per se can invite to apply it along its general description in literature instead of creatively adapting it to the individual project´s needs.

Among the aforementioned broad range of projects, those that are exploratory in nature require a skilful adaption of methods and research design: They are typically framed very openly and easily result in overgeneralised insights that do not meet the highly inspirational quality these projects are commissioned for. It has proven helpful to define the project type together will all stakeholders before planning the design research.

Different project types where design research is applied Design research is being applied in a great variety of project contexts,

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Four project types and their typical framing Four project types and their typical framing

EVALUATION

IDEATION

FOUNDATIONAL

Focussed

let alone industries. Some more open, and some more narrow in their framing. Some for near-term product development, some for long-term strategies.

The following four project types describe the most common ones: ‘Exploratory’, ‘Foundational’, ‘Idea­ tion’ and ‘Evaluation’.

−− Exploratory projects deep-dive into a theme or domain to understand the opportunity for a certain company or institution. This means they are strategic by nature and the most openlyframed of the four project types. The team embarks into unknown territory and has to constantly adjust along the way.

−− Foundational projects deliver an in-depth under­ standing of a topic to enable and support strategic decision-making. These types of projects are often commissioned by companies when they approach a new customer segment or external influences are impacting their business.

EXPLORATORY

Loosely-defined

−− Ideation projects generate ideas and concepts based on an in-depth understanding of peoples’ needs and wishes. Oftentimes, there is a technology or business need that requires a product or service idea.

−− Evaluation projects work with existing ideas, proto­t ypes, products or services and try to find the problem or potential for it to be evolved. Companies might have already collected data around the subject, and qualitative research is used to interpret it.

Specifics of exploratory innovation projects Comparing these four types, exploratory innovation projects are usually framed much wider than the other three project types. They start with a very open question, such as, “What is the future of retail?”. Many companies launch such projects when a consumer or tech trend hits their industry, or when they feel they need an update on where things are going in Touchpoint 11-2 15

their field. The research creates a foundational layer of basic understanding that usually involves past, present and future perspectives on the topic.

Future perspectives in particular play a decisive role and build on data gathered from future and trend studies in addition to in-field research. There is an element of intuition, too: There are no hard facts about the future and to some extent, it is always a gamble when guessing what will happen. This is difficult for some, but, all methodological approaches aside, at the end of the day a certain amount of guessing is an integral part of innovative product development.

If you are suggesting a concept for a future timeframe, you are envisioning the world around you.

Behavioural patterns and trends identified in the field are being projected. Depending on the duration of product development cycles, this demands vision and courage. With automotive manufacturing, it is up to seven years from the first sketch to market launch.

The broader the research question, the harder it is to deliver value that can be acted upon. In other words,

if the research stays too general, it can lead to unin­ spired results. Innovative ideas need rich, nuanced and insightful research.

Design research as inspirational research In corporate cultures that rely heavily on hard facts, qualitative design research can be far outside management’s comfort level because it doesn’t pro­ duce representative data that speaks for a significant amount of people, or follow scientific standards in terms of number of participants. While this might be a valid criticism in decision-making processes, it is a unique strength for innovation work.

Among several forms of research that inform product development (e.g. market research, tech scouting, etc.) only design research has the aforementioned freedom to alter methods in a way that maximises inspiration and minimises their standardised application. While it might be important to stay close to survey-type, explicitly articulated customer needs for near‑term evolutionary projects, exploratory innovation

Objectivity / Subjectivity of typical corporate research activities/ Subjectivity for product development Objectivity of typical corporate research a ctivities for product development

Tech scouting Big data

Netnography Qualitative market research Ethnography

Quantitative market research

Design research

Trend scouting Future research

Objective

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projects take the freedom to question and interpret what they learn in the field research more freely.

There are several techniques that have proven effective over time when planning and conducting inspirational design research. The most basic are: recruiting extreme profiles, cross-cultural research, and synthesis parallel to field research. These are further described in the following sections.

Recruiting extreme users

The question of whether to recruit actual customers or ‘extreme profiles’ for in-depth interviews is a recurring one, and one that is particularly important with exploratory projects. Exploring a theme means going to where the team can learn best about it, regardless of defined customer segments or personas. Extreme users usually have a strong opinion about the subject and can articulate themselves more clearly. Their distinct points of view can be controversial and niche, but they provide rich material for an intense and inspiring synthesis process.

Cross-cultural research

As with recruiting, the research locations as well are chosen according to where to learn most about the subject. One example of this is how the culture of convenience food might be studied in Japan, where ramen is perceived as fast food. The numerous noodle shops along the streets offer a different perspective on what a quick and easy meal experience can feel like in contrast to the burger chain concept that has shaped our Western idea.

Looking at it from a different angle and contrasting it with a deep-dive in a Western location will break biases and pre-existing frameworks – even if Japan is not a target market in this fictional example.

Synthesis parallel to field research

Conducting data synthesis in parallel with carrying out the field research has proven effective for very open exploratory research projects. When you enter new territory, you might not even know which the smartest questions are to ask. Synthesising the data on a daily or weekly basis on-the-go, instead of planning a dedicated phase afterwards, helps to constantly adjust the research questions along the team´s learning curve.

Balancing methodology and creativity

During a recent workshop at a university about analysis and synthesis of research data, a media informatics student asked about the correct way to cluster his raw data Post-its. It was highly frustrating for him to learn that there is a methodology in how to cluster, but there isn’t an objectively right or wrong set of clusters and cluster titles.

Just as with the design of a chair, there isn’t a single correct outcome. It isn’t a linear problem-solving approach with an ultimate solution. Moreover, in professional settings, this has led to frustration amongst those joining such a process for the first time, and also insecurity for young designers in how to justify results in front of critical clients or managers.

Methods give security. However, it is an inherent danger within design methodologies that they invite one to follow guidelines too closely and ultimately stay too close to the expected. In our data-driven, rationalised business worlds, it is understandable that many of us practitioners love the rational and standardised side to design research. Still, it is a widely subjective practice – it depends on who conducts the in-depth interview, who clusters, who ideates, who envisions. It is a design discipline that takes someone who combines impulses, interprets and creates. For exploratory innovation pro­ jects, it is this creative courage that is most important.

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Simulating AI-enabled Services Using a Human Element Prototyping service experiences using Lean Startup methods Prototyping complex service experiences that feel authentic when testing with real users is a perennial challenge for service designers. There is a case for making use of building blocks from real-world services, coupled with a human element, for creating experience prototypes to simulate Abhay Vohra is a service designer who works for a digital experience agency in the city of Chandigarh, India. abhayvohra@outlook.com

complex, AI-enabled experiences. In this article I explore this possibility by presenting two such methods: ‘Wizard of Oz’ and a ‘concierge test’, and share how they were leveraged to create realistic experience prototypes.

The challenges of prototyping experiences that feel real Service designers strive to simulate service experiences by prototyping the touchpoints that are central to the service. When tested with users, these simulations of the intended service help designers to develop insights on how to improve their associated touchpoints.

At different stages of the design process, and depending upon the purpose, the prototypes take on different levels of realism and fidelity, ranging from low-fidelity mock-ups to full-scale prototypes for a more realistic-seeming simulations of the service experience.

20 Touchpoint 11-2

The more realistic the simulation, the better the quality of the insights it yields. A realistic simulation does require the use of high-fidelity artefacts in a controlled environment. However, creating a prototype with sufficiently ‘good’-enough fidelity to enable its use in real-world contexts is often a challenge because of cost and time constraints.

In building experience prototypes that simulate complex AI, elements from existing services can be coupled with a human mediator. While not all existing services will be suited for use as part of such a prototype, there are opportunities to leverage parts of existing services

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where a human mediator manually modulates and orchestrates the different parts of the service experience.

There are two examples we can describe in more detail: Wizard of Oz and concierge tests, which come from the Lean Startup world and are used to build so-called MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) and PoCs (Proofs of Concept). These methods can be useful for service designers prototyping complex service experiences because, among other things, they can shorten the time required to develop the prototype.

‘Wizard of Oz’ and ‘concierge test’ methods Both these methods involve a human mediator per­ forming essential functions of the product or service manually – instead of the intended technology – to ­create the illusion of a working product or service.

The key difference is that the human mediator functions behind the scenes in a Wizard of Oz test, whereas they are known and visible to the end-user in a concierge test. Another important difference is that while a concierge test is used as a generative research tool, Wizard of Oz is used more as tool for evaluating the value proposition of the product.

Aardvark and Zappos represent well-known examples of the successful use of these methods in the start-up world. Aardvark, a social search engine, built an MVP using the Wizard of Oz method by employing actual human beings to answer search queries. Zappos used the concierge method to simulate order fulfilment by making use of actual shoe stores (rather than in-house stock) to source and ship products to customers.

It is not difficult to envisage how these methods could be used for creating experience prototypes. Here we present an example of how we used one of these methods to test a service proposition and generate service concepts for a food delivery service.

We simulated the AI by replacing it with an expert human – the so-called Wizard of Oz – who shares recom­ mendations and accepts orders via the messaging app WhatsApp.

services on the market, users with special dietary requirements need to spend extra time searching because these services do not include the requisite filters to search for food that matches their needs.

The central touchpoint of this service is an expert AI that understands the user’s special dietary needs and give recommendations on the food they should order.

We simulated the AI by replacing it with an expert human – the so-called Wizard of Oz – who shares recommendations and accepts orders via the messaging app WhatsApp. Because we wanted to deliver a realistic simulation of the entire service experience, the food chosen by the participant is actually delivered to them using an existing food-delivery service.

Insights Creating a realistic simulation of the entire service experience and testing it with real users enabled us to gather useful insights about how users communicate their dietary needs, and the factors that influence the choices they make. This allowed us to test the service proposition and generate service concepts for developing a full-fledged service that helps users meet their dietary needs.

An AI-enabled food delivery service The proposition to be developed was an AI-enabled food delivery service that caters to users with special dietary needs, such as gluten-free, Keto, low carb, vegan, etc.

While there are multiple, app-based food delivery Touchpoint 11-2 21

Bodystorming Healthcare Rethinking the experience of interventional radiology

Bodystorming enables healthcare teams to better understand and design for the medical staff and patients they serve. This role-playing methodology provides new perspectives on existing problems and constructs an ‘opportunity space’ to imagine novel, innovative solutions that healthcare so desperately needs.

Kara Chanasyk is a design strategist and service designer that helps health­ care organisations transform patient experi­ences by creating services and systems that make a difference.

She partners with digital health product teams that want to adopt human centred design to improve the patient experience, leveraging tools and best practices from Design Thinking, user research, service design and lean UX. kara@experienceinnovation.net

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Why bodystorming?

Physicians rely heavily on images taken before and during operations to effectively guide catheters or other surgical instruments during minimally-invasive interventional radiology (IR) treatments. However, it can be challenging for a physician to efficiently review and manipulate images while maintaining a sterile field in the operating room.

An IR imaging product team was looking to create an innovative solution to address these pain points while rethinking the broader service experience of the patient, physician and medical staff during IR procedures.

While conducting user research, they revealed significant variations in IR procedures across institutions and geographic regions, including: — Number of medical staff and roles in the operating room — Staff interactions — Management of tasks and sterile field

This variability contributed complexity to the design challenge and left the product team without a clear solution that could work across multiple operating room configurations. Leadership welcomed a facilitated bodystorming simulation as an alternative approach to problem solving.

Tailoring bodystorming with user research Bodystorming is a method of roleplaying user scenarios. By simulating user interactions, a cross-functional team can explore new contexts and hypothetical situations to gain user empathy and insight. This human-centred design method can be applied to various phases of the design process including understanding, ideation and prototyping.

Customising the narrative, roles, space and props enables the team to generate insights specific to their design challenge. Integrating elements of realism such as props into body­ storming can help participants to

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Fig 1: Scene 1 – Patient Installation

Fig. 2: Diverse roles participating in the bodystorming experience

suspend their disbelief and fully engage in the activity.

User research findings are a valuable source of information to construct a realistic simulation.

In preparation for bodystorming, the research team conducted a follow-up study to gather insights on operating room configuration and workflow variations.

The research findings defined personas, context of use, user scenarios and a journey map that were shared with the team and then used to tailor the bodystorming simulation. The primary user scenario provided structure for the narrative, with primary personas serving as key characters. The journey map served as a framework to capture additional needs, pain points and opportunities that were identified during the session.

By integrating the research findings into a body­ storming session, the product team were able to engage with the findings in a novel way. Bodystorming deepened their understanding of the users' context and challenges and provided a seamless transition into inspired ideation.

space’ for empathy building and ideation along the care journey. Scene one was ‘Patient Installation’, in which the patient was wheeled in on a stretcher and ‘installed’ on the operating table (see Fig. 1). From there, the team played out scene two, ‘Patient Preparation’, and so on.

The script for each scene incorporated the user tasks and jobs-to-be-done as key actions for each character.

Providing this structure ensured they brainstormed solutions that addressed the core user needs and pain points. Meanwhile, providing flexibility in the script by omitting specific dialogue, the participants were able to improvise, resulting in richer discussion and ideation.

Importance of a structured yet flexible narrative Research-backed user scenarios were woven together to construct a broader narrative and script for the team to bodystorm. Each ‘scene’ represented an ‘opportunity

Assign key roles for impact In order to engage the entire team in the bodystorm, team members played diverse roles, from acting to support roles (see Fig. 2). Bodystorming roles could have been selected arbitrarily, by picking from a hat. Instead, we opted to assign key roles to maximise impact.

When selecting participants for the acting roles, we chose team members who had not participated in the user research. The bodystorm was intended in part to serve as a proxy for the field work, so they could engage and develop a sense of empathy in the absence of face time with the end user. For example, a software architect was Touchpoint 11-2 23

asked to play the primary role of the nurse as an effort to inspire user advocacy within the engineering team.

It was important to engage leadership in the process to gain their insights and buy-in, but we asked them to play secondary roles and encouraged other team members to take on primary roles. By shifting roles, we shifted the power structure and exposed new group dynamics.

When assigning the role of the interventional cardiologist, we selected the system architect, who already had working knowledge of the clinical workflows. This sped-up the portion of the bodystorm where this character needed to be familiar enough to demonstrate the co-ordination of the imaging device hand and foot controls while simulating the catheter insertion with her other hand (see Fig. 3).

In addition to the main characters, other roles are necessary for the success of the bodystorm. Having a subject matter expert present as a participant who could contribute valuable insights and context was useful.

Other non-acting roles were asked to participate as active observers and note-takers. They watched the scene unfold and captured insights, pain points and opportunities on colour-coded Post-its. Those observations were mapped to the user journey on a scene-by-scene basis.

Create realism and empathy with space and props Designing the props and space for the bodystorm is what brings the story to life. We were able to utilise an existing device testing space within the company’s building to run the session. The fact that the space already had the operating table, imaging device,

Fig. 3: Roleplaying the interventional cardiologist

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Clinical simulation excercise

Scene 1: Patient Installation 1. Stretcher-bearer: Brings patient 2. Patient Chelsea: Moves from trolley to table, very weak,

moving a lot (stress, pain and cold)

3. Stretcher-bearer and Nurse: Move patient on the table 4. Nurse: Moves perfusion to IV pole

a. Moves equipment

b. Moves UIs and suspensions

c. Install sterile drape on table

5. “Patient installed”

Fig. 4: Rough schematic to illustrate space configuration

stretcher and overhead monitors simplified our effort to simulate a ‘believable’ operating theatre.

In addition to the key pieces of medical equipment, it was important to accurately configure the space. The research findings analysed staff and space configurations across different locations and were captured as rough schematics (see Fig. 4). These artifacts were used to configure the space to reenact a realistic scenario.

Additional props such as a lead apron, scrubs, face masks, gloves and a sterile drape brought even more realism the experience. With these props, empathising with the physician came easy. While watching the team’s systems architect suit up in scrubs, face mask and a 9+ kg lead vest was entertaining, it was watching her trying to juggle systems controls with gloved hands and foot pedals, while maneuvering a catheter and interpreting real time imagery on surgical monitors that was eye-opening (see Fig. 5).

Props are not just accessories to create realism.

They represent the tools and context of the user and play an important role in building empathy. The act of simply wearing gloves while attempting to interact

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Fig. 5: Leveraging all the props to bring the service design to life Fig. 6: Interacting with a touchscreen through a sterile drape Fig. 7: Initial prototype for UI placement Fig. 8: Refined prototype for UI placement

with touchscreen controls through a sterile drape was enough to hit home; the team observed how users face significant challenges when trying to complete tasks (see Fig. 6). Only by ‘walking a mile in their shoes’ do these moments of empathy emerge.

Capture ideas and prototype on-the-fly After each scene played out, discussion would begin and ideas would emerge. Having prototyping materials on hand was useful when it came time to imagining future state solutions.

After the bodystorming highlighted the challenges that doctors face with operating the device user interface (UI), discussion led to the exploration of alternate placement (see Fig. 7).

Rapid, low-fidelity prototypes were used to experiment with different positioning for the UI. Initially, a piece of paper was adequate to demonstrate a proposed placement of the controls. From there, the team refined their idea by using alternative prototyping materials.

This enabled the team to visualise the physical reach of the doctor to test their proposed positioning of the UI. Conclusion Bodystorming proved to be a valuable exercise for this IR imaging product team, and it inspired improvements to the patient and clinical service experience. Team members stepped away from their whiteboard sketches and conference room discussions into an immersive experience where they developed a deeper sense of empathy and understanding of their users and context.

By interacting with one another in physical space, they experienced a new methodology to work through the spatial configuration aspects of their project. Beyond concrete project outcomes, the team also experienced working together in a completely new way, outside of traditional roles and mindsets to perceive their problem and imagine a solution from an entirely different vantage point.

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High-Fidelity, Low-Burden Experience Prototypes Adapting to the complex systems within healthcare ­settings Hospitals and emergency departments are complex, high-stakes environments with the potential for patient harm. This makes testing new service concepts challenging. Experience prototypes must be appropriate for clinical practice and situated in the real context of care (high fidelity), while minimising disruption using temporary processes and workflow supports (low burden).

Jennifer Sculley (MDes), Senior Design Strategist, Institute for Healthcare Delivery Design jsculley@uic.edu Nathalie Cacheaux (MDes), Design Strategist/Visual Designer, Relish Works Pooja Chaudhary (MDes), Design Strategist, Relish Works Zane Elfessi (PharmD, BCPS), Emergency Medicine Clinical Pharmacy Specialist, Jesse Brown VA Michelle Kurzynski (MDM), Digital media production and storytelling manager, JAMA Network, American Medical Association Kim Erwin (MDes), Co-Director, Institute for Healthcare Delivery Design

26 Touchpoint 11-2

We propose that a high-fidelity experience prototype for healthcare settings has two important attributes: 1) it is assessing a new concept that is sufficiently developed to be appropriate for clinical practice; and 2) it is deployed in the real context of care.

While co-designing with stakeholders can yield new service concepts that are well-informed and more likely to succeed, the complexities of healthcare delivery can’t be fully simulated through planning alone. Accurately assessing new concepts requires real-world conditions.

Testing in the real context of care can impose both system-level and clinicianlevel burdens. Changes to existing systems such as electronic health records are resource-intensive. This effort is often reserved for full-scale implementations that are evidence-based and intended to be permanent. Even minor changes to existing processes can burden front-line clinicians with training and

workflow adjustments. A low-burden experience prototype for healthcare settings minimises both system-level burden and clinician-level burden.

This is because it relies on temporary processes, which bypass changes to existing systems and are quicker to put in place; it assesses a service concept that was co-designed with clinicians to fit workflows; and it eases participation through supportive materials.

This article describes a two-phased approach to high-fidelity, low-burden experience prototyping in a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical center’s Emergency Department (ED) in the United States. The first part describes developing a new ED discharge education tool that is aligned with clinicians, their workflows and health system priorities. The second part describes prototyping the experience of using the new discharge education tool in the real context of the ED.

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The VA medical center’s existing discharge instructions

Project background The leadership of this urban medical center’s ED invited a design team from the Institute for Healthcare Delivery Design (University of Illinois at Chicago) to develop and test a new discharge education tool. The new discharge tool would supplement existing discharge instructions for patients (Veterans) being discharged from the ED

1 Kochanek K.D., Murphy .SL., Xu J.Q., Arias E (2016). Mortality in the United States, 2016. NCHS Data Brief, no 293. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. 2017.

2 Potentially Avoidable Hospitalizations. Content last reviewed June 2018. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. https://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/nhqrdr/chartbooks/ carecoordination/measure3.html

after a Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) exacerbation, or flare-up. COPD is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States.1 COPD flare-ups, characterised by shortness of breath, are life-threatening but can often be avoided through good self-management.

Without good self-management, COPD flare-ups can contribute to avoidable ED visits and hospitalisations.2 Discharge instructions are an important information bridge between the ED and home, but patients and clinicians widely perceive the existing discharge paperwork as hard to understand and use. It relies solely on text which is written at an advanced reading level, making it difficult for a patient p ­ opulation which can struggle with health literacy.

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We, the design team and ED partners, aimed to develop and test a discharge education tool that better prepared patients to manage their COPD in the crucial five days after an ED visit, when they are most vulnerable to repeat COPD flare-ups.

Phase 1: Developing a new “fit for purpose” discharge education tool In the context of the ED, a ‘fit for purpose’ discharge education tool would be considered: 1) acceptable by ED doctors, nurses and pharmacists by improving discharge conversations; 2) appropriate for clinical practice by promoting guideline-based care of COPD; 3) appropriate for patients by addressing their physical, cognitive and emotional human factors, and 4) feasible by integrating with ED workflows.

We engaged 13 ED clinicians and staff, three pulmonology experts, 16 people with COPD, and 30 patients through in-context interviews, participant observation and intercept interviews to understand guideline-based care for COPD and the perspective of patients with COPD. We generated four different discharge education tool prototypes and 25 variations, which were merged into a single testable prototype. This consisted of a two-sided 11-inch x 17-inch (A3) sheet folded in half, creating a front cover, inner spread and back cover. It is written in simple English (a U.S. 5th grade reading level), contains illustrations to make complex regimens easier to understand and perform, and has a typographic hierarchy to help clinicians and patients jointly review the key points.

User reviews suggested that the final discharge education tool met the requirements of acceptability, appropriateness and feasibility3 and therefore warranted further assessment in the context of care. The VA medical center’s patient education board approved the new discharge tool for use in clinical practice, enabling us to plan and launch an experience prototype.

Phase 2: Planning and launching the experience prototype To determine the tool’s effect on clinician workflows and discharge conversations, we followed a four-step process to prototype the experience of using the new tool in the context of ED care delivery. These activities improved alignment between the experience prototype and the people, processes and systems already in place.

Step 1: Planning for a high-fidelity, low-burden experience prototype We firstly needed to observe current discharge processes.

We received full access to the ED and were provided data on COPD patient volume to help identify high-volume days and times for observations. The team observed 65 patient discharges, eight of which involved COPD patients.

3 Proctor, E., Silmere, H., Raghavan, R., Hovmand, P., Aarons, G., Bunger, A., … Hensley, M. (2011). Outcomes for implementation research: conceptual distinctions, measurement challenges, and research agenda. Administration and policy in mental health, 38(2), 65–76.

The new discharge education tool

Front page:

Inner spread:

Back page:

What to do in the five days after

Long term care connecting symptoms to

Simplified inhaler

ED discharge (until follow-up)

medications to action

instructions

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People (training, champions)

Processes (workflows, tools) Temporary experience prototype supports in the ED included 1) nurse trainings, 2) nurse champions, 3) a pilot workflow, 4) a data protection workflow, 5) weekly update emails,

Products (reminders, supports)

6) new discharge tool storage and signage, 7) a promotional animated GIF to embed in emails, 8) donuts to kick off launch week, 9) progress update board, 10) workflow ‘cheat sheets

Observations revealed operational realities that interviews had failed to surface. We learned that some clinical staff rotate monthly and some work only parttime. Therefore, we expanded the project timeline from eight to 12 weeks to ensure the experience prototype captured an adequate number of staff rotations and COPD patients, better simulating a full-scale implementation. We also observed eight meaningfully different variations in discharge processes which impacted the clinician groups included in the experience prototype.

We did not initially recognise nurses as a primary user of the new discharge tool, until we observed them performing the bulk of COPD discharges. As a result, we engaged nurse leadership, who approved nurse participation in development of the experience prototype (and continued to support design, launch and assessment activities). Finally, our observations highlighted the busy and chaotic nature of ED work. We hypothesised that clinicians would need environmental prompts to remind them to use the new discharge tool and workflow supports to help them use it as intended. We used these insights to adapt the tool and design the experience prototype.

Step 2: Designing the experience prototype We designed an experience prototype process in which ED nurses and pharmacists would: 1) fill out the new tool for COPD patients being discharged home; 2) document use of the new tool by making a photocopy and securely storing it; 3) review the completed tool with the patient along with other discharge paperwork. To promote and ease participation in this

new process, we created a suite of supportive materials and experiences.

These materials and experiences specifically targeted three known barriers to clinician engagement4: Awareness – Do staff know about the concept and understand it?

Agreement – Do staff believe and agree this is the right thing for their setting, role and patients?

Ability – Do staff have the time, bandwidth, resources and support to participate in the experience prototype?

Step 3: Launching the experience prototype in the context of care We launched the experience prototype by introducing the new discharge education tool into the ED and prompting clinicians to begin using it supported by the suite of materials described in the previous step. Despite planning and staff review of all aspects of the experience prototype, continual adaptations were required. We: — Expanded ‘launch day’ to ‘launch week’ to reach relevant staff across shifts and days off.

— Revised workflow supports. For example, increasing the size of the ‘cheat sheet’ for attending physicians so that it stood out among other papers next to computer workstations.

— Adapted to clinician turnover. We oriented new staff to the project and identified a new site champion.

4 Cabana MD, Rand CS, Powe NR, et al. Why Don’t Physicians Follow Clinical Practice Guidelines? A Framework for Improvement. JAMA. 1999; 282(15):1458–1465.

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Eight variations in discharge processes

— Visited the ED more frequently than originally planned.

Our physical presence in the ED acted as a reminder of the project and seemed to correlate with ED clinicians using the new discharge tool more consistently.

Step 4: Assessing the results of the experience prototype The goal of the experience prototype was to assess whether the experience of using the new discharge education tool in the context of care was acceptable, appropriate and feasible for staff, and if it improved the quality of discharge conversations between clinicians and patients. This was assessed using both quantitative and qualitative data.

Quantitative data suggested the rate at which ED clinicians were using the new discharge tool with eligible COPD patients. The number of patients who were eligible to receive the new discharge tool during 30 Touchpoint 11-2

the experience prototype timeframe was compared with the photocopies of discharge tools used with patients. Additionally, each tool was numbered, allowing us to track how many had been used, even if they were not photocopied. Photocopies indicated that the new discharge tool was used with about half of eligible patients. The discharge tool numbering indicated that several were unaccounted for and may have been used with an additional quarter of eligible patients, although not photocopied. These tracking efforts suggested that clinician use of the discharge tool steadily increased as the experience prototype progressed, with the number of photocopied tools peaking in Week 7. Photocopy numbers declined when the design team's presence in the ED slowed.

Qualitative data helped us understand how clinicians were using the new discharge education tool. This

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included observing clinicians using it with patients and reviewing the photocopies of completed discharge tools. The photocopies captured clinician notes and hand-written modifications to the tool. This enabled us to assess whether the tool was being filled-out as intended. This review informed final revisions to the discharge education tool. Observing clinicians using the new discharge tool proved difficult, because there was not a way to predict when COPD patients would visit the ED. For the first three weeks of the experience prototype, we observed for an average of nine hours per week during high-volume times. We were able to witness a few COPD discharges using the new tool as a result. These observations suggested that the new discharge tool was promoting longer and more detailed explanations of medication usage and symptom management, compared to discharges we witnessed using the existing discharge paperwork alone.

Finally, we conducted a staff satisfaction survey building on the ‘Getting To Outcomes’ framework5 to assess the perceived fit and benefits of the new dis­ charge tool among ED doctors, nurses and pharmacists.

Response to the survey was limited, but all respondents voted to keep the new discharge education tool avail­ able for use in the ED.

Conclusion Experience prototyping in hospitals and Emergency Departments can be daunting for service designers, yet it is essential for designing health services that are likely to succeed. We offer five takeaways for successfully deploying experience prototypes in complex care environments: 1. Build relationships with both leadership and front-line

staff. Both perspectives are essential for gaining organisational cooperation and access to the right people and places. We could not have carried out this experience prototype without support from both groups.

2. Plan for direct observation of site processes to

reveal what conversations may not. It is critical to

design for the real-world context of care rather than official plans and protocols. This can help designers reduce burden to systems and clinicians, unintended consequences, and potential patient harm.

3. Provide supportive materials designed to mitigate

three kinds of barriers to clinician engagement.

These barriers are described earlier in this article.

4. Be attentive and ready to respond when things don’t

go according to plan. Maintaining a physical presence

on site, careful monitoring and rapid adjustments to an experience prototype reduce friction and harm, build goodwill, and signal to the staff that designers can be counted on to prioritise patient care.

5. Reciprocate the time and attention your experience

5 Wandersman, A., Chien, V. H., & Katz, J. (2012). Toward an evidencebased system for innovation support for implementing innovations with quality: Tools, training, technical assistance, and quality assurance/quality improvement. American journal of community psychology, 50(3-4), 445-459.

prototype requires. Even the most thoughtfully-designed

experience prototype asks something from its users. Continually updating staff on experience prototype progress and recognising staff effort with treats, thank-yous, and humour shows consideration for their participation.

1: Plan

2: Design

3: Launch and adapt

4: Assess

Goal

Understand user activities and setting Develop design requirements

Design the experience prototype

Deploy the intervention and collect data

Determine impact of the experience prototype

Activities

Contextual inquiry 65 observations of discharge from the Emergency Department and discharge process mapping

Design workflows and process supports Help staff integrate the experience prototype into routine care

Orient and train staff

Collect and analyse data Review photocopies of filledout discharge tools

Weekly site visits Build relationships and trust with staff

Tools and Baseline data pull supports Identify patient volume at

times of day and week Customised field tool Capture discharge communication and interactions

Install process supports into work environment

Develop measures and data capture tools Identify site champions

Monitor usage and adapt experience prototype and supports

Compare data of COPD patient volume to number of discharge tools used

Workflow diagrams Process support tools Cheat sheet for attending physicians; storage solution for tool; big signage for how to complete documentation, etc.

Donuts for staff ED presence 3x per week for first four weeks Weekly emails Update all core team members Progress updates Posted weekly in the ED

Staff satisfaction survey Monthly data pulls Regarding COPD patient volume

Phase 2: The four steps of launching the experience prototype in the ED

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Board Games: Experience Prototyping in Miniature When facing a challenge with many players, a physical space and a race against time, a board game can help designers and stakeholders illustrate and iterate on different collaboration models.

Emily Eagle is a Senior UX Designer at Nordstrom. She relishes opportunities to dig into complex systems and works to influence the overall service design for back-of-house employees.

When she’s not designing, she may be found biking around Seattle or attending modern dance classes.

Collaboration vs. competition Board games often use maps to represent time and space, pieces to represent players, and cards to represent actions and opportunities. Because of all of these elements, they can be useful – and fun – tools to prototype a service or visualise an ecosystem. At Nordstrom, our design and research team, working with an in-store fulfilment mobile application and its accompanying business process, developed a board game to tackle service-level questions.

In the current world of in-store fulfilment, efficiency and order fulfilment rates are important to serving customers and measuring success with employees. The team behind the mobile application and the game – Ben Lile (UX research), Anouk Mouillet, Sabrina Weschler and myself (all UX designers) – set out to answer a set of tough questions: “How do we encourage operational employees to work together as a team? How could we emphasise collaboration and still benefit the end

customers? And, how could that collaboration be translated into our digital tool?”

A couple of us had the experience of playing Forbidden Island, a co-operative board game. We analysed how it en­­ courages players to work together, collecting treasures as water rises on an island. The group wins or loses together.

This shares much in common in terms of urgency and complexity with our Nordstrom context, in which employees must quickly handle a high volume of orders. With our vivid imaginations,

Ben Lile playing one of the first drafts of the game

32 Touchpoint 11-2

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and our experiences doing research behind the scenes in stores, it was easy to see the parallels.

Prototyping the prototype of the board game Building a board game became a new approach we designed and iterated on to research collaboration concepts. As we iterated and ran sessions, the game became a tool to build awareness of the complexity of our problem space and build empathy for our users (store employees) from partners, stakeholders and other sections of the business.

The employees we design for are logistics fulfillers, who find items in back stock or in departments for customers, for both store pick-up or delivery. However, managers frequently change store merchandise, and returned items or rare items can be challenging to find. Fulfillers talk about the numbers on their fitness trackers as a measure of how busy a day they had.

This meant it was clear that we needed to account for movement and as well as the layout of the store. The board itself needed to represent the physical challenge of moving between departments and floors, as well as the necessity of having orders reach the consolidation area.

Following the precedent established by good board games, we introduced a mix of luck and strategy to the effort of ‘picking’ in-store. The last items in inventory can be particularly hard to find, and so we tried a few methods to represent that challenge. One of the first iterations, using a matching scenario like a memory game, ended up creating stress amongst participants because they didn’t have any way to gain knowledge or skill when flipping over the cards that represented products. We soon realised we needed to improve the game mechanics without getting too swept-up in making the game enjoyable to play.

Otherwise, we risked losing sight of the learnings we wanted to capture around collaboration.

As we iterated, we wanted to emphasise the ways that players could learn from each other about the status and volume of orders. The mental model was to help each other finish orders as they would in a relay race, passingoff items to be completed by others down the line. The

communication between players became a key element we wanted to record because we wanted to enable that kind of communication in the next version of the tool.

Using game play to illustrate work After several iterations of playing and adjusting amongst ourselves and immediate teammates in the design department, we ran two different game play sessions with engineers, business stakeholders and our product partners. Not only did our colleagues enjoy the process, but they started to see aspects of our work beyond the mobile application, and in the overall service design of the fulfilment ecosystem.

One of the things we tested was whether visibility into items that had been found but dropped-off for another player to pick up would impact communication and eventually fulfilment. Building visibility into what items were in drop-off areas had been a hard sell with business partners previously, but after playing the game, our partners saw what impact it could have, because they knew where urgent items were in the store.

Finally, we held another large session and invited the larger user experience team. Some of our peers who focus on the online experience had not really understood our problem space until they played the game. By experiencing a simulation of the challenge, and the stresses experienced by fulfilment employees, our stakeholders and colleagues understood the ecosystem and the employees more clearly.

The game now exists as an accessible prototype within Nordstrom. It helps people understand the fulfilment space as well as empathise with our end users – the fulfilment employees. If you are working on a complex service with multiple people, time, space and luck, a board game may help bring ideas to life, validate and test assumptions about collaboration within an ecosystem, and give the o ­ pportunity for some fun with your team in the process!

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Lessons Learned from Experience Prototyping in the Field Indonesia has more than 250 million people, with half of them living on less than US$2.5 a day1, and approximately 66 percent ‘unbanked’2. Our client, one of the state-owned banks, wanted to help people save their money in the bank so they can have access to financial assistance. In this article, we will share lessons learned from experience prototyping the solution with the client to target this segment of the population.

Ketut Sulistyawati, PhD is the Director at Somia Customer Experience.

Sulis has 15 years of experience in research, strategy and design. She believes that innovation should be insights-led and implementable. sulis@somiacx.com Ukasyah Qodratillah Ananda Putra is a Senior Interaction Designer at Somia Customer Experience. Uka was drawn into the experience design field due to his interest in how the human mind works. uka@somiacx.com Nathaniel Orlandy is a Product Designer at Somia Customer Experience.

Nathan is passionate about creating tangible experiences and delivering implementable solutions. nathan@somiacx.com

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Identifying the right solution Early in the project, we facilitated an ideation workshop with crossfunctional divisions within the bank to capture ideas for solving the problem, as well as understanding the client’s aspirations. Initially, there was a strong push to create digital solutions to attract customers to save their money in the bank.

1 World Bank. (2017). Financial Inclusion Insights: Wave 3 Report FII Tracker Survey. [Online] Retrieved July 9, 2019 from http://finclusion.org/ uploads/file/reports/Indonesia%20Wave%20 3%20Report_11-July-2017.pdf 2 Nugroho, Y., & Samudera, I. (2018) All eyes on e-money: The race to reach 180M unbanked Indonesians, Retrieved 8 July, 2019 from https:// www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-apac/toolsresources/research-studies/all-eyes-e-moneyrace-reach-180m-unbanked-indonesians/

Using low-fidelity prototypes to provoke From the ideas generated, we developed low-fidelity prototypes to bring to the field. Some of these initial prototypes were simple illustrations and brochures, while others were more elaborate scenario role-playing and card sorting sets. The prototypes were quick to make, which gave us flexibility to create new prototypes rapidly in the field.

The prototypes were designed to help our respondents imagine the concept and how it would fit into their lives, and they enabled the respondents to provide more detailed feedback than simple ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ responses. This was important because we observed that the people that we spoke to tended to have difficulty articulating their thoughts.

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Low fidelity prototypes used in Phase 1 field research, from saving small change from groceries shopping to more elaborate ones, such as saving to buy gold bars or jewellery

Various forms of piggybanks used by customers to keep their money at home

Rapid iteration enabled convergence toward the most suitable solution We brought the concepts to the first field location, Yogyakarta and Klaten. Using the prototypes, we quickly learned that the initial hypotheses for solutions did not fit well with the respondents’ existing behaviours. Although they were already using smartphones, they were not comfortable using them for financial purposes.

We also discovered that most of them already had the habit of saving a small amount of money from

their daily income, which they keep inside a cupboard or piggybank. The respondents consider going to the bank to be costly and inconvenient, because they must pay for public transport or parking fees, thereby reducing their savings. They also spend time traveling and queuing, which they could use instead to work.

Furthermore, they feel embarrassed if they only deposit a small amount of money in the bank. On the other hand, they are aware that accumulating money in a piggybank at home leaves them prone to the temptation to spend that money on non-essential things.

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From the insights we gathered, we quickly dropped the initial concepts and developed new ones to bring to the next field locations in Medan and Binjai. These were then further iterated for the last field research sessions in Manado and Tondano. After several iterations were complete, the solution converged into a locked piggybank concept in which customers could save their money at home, but which could only be opened by bank agents who are local neighbourhood stall owners.

In return for a certain amount of saved cash, customers were given shopping coupons which they could spend only at the respective market stalls, further motivating savings and deposits through the bank agents.

Service prototyping in full scale After nailing down the solution (the ‘what’ and ‘why’), we needed to find the most effective way to implement it nationwide (the ‘how’), as well as determine how to measure its potential impacts. To evaluate if the concept could really change peoples’ saving behaviours, we proto­ typed the end-to-end service solution at full scale with four communities in Tangerang for about four months.

The devil is in the details The initial concept included a locked piggybank and reward system. But as we planned for full scale service prototyping, we also needed to design the details of the other components, such as: 1) communication materials and standard operating procedures for the bank agents; 2) the acquisition, education and distribution channel; 3) the engagement model to trigger and remind people to save and deposit money; 4) the collection procedures from the bank officials; and 5) the communication strategy to secure buy-in from bank officials in the region.

By iterating each component, we learned that even a slight change in the details had a significant impact on the results. For example, the choice of which channel would be used to introduce the programme and how it was communicated (whether through a neighbourhood event or a religious gathering, or placing the concept in the market stalls) directly influenced the programme’s conversion rate.

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Top: The team hosted an event which prototyped an acquisition, education and distribution channel. Middle: Design iterations throughout the project. Bottom: Designing the first prototype took a lot of time and effort, but it did not fulfil customers’ needs.

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Spend more time testing rather than perfecting The design requirements of the first prototype were complex, and they were based on assumptions. For example, we assumed that customers needed a rigid piggybank to place on top of a table, but that it had to be foldable so they could easily carry it to the bank agents. It took us three weeks to build this prototype, but when we tested it, we learned that customers typically hid it inside a cupboard instead of placing it on a table, thereby not using the foldable feature.

In another iteration, we used a simpler walletlike piggybank, which was much simpler, faster and cheaper to make while meeting the customers’ needs much more effectively. Had we started with a simpler prototype, we could have saved more time and done more iterations along the way.

Define metrics to measure the impact During the testing period, we gathered several data points to evaluate the impact of the solution, including: 1) number of customers who signed up to the programme, 2) amount of savings collected, and 3) customers’ and agents’ attachment to the programme. Building on the last two points, we offered participants the option to trade back the wallet in return for five times the original wallet price. They all rejected the offer, saying that the wallet is more valuable because it enabled them to save money, whereas cash would be easily spent.

At the end of the four-month prototyping period, the savings collected were 127 percent of the initial target. These metrics helped the team to get buy-in from business stakeholders to continue rolling out the programme nationwide.

Co-design is a journey, not a one-time event As designers, we knew that we had neither the full view of the problem nor the full context for the solution. At the beginning of the project, the client formed a dedicated core team with in-depth knowledge about the domain to work closely with us throughout the research and design process. Working

Both the research participants and our team were surprised by the amount of money collected during the short testing period

side by side with the client’s team provided us with insights about organisational culture, business metrics, budget, technical and operational limitations, thereby allowing us to design a viable and feasible solution.

For example, although collecting money door-to-door was really appreciated by customers, the operational cost would be too high; utilising neighbourhood bank agents would achieve the same purpose at a much lower cost. Working closely with bank agents and customers also provided us with the insights on what matters to them and how to design the solution to best fit their existing behaviours. These could not all be achieved through a single co-design event.

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Evaluating Video Prototypes with Emotion Analytics Emotions have an important influence on how we think and behave.

Incorporating emotion analytics in the video prototype evaluation process allows service designers to gather feedback from viewers based on moments of high emotional arousal in videos. This article explains how to incorporate emotion analytics into semiBruce Wan is an assistant professor at the School of Design at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is interested in technologymediated experience design that supports human flourishing in the field of tourism and leisure. He is currently working on experience-based design literacy, a knowledge base that facilitates the codesign process with multi­ disciplinary researchers for smart tourism innovation.

Bruce.Wan@polyu.edu.hk

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structured interviews when evaluating video prototypes. We conducted a study and found the proper application of this method provided valuable feedback for enhancing the service concept.

Video prototyping and emotion analytics Video prototyping is a storytelling method for communicating service concepts. The process involves service designers creating an explanation video that highlights the user experience as developed through multiple service touchpoints under different situations. To evaluate the video prototype, designers conduct semi-structured interviews with viewers after they watched the video.

Viewers then share their opinions and the emotions they felt while watching specific interactions, features and touchpoints.

A typical problem is that a viewer’s feedback may be limited by the capacity of his or her short-term memory, which normally lasts for 20-30 seconds, and can store between five and nine items.

An explanation video can easily exceed

this duration and as well as present more things to react to emotionally.

Service designers can benefit from a way to help viewers remember what they felt as they watched the video.

Emotion analytics may help here, by capturing viewers’ emotions while they watch a video, complementing conventional semi- structured inter­ views and enhancing the extent and quality of feedback gained during the subsequent interview.

Emotion refers to strong feelings caused by the situation someone is in or the people one is with. Such instinctive feelings, which are distinct from cognitive reasoning, play a vital role in our survival and help us avoid danger and strive for greater fulfilment in life. Emotion analytics is a non-intrusive technique used to record and measure viewer’s

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emotional reactions. Data related to emotions can come from different sources, such as text, speech, facial expressions and body language. That data is analysed and interpreted using machine learning algorithms.

Emotion analytics is capable of identifying and distinguishing basic emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger and fear. The advertising, marketing and entertainment industries have increasingly relied on emotion analytics to gain insights into customers’ emotions.

We used the emotion analytics platform ‘Affectiva’1 for our study. The platform allows users to set up an emotion analytics study by inputting a link to a video hosted on YouTube2 . A camera above the monitor records viewers’ facial expressions while the video plays. The platform can calculate – in real time – the likelihood that the viewer is feeling one or more of five

1 https://www.affectiva.com/ 2 https://affectiva.github.io/youtube-demo/

basic emotions: joy, anger, disgust, contempt or surprise, and does so with an accuracy in the 90th percentile.

Facial expressions can have either a positive or a negative effect on the likelihood of an emotion.

Calculating that likelihood requires the system to recognise and map certain facial expressions to emotions. For example, if the viewer smiles, the software will increase the likelihood of joy, whereas raised or furrowed eyebrows will decrease its likelihood3 . The strength (i.e., likelihood) of each emotion is represented as a line chart plotted below the video. After the video ends, those carrying out the research can identify video segments that triggered a viewer’s specific emotion and investigate them in the interview (Fig. 2). In sum, using emotion analytics can help service designers gather more

3 https://developer.affectiva.com/mapping-expressions-to-emotions/

Segment

Feature

Description

Moment

1

Daily advice

Start your day with supportive advice

Morning

2

Mini-game

Get inspired by the wizards

Commuting

3

Reminder

Recall what you have learnt from others

Working

4

Emotion logging

Log your feelings

When you feel agitated

5

Strength developer

Get motivated to develop strength of character

Facilitate leisure activity

6

Guided journaling

Reflect on your day

Evening

7

Goal-setting

Set a goal

Evening

8

Choose the wizard

Decide on optimal ways to interact with others

Before bed

Table 1. Segments and features that appear in the video

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precise and valuable feedback for improving the quality of the service concept under investigation.

Research design and data collection This study used a video prototype of a capstone project designed by two undergraduate students4 at the School of Design, at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The project, titled ‘Refles’, is a mobile application that promotes the psychological wellbeing of city dwellers via self-reflection and is based on scientifically proven studies of the ‘Character Strengths and Virtues’ framework5 . It offers a guided reflection tool that turns self-reflection into a daily practice. When used purposefully, these character strengths can boost happiness.

Refles personifies these character strengths as different virtual characters (known as the wizards).

Users can interact with these wizards to learn about and develop their character strengths.

4 The capstone project was designed by Nathan Hui and Chester Wan, mentored by Bruce Wan, BA (Hons) Interactive Media, School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong.

5 https://www.viacharacter.org/ 6 http://tiny.cc/refles

Fig. 1: Excerpt from the video6

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For example, the wizards invite users to reflect on their activities before going to bed. Using Refles has the potential for the users to build greater connec­ tions with themselves by recording their indi­v idual thoughts, behaviours and character strengths.

Despite the positive potential, the designers were uncertain of the desirability of new behaviours.

Therefore, they produced a four-minute explanation video6 , comprising eight segments and features to communicate key features, information and context of use, in order to elicit viewers’ feedback.

Ten people participated in this study, none of whom had ever seen the video, because we wanted to gather a more instinctive emotional response from them. Before each session, we masked the line chart area with paper so it would not distract the participant’s attention. We briefly introduced the project, then seated them in front of a computer and played the video via the Affectiva platform. After they watched it, we conducted a semistructured interview with participants, inviting them to talk about specific segments that intrigued them. Then, we revealed the line chart that record­ed the participants’ emotions and invited them to elaborate on the segments that triggered their emotions. The interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, coded and thematically analysed.

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Webcam

Capture viewer’s facial expressions

Video from YouTube

The area below this line was covered during the initial video viewing

Line chart

Emotion analytics

Emotion filter

Select specific emotion The setting of the study

Fig. 2: (Top) The context of the study, in which a video was played and viewer’s reactions were simultaneously captured and analysed Fig. 3: (Left) Samples of emotion analytics of three participants mapped with the video sequences

Key findings All participants were able to describe the key features that appeared in the video. At this stage, some appre­ciated these features because they believed the application could foster positive behaviours, ­whereas others questioned the feasibility and practicality of the system in a real-life setting.

We then proceeded to the second step of the inter­ view in which we disclosed the emotion a­ nalytics results to the participants. Figure 3 shows the results of three participants who viewed the same video.

The three participants were selected because their feedback was valuable and representative despite the diverse emotional reactions.

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The analytics results were distinct in terms of the emotion (colour), likelihood (Y-axis), and occurrence (X-axis). For instance, Participant 1 mostly expressed joy on the first two sequences of the video, Participant 2 showed both surprise and anger at the first, seventh and the last sequences of the video, and Participant 3 expressed contempt at the second, sixth and the last sequences.

We believe the diverse emotional expressions might be due to the subjective and idiosyncratic nature of the emotional reaction. Certainly, the video content plays a role in triggering viewers’ emotions; however, viewers can have very different emotional reactions towards the same content because of the individual’s previous experience.7 We interviewed participants about each of the video sequences that had triggered a strong emotional moment (i.e., likelihood), and asked whether the type of emotion identified by the system was accurate.

Because the goal was to improve the service concept, we were especially interested in negative emotional reactions such as the anger and disgust experienced by Participants 1 (sequence 2, 4 and 6) and 2 (sequence 1 and 3) during the video. However, both participants claimed that they did not feel particularly negative towards these sequences in the video, but were rather distracted by them (Participant 1) or confused and doubtful about the feasibility of the feature (Participant 2). More in-depth discussions with each participant revealed some moments of high emotional arousal to be highly valuable, whereas others represented little value in terms of feedback.

Signals: Valuable high emotional arousal moments We found two types of feedback can fulfil our research goal: feedback on the features and content of the design solution, and feedback on the participants’ personal

7 Bryce, E. (2017). How emotions are 'made': Why your definition of sadness is unlike anyone else's. Retrieved August 7, 2019, from https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lisa-feldman-barrett-emotions

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interest. We found that the participants could elaborate on their strong emotional moments and thereafter make valuable suggestions regarding the service concept.

1. Features and content of the design solution This is arguably the most valuable feedback the design team wanted to hear because the participants’ emotional reactions were highly relevant to the service design concept, as shown in the video. Some participants expressed joy and surprise when they found that the features showcased were valuable. For example, some participants regarded the feature ‘guided journaling’ (sequence 6) as particularly valuable, although their emotions were distinct. Participant 2 provided more details on two moments she had not disclosed in the first interview. She clarified that she felt confused rather than angry during two intervals of the video because the feature’s daily advice (sequence 1) and goal setting (sequence 7) did not appeal to her. In fact, she was worried these features would dampen her sense of autonomy. Here, the results of emotion analytics provided useful discussion prompts to facilitate in-depth interviews.

2. Participants’ personal interest

Moments of high emotional arousal can be associ­at­ ed with participants’ personal interest. For instance, one participant expressed joy (sequence 5, activity reminder) because she loved playing sports, just like the actor in the video. The sequence reminded her of good personal memories. In contrast, another par­ ticipant felt disgusted by the same sequence because he had little interest in doing sport. Here, the negative emotion was not attributed to the feature but rather the content of the video. Designers should have a more in-depth discussion with participants to make sure viewer feedback helps to improve the product feature.

In sum, our interviews showed that participants appreciated the psychological benefits of using the application but also had concerns on the prac­ticality of the system. Using emotion analytics allowed designers to probe into these concerns, such as adaptability to user’s

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current habit and the intrusiveness of the reminders. The feedback allowed students to make adjustment on their final design.

Noise: Irrelevant high emotional arousal moments We also found two types of high emotional arousal moments that contributed little or nothing to the video evaluation: participants’ feelings about participating in the video evaluation and their feelings about the quality of storytelling.

1. Feelings about participating

Simply participating in the video evaluation ses­ sion led to strong emotional reactions from some participants. For example, Participant 1 expressed excitement and joy at the beginning of the video because the experience was novel to her. However, her strong emotion was not related to the service concept.

Interestingly, the video ended with a high emotional arousal moment for all three participants: They report­­ed having an emotional reaction to finishing the task.

2. Reactions to the quality of storytelling

The quality of a narrative can also trigger partic­ipants’ emotions. Inept acting, poor narrative, disturbing background music and unclear wording can distract viewers and thus increase noise. We found that too much noise (e.g., the first half of Participant 1) generates a chart that is a challenge for those carrying out the research to read. However, participant feedback on this issue can improve the quality of the narrative in future iterations. In this case, emotion analytics can be used to de­termine if the video is ready for a more formal evaluation.

segments and features to help facilitate the interview.

Thirdly, by using an emotion analytics platform to capture the viewer’s facial expressions while they watch the video, and ensuring to conceal the results of the emotion analysis in order not to disturb the viewer. And finally, by conducting a semi-structured interview afterwards, using the line chart produced by emotion analytics tool as a discussion prompt.

On the whole, we recognised three important points when using analytics. First is that because emotional reactions are highly idiosyncratic, there may be little similarity between the line charts produced by different individuals. Second was that the result of emotion analytics contains both distracting noises as well as interesting signals, so researchers or designers need to distinguish between the two when collecting and analysing feedback. And last, compared with 27 human recognisable emotional experiences8, current emotion analytics can only capture a handful of basic emotions. Therefore, researchers or designers should further discuss with viewers the emotion identified and, more importantly, flesh out the meaning behind the emotional reaction that was observed.

8 Cowen, A. S., & Keltner, D. (2017). Self-report captures 27 distinct categories of emotion bridged by continuous gradients. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(38), E7900–E7909. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1702247114

Conclusion Service designers can integrate emotion analytics into video prototype evaluation in four steps. First, by creating an explanation video that communicates a service concept. Secondly, by creating a list of video Touchpoint 11-2 43

Yes, No, Maybe: Experience Prototyping at Scale Product designers Joydeep Sengupta and Adam Cochrane look into the issues of prototyping at scale, sharing insights on how fashion retailer Zalando is going about building a prototyping culture within a 14,000-person organisation.

Adam Cochrane is service designer at Zalando SE. Australian-born, Berlinbased. Whether working with indigenous Australians or corporate Austrians, he has had the privilege to work around the world with diverse teams, solving complicated problems and creating delightful solutions. adambcochrane@gmail.com

Joydeep Sengupta is a product designer at Zalando SE. He has had experience designing for users on four continents, which has helped him build strong empathy towards different cultures. In the past he worked at Nokia, Honeywell and the Federal Reserve Bank. Born in India, his passion is cooking and country-hopping. contactme@joydeepsg.com

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What does it actually take to make proto­ types work at Zalando? Joydeep, who builds experiences in the area of convenience, describes the challenge of scale: “One unique thing for us designers, is the size of it.” Indeed, Zalando is large – it operates in 17 countries, and is Europe’s largest online fashion retailer, with over 28 million active users, which creates a few unique challenges.

Scale has a strange way of distorting things. For example, you can have deep empathy and understanding for one or two users, or maybe even 50, but if you try to keep this up for all 28 million, you will surely struggle.

To paint a better picture, we will share the details of three projects which illustrate the impact prototyping can have on an organisation: Jochen Saal, on using experience prototyping to validate the value proposition of a new service offering.

Luana Moura Busquets, on using experience prototyping to share critical insights around payment within her team and the bigger organisation. And Dennis Harz, on introducing design and prototype-driven innovation in warehouse processes

Insights from Jochen Saal Jochen started seven years ago as a strate­ gic designer at Zalando, responsible for the app experience and the organisation’s future vision. Currently a research strategist, he helps Zalando empathise with its customers and make decisions based on users’ needs and pain points.

Jochen’s case study concerns Zalando Plus, a premium service that offers faster delivery, free return home pick up and access to exclusive offers. The initial concept came straight from top

Getting our hands dirty prototyping the premium delivery service

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The value proposition delivered to thousands of potential customers

management and had a heavy business agenda attached.

From a researcher’s perspective, it triggered serious doubts that actual user problems were being solved.

Jochen’s challenge was to figure out and validate what value a premium service could bring to Zalando’s most loyal customers.

Jochen’s interdisciplinary team of five used the double diamond process in conjunction with qualitative methods (two expert and 11 user interviews, customer observations and ‘fake door’ tests) and quantitative research methods (including market research and surveys). Their plan was to not only understand qualitative insights but also to validate them with numbers, in order to help satisfy stake­ holders in a data-driven organisation such as Zalando.

The team’s fake door prototype is a method that helps rapidly validate a concept by mocking up a feature or service that doesn’t exist, and attempts to sell it to the customer as if it does. After the user takes an action, the system lets the user know the feature is not available yet, and designers are left with an understanding of the demand for that feature. The tests were carried out over 12 weeks and combined multiple value propositions, such as next day delivery, circular fashion, premium access to select brands, access to a personal assistant and also touched on cost. They required support from a variety of teams including marketing, design and user research.

A little more than 850,000 participants were reached by these tests, and about 4,000 people engaged in the email campaign. This experience prototype helped illustrate just what Zalando customers were looking for in the Zalando Plus experience, and since them the programme has grown, with many features in the roadmap coming from findings discovered by Jochen and his team. In this case, experience prototyping helped create the necessary findings – a balanced view of qualitative insights and supporting numbers – to strategically support the team and key decision makers to build and maintain an impactful roadmap.

Jochen’s advice based on his learnings and experience are: — Never prototype in silos. Some things need to be seen and felt to be believed, and it’s important to involve stakeholders and work with other teams for better outcomes.

— Be specific about the purpose of the project, the business goals and the hypothesis that you need to validate in order to obtain the right balance of quantitative and qualitative information you need to move forward.

— Lastly, start with the MVP (Minimum Viable ­Proto­type). If you can get the answer with a pen and paper sketch, do that, and build up from there.

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Insights from Luana Moura Busquets The following insights are from Luana Moura Busquets, a designer for the Zalando payments area, which concerns checkout, refunds, invoicing, legal, banking details and even fraud. Each month, Zalando processes approximately ten million orders through more than ten different payment channels.

Luana's challenge is to figure out the simplest, safest and most trustworthy payment methods for many different customers, while balancing their needs with the current business objectives. To achieve this, it’s important for designers and product owners to understand that the success of our products heavily relies on having a deep understanding of cultural aspects in each country. For example, invoicing still remains the most preferred payment method in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Nordics and the Benelux, whereas in Poland, Italy and Spain, customers prefer cash on delivery, and for UK and France it’s card payments. As she said, “For each culture, paying means something distinct, and it’s important to understand this.”

Luana built an experience prototype that would help her product development department understand why certain payment methods are preferred in certain countries and tested it in different markets.

In combination with existing analytic data, observations and card sorting, Luana’s team conducted

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qualitative research with nine in-home interviews with a variety of participants. She says this experience of being “actually in someone’s home” was the most eyeopening for her team.

Luana stated that, “What we really understood that day was that a seamless experience for our customers is more about the cultural understanding of what ‘seam­ less’ means for them than designing the shortest and most convenient payment process.”

Luana’s advice for anyone else building prototypes: Involve key stakeholders early in experience proto — typing and testing with real users, ideally in context.

As she said, “It was easier for the product owner to understand and communicate with the management board, because he was part of the discovery phase as well.”

— If you carry out in-home interviews, make sure you can speak the user’s language. Don’t use jargon – use simple and translatable language. Bring a translator along if needed, and even better, bring designers or researchers who are native speakers.

Insights from Dennis Harz Dennis Harz is a product designer at Zalando logistics, where the day-to-day concerns are often more about increasing efficiency then about addressing user needs. Workers in the organisation’s warehouses constantly struggle with tools that are poorly-designed while simultaneously trying to meet daily fulfilment quotas. In addition, they often work shorter tenures, meaning quick on-boarding and easy-to-operate tools are of key importance.

Dennis was tasked with a platform upgrade and ‘pick tool’ redesign. To familiarise himself with the work, he experienced the journey of a picker himself, thereby also building empathy with the workers.

He also conducted interviews with expert pickers, to understand all the warehouse processes. As Dennis said, “Before I came, there hasn’t been any practice of design and prototype-driven innovation in the warehouse processes for years, if at all.”

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software at work, and those who want those workers to perform in the most efficient way. Creating a dialogue for win-win situations in these cases is essential.

The role of a designer is to generate empathy for users — amongst stakeholders who have different objectives, meaning they often need to act like diplomats.

Conclusion Looking back at the aforementioned projects, and across many other projects we worked on at Zalando, we can conclude several things: Every good prototype is backed by a clear purpose –

Prototyping at scale isn’t always going to be 100 percent risk free, and the designers we talked to were open about their failings and the hurdles they had to cross. As Jochen pointed out, “Be really intentional in what you want to learn, what’s the goal, and what does success look like.”

Prototype-driven innovation was used to redesign the ‘pick tool’

After Dennis developed his experience prototype, he tested it alongside a control group. Because the interfaces for the handheld devices contain at most a few buttons, there is not a lot of explorative and creative design to be done. However, seemingly small changes can have a major impact when applied on a large scale. In the end, his prototype showed a four percent increase in units per hour picking. Considering the average of one million items processed per day, it means an additional 20,000 items being picked, as well as a boost in ease-of-use for the employees.

Dennis said his motivation was not only to encourage the warehouse workers to perform at a higher efficiency, but also to make the work of thousands of warehouse workers more pleasant. For him, finding the balance between business objectives and employee satisfaction was key.

Dennis summed up his learnings as follows: When building a prototype, you have two challenges — to address: the people who are using the tools and

The earlier the stakeholders are involved, the more prevalent the learnings are – Design at Zalando is

not am individual activity but means mediating the conversations between stakeholders and customers working together. Leveraging the power of experi­ ence prototyping through collaboration wherever possible is therefore extremely important to us.

Simplicity is the key to a successful outcome –

Keeping it simple, or testing one idea at a time, be­comes exceedingly prevalent not only for the stakeholder management but also for getting the most worthwhile results. Designers have a tendency to overcomplicate. Take one step at a time. Although this takes more time, the impact is far greater.

It’s clear to us that at its core, prototyping is about get­ ting close to the customer. This aligns closely to what Zalando Design is all about. Although we are still finding our way, we are working on creating even faster feedback loops in order to get more input more often so that we can build our culture of prototyping and better align internally and externally on solving our customers’ needs.

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Creating a Structure for Organisation-wide Prototyping Six structure-building elements to institutionalise ­prototyping Creating a structure for prototyping as a tool supports the acceptance and solidification of prototyping as a philosophy.

Many companies buy into prototyping as a philosophy and a set of ideas and methodologies that help de-risk innovation projects. The institutionalised practice of prototyping, Monica Tisminesky is a senior service designer at Philips and has an MFA in service design from SCAD. She has planned and executed many prototypes, from low-fidelity ones to highly complex ex­ perience prototypes, while working in very different corporate contexts. She started her career at Lowe's Customer Experience Design. Later, she moved to Chick-fil-A’s Restaurant Design Innovation team.

She currently works in the Experience Design group at Phillips, where her projects focus on patient monitoring. monicatisminesky@gmail.com

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however, is rare. This article presents the issues caused by an ad-hoc approach and then looks at the elements that provide structure to an established prototyping practice.

The status quo: ad hoc prototyping Even when firms adopt an innovation process, there’s no guarantee of pro­ totyping becoming institutionalised.

Many employees might know that prototyping is a good idea – that one should fail fast, iterate at different levels of fidelity and get customer feedback and stakeholder buy-in.

Some are familiar with prototyping methods. However, this is not enough.

This approach presents prototyping as being positive but not as a requirement.

Instead of thinking: “All that is new shall be de-risked by prototyping”, leadership make ad hoc decisions on which concepts and projects go through a prototyping phase.

Reviewing the 21 case studies in the SDN’s Case Study Library tagged ‘prototyping’ reveals the ad-hoc way in which it is frequently practiced.1 None of the 21 cases highlights the institutionalisation of prototyping.

Rather, they point to a project-byproject approach. Similarly, a case study2 in This Is Service Design Doing recounts that practitioners, “… built a team of internal and external experts with diverse skills” and then “… used

1 Service Design Network. Accessed August 14, 2019 https://www.service-design-network.org/casestudies 2 Stickdorn et al. (2018). This is Service Design Doing, 246-249

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an aircraft fuselage and built a workshop around it.”

Both quotes imply that the team and the workshop had to be built from scratch, because such teams and spaces were not permanent parts of the organisation.

To be clear, any prototyping is infinitely more positive than not prototyping at all, but there are three issues with this ad hoc, un-established quality. First, it can communicate that prototyping is a flavour of the month, just like a “Now, with prototyping!” banner on a cereal box, thereby devaluing its true impact. Second, it often leaves the projects that do employ prototyping to create a structure for themselves, from scratch. And worst, it can create painful customer experiences.

There are good explanations for a lack of institu­ tion­alisation of prototyping. For one, most companies do not have enough teams to prototype all innovation projects. If consultants are brought in, they prototype,

but only for that lucky project. Second, because different projects need different prototyping resources, planning for a structure is complex. In addition, the structure needed for prototyping involves items that can be costly and take up physical space.

For the most part, service designers, both in-house and consultants, do not present prototyping as a philosophy that needs a stable structure. Most consultancies create structures for their specific endeavours, but these structures end with their respective projects.

Consultancies that teach service design thinking present the philosophy (“you should prototype”) and the methodologies (“here’s how you do it”), but do not help the company build a structure to institutionalise prototyping.

In contrast, many firms do have structures for research such as customer insights and voice-of-thecustomer groups. These groups do not apply all the

Prototyping principles

Work together

Produce stimuli to get feedback

Evaluate ideas fast

Try again and again

Invest recources as needed, but not more

Collaborate

Get feedback

Fails fast and often

Iterate fast

Increase fidelity

Persistent teams

Fabrication lab

Prototyping lab

Access to real-world context

Access to employees and customers

Formalised budget

Structure-providing elements

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research methodologies that service designers use, but at least they are the beginning point for a structure, and some of their frequently-used methodologies, such as surveys, can help triangulate research.

We might understand the current realities, but do not need to accept them. We can advocate for structures that support the switch from prototyping as a tool for selected projects to prototyping as an ingrained practice.

From philosophy to ingrained practice To go from prototyping as philosophy (ideas, tenets) to an established practice, a company needs to set up a prototyping structure. The evolution from Agile to Scrum Agile serves as a great analogue.

Agile is a collection of principles, to which Scrum gives structure and operationalises it. For example, Scrum teams meet for a short daily meeting 3, which is the manifestation of the Agile principle: “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.”4 And Scrums’ practice of keeping persistent teams is the manifestation of the tenet: “The best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organising teams”.

Agile’s focus is on completing value for the com­ pany. Instead of organising teams around available work, Scrum requires work to be assigned to per­ sistent teams. This avoids needing to begin the process of creating a good team culture every time a project starts; teams can switch focus to a different digital product as needed. This team persistence makes them stronger, faster and part-and-parcel of the organisation’s way of doing things.

The change from waterfall philosophy to Agile is mediated by clear project management methodologies (e.g. Scrum, Kanban, Cristal) that form a structure that facilitates adoption.

3 Rubin, K. (2012) Essential Scrum, 23-24 4 Principles behind the Agile Manifesto (2001). Accessed August 1, 2019. https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

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Six elements for institutionalising prototyping Like Agile, service design uses iteration, experimentation and prototyping. The difference is that service design thinking hasn’t created a project management method – a structure to support prototyping in the same way.

Therefore, the next question is: “How might we translate a prototyping philosophy into a proto­ typing structure within a company?” The next paragraphs list six elements that give structure to prototyping, connect those elements to prototyping as a philosophy, and provide examples.

1. Persistent teams

This is a structure-making element can be taken into service design projects to support collaboration, across all phases of a project. A service design team should be a permanent entity. Having permanent service design teams means keeping the all-important team infrastructure, governance and collaborative culture, and communicating to the organisation the permanence of the practice. Persistent teams are not closed: people will exit or enter them, but they persist during the project’s phases and remain once the project is completed. Persistent teams can be selected for a project on the basis of their aggregated skills.

2. Fabrication lab

To manifest the philosophy of quick iteration between increasing levels of fidelity, a persistent service design team needs access to internal or external fabrication vendors. Yes, prototyping needs are unpredictable.

But, in general, there is enough consistency to plan to cover the needs of most service concepts. A vendor can make physical buildouts for live prototypes, including simulated interiors and exteriors, in various levels of fidelity. The same goes for digital prototypes. These established relationships make iterations simpler.

3. Prototyping lab

To fail fast and iterate frequently, service design teams need a space to test prototypes from of a range of fidelities for when, as the authors of This is Service

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Design Doing say: “The real context is not available ... does not allow changes, does not exist yet, or simply is too expensive to use.” At Chick-fil-A, the innovation teams have easy access to a space where live prototypes can be set up at different levels of fidelity, up to a high-fidelity restaurant simulation.5 In ideal prototyping lab conditions, physical and digital prototypes can be maintained longer, so that the second versions can built on the first ones. Video and audio equipment allow stakeholders to watch and hear simulations in a soundproof, contiguous space and make on-the-fly tweaks to the prototype.

Physical proximity and the permanent status of a lab allow for high levels of stakeholder engagement.

4. Access to the real-world contexts

A team will need to have access to a physical space for contextual prototyping, meaning prototyping that occurs where the actual service takes place. This includes physical or digital contexts. The need for a real-life physical location is not limited to brands that have brick-and-mortar servicescapes, such as hospitality and retail. Many of today’s most innovative services have interactions outside of the user-toscreen scenario. Companies can formalise access by providing different incentives to stakeholders who control access to real-world contexts. For example, a brand’s franchisees could sign up to participate in prototypes, which would enrol them in further pilots and roll-out. These franchisees would benefit by being first in getting the innovations implemented.

also that the protocols to do so are clear, including nondisclosure agreements and privacy documentation.

6. Formalised budgets and funding

Companies need to facilitate the above by earmarking funding for prototyping. Finding money for a prototyping iteration after the project has started is time-consuming and sometimes impossible. But apart from allowing single projects to have easier access to budget, funding a prototyping structure will provide economies of scale, where multiple projects will benefit from the five previous elements for a smaller per-project investment.

Conclusion These elements would considerably solidify proto­ typing as institutionalised practice. Prototyping services should be part-and-parcel of the idea of ‘doing service design,’ and service designers should make the case for them being required for our practice.

5. Access to employees and customers

Getting feedback from customers and stakeholders is the purpose of prototyping, but getting employees or customers to participate in live prototypes is frequently a hurdle. ‘Access’ means not only the ability to recruit, but

5 Wittenstein, M. (2014) Chick-fil-A’s Innovation Center “Hatch”, Accessed August 14, 2019. https://www.linkedin.com/ pulse/20140303153610-18997-chick-fil-a-s-innovation-center-hatch/

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An Exciting Time to be a Wizard With disruptive technologies such as AI (Artificial Intelligence), 5G and IoT (Internet of Things), it has become harder than ever before to imagine our future and the experiences it will contain.

The future is moving towards an era of pervasive and complex interactions with intelligent agents that promises unpredictable Minwoo Kim is a service designer at pxd inc, an innovative design consulting group in South Korea. He has conducted diverse projects with computer technology companies, telecommunication companies, advertising agencies, research organisations, and universities and governments in the US, EU and South Korea. minwoo.kim@pxd.co.kr

52 Touchpoint 11-2

experiences. Therefore, we as service designers face new challenges when it comes to designing and delivering experiences that are generated by emerging technologies.

Today, user-centred design, Design Thinking, lean and agile methodologies are understood and applied in the design field as well as many other industries.

Their popularity comes about because businesses see the successful results of involving users in the process of creating new products and services. When we design those products or services, the tests and research we conduct with users allows us to determine and develop our concepts, and bring them to life. However, due to the rapid technological development, it is difficult to design and deliver realistic testing experiences with proper prototypes, in order to demonstrate our concepts and directions with users.

behind the curtain pulling the levers”.1 This method delivers not artefacts but experiences to potential users with proper prototypes and scenarios for the experiments. We can ‘trick’ the participants into making the functionality, space and experience feel realistic, in a controllable environment, which is to simulate experiences through role-playing and observation of how users interact with a prototype. This is a very effective and suitable way to test a future service based on new technologies, in which the participants easily think and imagine the experiences in the simulated space without any limitations of applications

Wizard of Oz prototyping The ‘Wizard of Oz’ method of prototyping, “… refers to the idea that there is a man

1 https://designguidelines.withgoogle.com/ conversation/conversation-design-process/testiterate.html#test-iterate-get-feedback-to-see-ifyour-dialog-is-working

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of new technologies. For instance, a designer who is designing for a smart assistant service may simulate a scenario with an existing speaker, operated by a voice from the designer remotely from another room through a microphone. Cameras and sensors may be used in the setup to capture participants emotions, reactions and actions in the test environment.

By carrying out the test with participants, it is possible to identify and reduce the gap between our thoughts and users´; needs, and furthermore, we can refine our direction about future services.

2. Designing the test

Next, it is necessary to figure out and design a way of mimicking or faking the primary experience to simulate it to participants with the scenarios. It requires a fair bit of ingenuity, but we can utilise many kinds of physical and digital tools such as a remote controller of smart devices, a wireless keyboard and a computer mouse, TTS (Text-To-Speech) software, and so on, to make realistic experiences, provided by AI-based technologies.

3. Carrying out the test

What we have to consider to be the Wizard

Wizard of Oz prototyping is not a stand-alone usability test method but is based on a number of initial design decisions concerning: — Overall design goals — Technological and other feasibility constraints on the design process — Various criteria having to do with the realism, functionality and usability of the artefact — Choice and delimitation of application domain and target user types2 Additionally, we must consider three phases: planning, designing and testing.

1. Planning the test

In the planning stage, we first have to decide what we want to validate with participants and what we must deliver to them. Then, we have to make a scenario for the test. The scenario should be considered to be ‘horizontal’, displaying a wide range of features to demonstrate the desirability of the service.

Following that, the fidelity of the prototype should be determined, including the types of capabilities that are implemented within a vertical scenario. The vertical scenario does not attempt to replicate the entire system, but instead focusses on a small set of features to test their usability and performance.

Lastly, in the testing itself, it is essential to have a step to compare experiences of the current way and new way by solving assignments in participantdriven experiments. Here, participants are more concentrated on the experiment, making it easier for them to grasp the concept being tested by comparing new experiences to familiar ones them­ selves. Through observing and analysing the participants’ actions, we can derive valuable insights.

What we can make magic Wizard of Oz testing is particularly useful to test AI-based services because we can simulate the AI- communications based on our natural intelligence.

Then, we can collect ‘the real responses of the possible users’ in participant-driven experiments for the validation and implementation of the AI- driven future services. The experiments allow us to gather observations, opinions, feedback, insights and inspirations from the participants with minimum efforts. It can also be a helpful tool to generate valuable material to achieve customer experiences with deeper empathy. Lastly, they can shape a successful solution based on validated experiences with possible users through our magic.

2 Bernsen, N.O. The Structure of the Design Space. In Byerley, P.F., Barnard, P.J. and May, J., Eds. Computers, Communication and Usability. Design Issues, Research and Methods for Integrated Services. Amsterdam, North-Holland, 1993, 221-244.

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Feeling the Future Behavioural insights for experience prototyping

Experience prototyping can help designers understand existing experiences or explore and evaluate new design ideas.1 Insights from behavioural science suggest potential pitfalls of these activities, but also how to amplify their benefits.

Aileen Heinberg is a be­ havioural scientist in Design & Innovation at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, specialising in decision making and behaviour change.

Previously, she was a be­ havioural scientist at RAND. She holds a BA from Columbia University and a PhD from UCLA, both in psychology. heinbera@mskcc.org

54 Touchpoint 11-2

Understanding existing experiences When designers engage with prototypes of existing user experiences, this generative research activity often helps them empathise with users’ current states. However, this well-intentioned activity can also backfire and lead to misleading conclusions.

Disability simulations provide an example of this downside. It’s true that trying out a wheelchair or navigating everyday tasks while blindfolded tends to increase sympathy for people with disabilities. However, simulations like these can also exacerbate stereotypes of people with disabilities as being incompetent.2 People living with disabilities acquire specialised expertise that isn’t modeled within the simulations, so they experience physical limitations very differently from simulation participants who lack their skills and knowledge3.

Designers and users also often possess different levels of relevant expertise, and differ in other important dimensions too. Prototypes that faithfully capture objective external elements of a situation,

but don’t accurately represent subjective aspects, can lead to mistaken conclusions.

Exploring and evaluating ideas Designers use experience prototypes of possible solutions to explore, evaluate and iterate on design ideas. Noncontextual experience prototypes provide opportunities to test ideas in the studio or in other accessible environments

1 Buchenau, M., & Suri, J. F. (2000, August).

Experience prototyping. In Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques (pp. 424-433). ACM. 2 Van Boven, L., Loewenstein, G., Dunning, D., & Nordgren, L. F. (2013). Changing Places: A Dual Judgment Model of Empathy Gaps in Emotional Perspective Taking. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 48, pp. 117-171). Academic Press.

3 More recent simulations, which provide a taste of the strategies used by people living with disabilities, may inspire more favorable assessments of competence. Silverman, A. M., Pitonyak, J. S., Nelson, I. K., Matsuda, P. N., Kartin, D., & Molton, I. R. (2018). Instilling Positive Beliefs About Disabilities: Pilot Testing a Novel Experiential Learning Activity for Rehabilitation Students.

Disability and Rehabilitation, 40(9), 1108-1113.

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when on-site testing would be too resource-intensive or otherwise infeasible. And designers often recruit representative users to try out these prototypes. After all, who could possibly understand user needs better than users themselves?

We might expect users to be great at predicting their own future attitudes, preferences and behaviors.

But when trying to slip into the shoes of our future selves, we use our current experience as a sometimesmisleading starting point.2 In one experiment, men predicted their behaviour in a date rape scenario. Those who were sexually aroused when asked to make their predictions estimated that they would be more likely to engage in sexually aggressive behaviour that those who were not aroused4.

Users are only human. Like pretty much everyone else, users’ moods, emotions and other feeling states such as hunger and sexual arousal influence the way they respond to experiences2 . Correspondingly, their feelings while interacting with a prototype colour their predictions about how they would respond in a real-world context. This is true of pre-existing feelings when users walk into a prototyping session – because of things like terrible traffic or a kind receptionist – as well as for feelings that arise in response to a prototype.

And of course, designers and clients who engage with prototypes while attempting to slip into the shoes of users aren’t immune to such influences either. Their own feelings also colour predictions about others. For example, studies have found that people who are thirsty themselves are more likely to predict that thirst will bother hikers too.2,5 We often don’t recognise how our feelings in the moment bias predictions about our future selves and other people. It’s no surprise that we often fail to recognise how users’ temporary feelings influence their responses to prototypes and predictions about the future.

4 Loewenstein, G., Nagin, D., & Paternoster, R. (1997). The Effect of Sexual Arousal on Expectations of Sexual Forcefulness. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 34(4), 443-473.

5 However, when predicting the perspective of someone we perceive as extremely different than ourselves (e.g. with strong opposing political views), we often see them as so ‘other’ that our own feeling state doesn’t influence predictions about them. O’Brien, E., & Ellsworth, P. (2012). More Than Skin Deep: Visceral States Are Not Projected Onto Dissimilar Others. Psychological Science, 23, 391–396.

When experience prototyping, designers can guard against the empathy gaps described in this paper by asking the questions below.

Questions to ask when creating prototypes 1. What do we expect users to be feeling in the realworld use context, before they encounter our solution?

2. How might we evoke a similar emotional starting point within our prototype?

3. What feelings, if any, do we expect our design solution to evoke in its real-world use context?

4. How might we evoke these feelings within our prototype?

Tip: When exploring design ideas, consider quick and dirty feeling inductions. For example, feelings can be induced by emotional video clips or by writing exercises that tap into emotional memories.

Behavioural scientists often use these shortcuts to explore hypotheses.

5. What other differences in perspective, such as level of expertise or familiarity, might cause those engaging with our prototype to respond differently than users in real-world use contexts?

Tip: Remember that the same person may have quite a different perspective in our prototyping context and in a real-world use case.

6. How might we create experiences that help bridge these differences?

Tip: Consider ways to capture the subjective experience of users, even at the expense of fidelity to superficial objective features.1 For example, when creating a prototype of an existing experience, it may be more important to recreate a task’s level of subjective difficulty than to copy the specific details of a task that’s very easy for users but would be difficult for designers interacting with the prototype.

Questions to ask when synthesising insights 1. What key differences in emotional or other

perspective were we unable to overcome in our prototypes?

2. How might we interpret our findings in light of these differences?

Tip: Keep in mind that people often fail to accurately recognise the impact of feeling states on their preferences, behaviours and predictions.

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Breaking Down Service Prototyping An approach based on prototypes, experiments, tests and pilots It is believed that a prototype of a service will never match an actual, real-world scenario. The breakdown of service proto­ typing into prototypes, experiments, tests and pilots as phases can be a solution to provide more clarity and commitment during a service design project.

Mauricio Manhaes is Professor of Service Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).

He has a Doctoral degree in Knowledge Management from Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil, with research and work focussed on innovation, design and service. mmanhaes@scad.edu

56 Touchpoint 11-2

It is not uncommon to hear product (goods and services) development teams uttering sentences such as: “We will develop prototypes to experiment and test the pilots of new product ideas”. Sentences such as these beg the question: What are these teams referring to when they use the terms ‘prototypes’, ‘experiments’, ‘tests’, and ‘pilots’? Are these terms all the same, somehow similar, or are there any effective differences between them?

It is well known and commonly accepted that a new material or the form of an object (physical or digital) can be evaluated based on instrumental characteristics such as usability, ergonomics and material resistance. And the results of such evaluations are considered valid within their intended implementation contexts. On the service side, according to service design practitioners interviewed

by Blomkvist and Holmlid1 , it is believed that a prototype of a service will never match an actual, real-world scenario.

Because prototypes should evoke the

yet-to-be-imagined2 and the not-yetexisting, and are located at the beginning of the development process, the high uncertainty levels involved explain the practitioners’ perception of mismatches with reality. Therefore, using a proto­ type to evaluate a new service might not be the best path to follow1. As an exploration tool, however, the proto­ typing of services can be an invaluable approach to opportunity mapping 3.

Prototypes and positions As mentioned above, consumer goods industries have had a long commitment

1 Blomkvist, J. & Holmlid, S. Service Prototyping According to Service Design Practitioners.

Innovation 1–11 (2010).

2 Nelson, H. G. & Stolterman, E. The Design Way. Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World.

(MIT Press, 2012).

3 Planing, P. On the origin of innovations—the opportunity vacuum as a conceptual model for the explanation of innovation. J. Innov. Entrep.

6, 5 (2017).

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Prototype Activity Stakeholder

Fidelity Representation Technique

Validity

Author

Audience Purpose

Position in process

Fig. 1: Prototyping framework by Blomkvist and Holmlid.6

to prototyping. Researchers have attempted to provide helpful additions to existing knowledge on proto­ typing1 techniques. But, despite all the efforts made in the last decades or so4 , there still is a lack of practical understanding of the fundamental characteristics of prototypes.5 Figure 1 depicts a framework created by Blomkvist and Holmlid6 , suggesting that what a ‘prototype’ is will be defined by the position at which it is used during the creation and development process of a new product.

They suggest that the top level of the framework is governed by representation, which is the actual artefact with which entities will interact. Descending towards its foundation, the following level is about the activity to be performed by/with that artefact and the corresponding technique for its creation and use.

The stakeholder level represents the different authors and audiences that the artefact might reach. The purpose level depends on where the prototype fits in the new product development process. And, finally, the

4 Lim, Y.-K., Stolterman, E. & Tenenberg, J. The Anatomy of Prototypes: Prototypes as Filters, Prototypes as Manifestations of Design Ideas.

ACM Trans. Comput. Interact. 15, 1–27 (2008).

5 Rodrigues, V. & Holmlid, S. Discovering Service Variations through Service Prototyping. Des. J. 20, S2247–S2257 (2017).

6 Blomkvist, J. & Holmlid, S. Existing Prototyping Perspectives: Considerations for Service Design. Nord. Des. Res. Conf. 1–10 (2011).

fundamental definition of a prototype is determined by its position in that process; in other words, whether it is located earlier or later on the development process.

Therefore, if a new product development process is depicted as a continuum going from higher to lower levels of risk and uncertainties, the position on that path defines what to expect from a product prototype. As presented below, with the aim of clarifying the communication between stakeholders and based on the levels of uncertainty, it is possible to define four different positions on that continuum.

From higher to lower levels of uncertainty Based on research about service design practitioners’ discourses7,8, the continuum of iterations involved in a new product development would evolve nonlinearly under ‘Three Overarching Perspectives’ (3OP): Understanding Stakeholders’ Contexts (USC), Understanding Innovation Dynamics (UID), and Understanding Institutional Transitions (UIT). As a suggestion, the path would start at exploring ways through which potential beneficiaries could uniquely and phenomenologically determine value (as suggested

by Service-Dominant Logic’s Axiom #4 / FP109), and would go through the different ‘prototyping’ positions and purposes6 , as the process moves from exploring to evaluating to validating. In a continuum starting at higher levels of uncertainties and moving towards lower ones, as shown at Figure 2, it is possible to devise four positions and purposes: ‘Prototype’ (explores meaningful potentialities), ‘Experiment’ (creates instrumental data to support decision), ‘Test’ (evaluates alternatives) and ‘Pilot’ (validates preferred option).

7 Manhães, M. C. Constructing an approach to identify service design narratives : The findings of an automated text analysis. in ServDes2018.

Service Design Proof of Concept, Proceedings of the ServDes.2018 Conference, 18-20 June, Milano, Italy (eds. Meroni, A., Medina, A. M. O. & Villari, B.) 1074–1087 (Linköping University Electronic Press, 2018).

8 Manhães, M. C. Three Overarching Perspectives of Service Design.

Touchpoint J. Serv. Des. 9, 64–67 (2017).

9 Vargo, S. L. & Lusch, R. F. Institutions and Axioms: An Extension and Update of Service-Dominant Logic. J. Acad. Mark. Sci. 44, 5–23 (2015).

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Understanding Stakeholders Contexts - USC

Fig. 2: Levels of uncer­tain­ties and ‘Three Overarching

Initial Brief

HIGHER Higher

Perspectives’

Systemic / Holistic Understanding of Contexts

Design of Problem and Solution Spaces

Broad Questions

Types of Knowledge

Non-Available / Not Accessible Knowledge

Knowledge Creation

Exploration for Unknown Alternatives

New Sets of Alternatives

Available / Accessible Knowledge

Uncertainty

Understanding Innovation Dynamics - UID

Prototypes

New Available / Accessible Knowledge

Knowledge Mapping

Experiments

Mapping Known Alternatives

Available Sets of Known Alternatives

Evaluation of Known Alternatives

Confirming Sets of Ideal Problem / Solution Pairings

Pilots

Scaling

Understanding Institutional Transitions - UIT 58 Touchpoint 11-2

LOWER Lower

Tests

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The 3OPs resulted from research based on a service design brief created by 20 corporate managers. The brief was then sent to a curated list of 20 service designers, from which 13 responses were obtained7,8 on how they would approach it. After an analysis of the responses, which included the use of automated text analysis software, a common sequence of 14 steps was obtained. To avoid the perception that the following sequence represents a strict order, the steps’ descriptions were made strategically ambiguous and polysemic. More importantly, as the standard IDEO disclaimer recommends10, the process presented here must be seen as a suggestion. Ultimately, it must be adapted to specific styles of work and contexts: “Hone your own process that works for you.”10

Questions’ that cannot be answered by previous experiences, projects and research.

5.1.1. Knowledge Creation – Stakeholders should be made aware and prepared for a phase of the project to be focused on creating knowledge, and that the products of these explorations should go beyond the limits of foresight or prescience.12 5.1.2. Prototypes – As explorations into the unknown, prototypes should focus on quantity instead of quality, with as many as possible, as low cost as possible per unit, and as varied as possible characteristics.

5.1.3. E xploration for Unknown Alternatives –

The prototypes should result in providing a variety of possible new and unexpected answers to the ‘Broad Questions’.

5.1.4. New Sets of Alternatives – Create reports of the perceived-as-best potential alternatives resulting from the prototyping effort.

Given that perspective, the resulting framework is presented below to contextualise the four positions and purposes suggested: 1. Initial Brief – Start with the briefing obtained with

5.1.5. New Available and Accessible Knowledge -

the client or sponsor.

Identify the new available and accessible knowledge created by the prototyping effort.

2. Systemic and Holistic Understanding of Contexts –

Explore the contexts from which the initial briefing was created.

3. Design Problem and Solution Spaces – Devise extensive lists of problems and solutions that might be of interest for the stakeholders in these defined contexts.

4. Broad Questions – Design open questions that ‘put into question’11 the initial data, information and assumptions gathered during the previous steps.

5. Types of Knowledge – Given the ‘Broad Questions’, devise which ones will require the creation of knowledge (i.e. primary research; to increase its effectiveness), and those that can be answered with available knowledge (i.e. secondary research; as a way to increase the development process efficiency).

5.1. Non-Available and Not Accessible Knowledge – To increase the effectiveness of the project’s effort, it is important to identify the ‘Broad

10 Plattner, H. & Hasso Plattner Institute. An introduction to Design Thinking. Process Guide. Iinstitute of Design at Stanford (2010). doi:10.1027/2151-2604/a000142 11 Gadamer, H.-G. Truth and Method. (Continuum, 2004).

5.2. Available and Accessible Knowledge –

To increase the efficiency of the project’s effort, it is important to identify previous experiences, projects and research that can answer – or contribute to answering – as many of the ‘Broad Questions’ as possible.

6. Knowledge Mapping – Create a diverse set of multimodal communication artefacts, including verbal, visual and tactile representations of all knowledge made available and accessible by the previous steps.

7. Experiments – Design logical, repeatable and predictable procedures focused on generating data and information to support stakeholders’ decisions on how to move forward on the project.

8. Mapping Known Alternatives – Create a set of multi-modal communication artefacts for each known alternative of ‘Ideal Problem and Solution’ pairings in order to support their comparisons by stakeholders.

12 Simonton, D. K. Creativity as Blind Variation and Selective Retention: Is the Creative Process Darwinian? Psychol. Inq. 10, 309–328 (1999).

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9. Available Sets of Known Alternatives – Stakeholders

should be made aware and take ownership of the available sets of known alternatives.

10. Evaluation of Known Alternatives – Stakeholders should be made aware and prepared for a phase of the project to be focused on evaluating the available sets of known alternatives.

11. Tests – Design explicit, unambiguous and experimentally correct procedures to evaluate the quality of specific aspects or characteristics of the available sets of known alternatives.

12. Confirming Sets of Ideal ‘Problem and Solution’

pairings – Based on the test results, present data

and information to support stakeholders’ decisions on which ‘Problem and Solution’ alternative pair(s) to move forward with on the project.

13. Pilots – Design a validation opportunity of the chosen ‘Problem and Solution’ alternative pair(s), with characteristics as close as possible to the intended large-scale deployment context.

14. Scaling – Based on the body of knowledge resulting from the previous steps, stakeholders will carry out large-scale deployment with the lowest possible levels of uncertainty, given the context of the specific new product development process.

Different positions and words As the above sequence of steps suggests, based on ‘Three Overarching Perspectives’ for service design (3OP), prototyping would be the name given to representations located at the higher uncertainty level of the process, aimed at exploration, and where quantity of entertained alternatives is the goal13.

Given the need for quantity, the cost of each prototype should be set as low as possible. Towards the middle of the continuum, once the exploration by low cost prototypes starts to yield results by lowering the perceived uncertainty levels, the successful prototypes will feed into experiments to create objective data to support decision-making.

It is probable that the data and information generated will require the continuous review of the ‘Broad Questions’ (see feedback lines in Fig. 2). In

that case, further prototypes, experiments and tests will be run until it is possible to support decisions with higher levels of objectivity. It might also happen that the experiments do not converge on a single alternative, or that the selected alternative might have different ways of implementation. That is the position in which more elaborate and costly tests are created to evaluate and prioritise alternatives.

Once a preferred alternative is clearly perceived by the stakeholders, although uniquely and phenomenologically perceived by the beneficiaries as valuable (as proposed by the Service-Dominant Logic’s Axiom #59, the perception of value will always be contextually bounded; in other words, it cannot be generalised beyond its original context), it is taken to a pilot stage where the levels of fidelity are as close to real-world implementation as possible. At this stage, although lower levels of uncertainty may be attained, some particular aspects of the final solution might still need to be experimented and tested to respond to specific issues raised by the pilot effort.

Based on the framework created by Blomkvist and Holmlid6 , the experiments, tests and pilots described above can all be characterised as prototypes with different positions, purposes, stakeholders, activities and levels of fidelity. So, the use of different words to describe these different levels has more to do with enabling better focus and communication than achieving technical precision.

Although contemporary organisations have a bias towards action, it is important to understand that communication, and therefore language, is the foundation for human action.14 In order to provide a minimum alignment through undistorted communication of what each of these words could mean, below are synthesised definitions created from etymological perspectives and descriptions obtained from popular internet sources.

As depicted in Figure 3, in a continuum starting at higher levels of uncertainties and reaching lower ones, it is possible to relate specific techniques to different phases of a service design project:

13 Ashby, W. R. Requisite variety and its implications for the control of complex systems. Cybernetica 1, 83–99 (1958).

14 Finlayson, J. G. Habermas. A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford University Press, USA, 2005).

60 Touchpoint 11-2

e x p e ri e n c e p ro t o t y p i n g

USC

UID

Uncertainty

UIT

Prototypes

Experiments

Tests

Pilots

Fig.3: Breaking down prototyping

1. Prototype – Mainly applied under USC and UID

perspectives, a prototype is an exploration effort to design opportunity spaces in stages of higher risk and uncertainty during a new service development process. It is based on exceptional resources, subjectivities and specificities, and is carried out on arbitrarily-defined favourable conditions.

2. Experiment – Mainly applied under the UID perspective, an experiment is an evaluation effort characterised by logical analysis and repeatable and predictable procedures to produce data and information out of the results experienced at the prototyping phase.

3. Test – Mainly applied under the UIT perspective, a test is an explicit, unambiguous and experimentallyfeasible effort to ascertain the quality of specific aspects or characteristics of a new product.

4. Pilot – Mainly applied under the UIT perspective, a pilot is a validation effort carried out before large-scale deployment, avoiding the exceptional resources, subjectivities, specificities and favourable conditions present in previous stages.

Based on the prototype framework created by Blomkvist and Holmlid6 , the prototype, experiment, test and pilot described above can all be characterised

as ‘prototypes’ with different positions, purposes, stakeholders, activities and levels of fidelity. So, the use of different words to describe these different levels has more to do with enabling better focus and communication between stakeholders, than with concerns about technical precision.

Words and real-world scenario The proposed breaking-down of prototyping into four different words can provide more clarity and a better understanding between stakeholders within a service design project. By untangling the common sentence used by new services development teams quoted above, it becomes possible to explain to stakeholders that the results of explorations made through prototypes will be evaluated by experiments, and further tests will provide decisive information to run pilots to validate the new service offering within desired levels of effectiveness and cost efficiency.

Moreover, it might help explain to clients and confirm the service design practitioners’ perception that prototypes should enable explorations of the yet-to-be-imagined and the not-yet-existing, at the beginning of a product development process. Therefore, a prototype of a service should not aim at matching an actual, real-world scenario, but challenge it.

Touchpoint 11-2 61

Prototyping the Bank Branch of the Future Using experience prototyping methods to design a future in-branch experience The bank branch needs to adapt. In early 2017, Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) had a challenge to overcome: What does the bank branch of the future look like?

Jack Jarvie is a service designer at eBay. He’s happiest when uncovering insights that he can use to design seamless experiences.

Previously, Jack worked at a service design studio in London, helping LBG and other organisations solve complex problems. jackjarvie@gmail.com

As more customers move to online methods to complete tasks they used to do in-branch, such as checking balances, moving money and opening accounts, LBG knew their in-branch experience needed reimagining. In doing so they hoped to better support customers with their financial goals, as well as attract new ones.

LBG were due to open a new ‘Flag­ ship’ bank branch, which was to help people in new ways. They wanted to dedicate the second floor of the branch to ‘the home’ and approached the consultancy I was working at to help define and design the experience.

Stakeholder discovery through LEGO We started with stakeholder workshops, with the aim of engaging and unearthing relevant insight from project sponsors, branch managers and customer service assistants.

We wanted participants to express their ‘branch of the future’ vision without constraints. By doing so, we hoped to uncover insights and hypotheses that we could prove or disprove in user research. Instead of in-depth in­terviews,

62 Touchpoint 11-2

or conducting a workshop, we got them to build a future in-branch experience, using LEGO. LEGO allowed stakeholders to create and play, revealing insights that an interview may not have uncovered.

In the conversations that followed, we discussed the LEGO models, as well as innovative experiences such as Apple stores, WeWork and Metro Bank. We discussed what worked, what didn't, and what we could learn.

Seeking inspiration The initial user research was in-depth interviews in peoples’ homes. We spoke with renters, people saving to buy a home, those in the mortgage application process, recent homebuyers and people who had bought in recent years.

After synthesising everything we learnt, we defined opportunity areas and began prototyping.

And then we got stuck. We knew the problems to solve and what people needed, but we struggled to translate this into in-branch solutions. We needed inspiration.

e x p e ri e n c e p ro t o t y p i n g

Fig. 1: Different methods used at the Science Museum in London to communicate complex information

With a clear understanding of our challenge, and the goal of the prototypes, we looked to related fields for inspiration. The project lead suggested a trip to the Science Museum in London, and this was a real turning point. Our challenge at this stage was to communicate complex information in a simple and engaging way, and museums do this well. The visit inspired our prototyping.

Prototyping the experience We needed feedback on our ideas, so we took over a large meeting room and constructed proto­types using paper and cardboard. We created a small‑scale 'branch', large enough to walk around in and interact with.

The prototypes were high-enough fidelity to facilitate conversation and interaction, but simple enough that we could discard them, or iterate, if they weren’t working. We welcomed LBG customers and non-customers into our ‘branch’ to test the prototypes. Some were hesitant – after all it feels abnormal to interact with a paper ­version of a branch.

To overcome this, we placed customers in the right mindset. We set the context, stating that they were here to try out a new branch and to give feedback. We had them walk into the 'branch'. And upon entry, they were greeted by a staff member.

Touchpoint 11-2 63

By keeping the prototypes low fidelity, we found users were inclined to co-create with us, and shape their own solutions. While testing something, we could sketch over the top of it, draw it differently, or create something new, collaboratively.

The throw-away nature of our prototypes, and the ease in which ideas could be created, discussed and tested encouraged users to get involved.

There was no barrier to entry.

Communicating the experience We wanted stakeholders to buy into our vision, to immerse them in the branch of the future and excite them. We chose virtual reality (VR) to do so.

Working with a 3D designer, we created a VR prototype of the branch, visualising key areas that brought our insights and solutions to life. Wearing a headset, stakeholders were immersed in the branch and experienced it

Fig. 2: Prototyping and iterating upon different solutions within our ‘bank branch’

64 Touchpoint 11-2

e x p e ri e n c e p ro t o t y p i n g

Fig. 3: Using a headset, stakeholders were immersed in a virtual reality prototype of our bank branch of the future

spatially. With supporting n ­ arration, it helped effectively communicate the user problems we identified, as well as the solutions.

However, the VR technique came with a downside.

We handed over our work to a third party, to build on and develop our concept. But the VR experience was so detailed that it discouraged further ideation.

It was too much, too soon. Conceptual drawings, ground­ed in user needs, would have been better.

Outcome and conclusions Our efforts resulted in a clear direction for LBG to pursue. In the Halifax bank located on Tottenham Court Road in London, the Home Hub exists, informed by our experience prototyping. The Hub

is designed to guide people through the complex process of buying a home, step-by-step. It’s also working as a tool to attract new customers.

Experience prototyping can achieve great results, but like all prototyping methods, it raises the question: “What are you trying to achieve by creating the prototype?”

For us, making our own branch, and inviting users to test it, was an effective method to iterate and improve. But creating a VR prototype to communicate our concept was unnecessary.

Always keep in mind and refer back to the goal of the prototype, this will help decide its form and level of fidelity. As well as ensuring focus, while prototyping different solutions. In doing so, the desired outcome is more likely to be achieved.

Touchpoint 11-2 65

Experience Prototyping for Predictable Behavioural Outcomes Where service design and behavioural science meet Service designers have long recognised the opportunities that behavioural science offers to their discipline. However, the result is often single, ad-hoc interventions that fail to meet desired business objectives. In this article, we offer some reflections and a case study demonstrating a ‘reverse design’ approach.

Starting from precise business objectives, we define predictable behavioural outcomes that can be achieved by behavioural Anne van Lieren is a service designer at Livework. She helps organisations to design for behaviour change by integrating behavioural science in service design. anne.vanlieren@ liveworkstudio.com Marzia Arico is Head of Insight at Livework. She is a designer with a PhD in organisational science.

She supports corporate clients with large customer­ centric transformations. marzia@liveworkstudio.com Melvin Brand Flu is a board member of Livework and a Partner at (R)Interventions. He uses cognitive science to tackle complex business challenges. melvin@liveworkstudio.com

strategies and optimised through experience prototyping.

Achieving business impact: from organisational objectives to behavioural interventions So far, designers have primarily leveraged insights from behavioural science to design nudges – interventions that influence the behaviour of individuals at a subconscious level.1 For example, if you’re told that most people in your neighbourhood pay taxes on time, it raises the chances that you’ll do the same. The principle behind this is called ‘social norming’.

The use of nudging interventions in service environments operates at a single touchpoint level and assumes one-sizefits-all solutions. The starting point is

1 Hansen, 2016

66 Touchpoint 11-2

rarely a real organisational problem or business objective. Furthermore, their impact is often limited, producing small, often temporary, behavioural changes.

For greater impact and sustainable behavioural change, it’s crucial to design a series of strategic interventions with a predefined business outcome in mind.

A strategic combination of different behavioural interventions Organisations across virtually all sectors struggle to optimise customers’ and employees’ behaviours within complex service ecosystems. A desired behaviour, such as switching to renewable energy sources, is to be encouraged. An undesired behaviour, such as submitting a false insurance claim, needs to

s p o n s o re d c o n t e n t

Intervention 1 - Priming A new script for staff members helps travellers to stay calm and focusses on their own responsibilities

train tracks

Tickets

Intervention 2 - Social norm By highlighting that most people in similar situations do not complain, travellers are nudged to not submit a illegitimate complaint

Tickets

Everyday life

Prepare journey

Train journey

Ticket inspection

Jan

3 02

Complaint

Bank

3 276 Mr Tim

Customer journey

Intervention 3 - Rational override A new online form included multiple clarifying questions at the right time, stimulating people to take a step back and re-evaluate their situation and reasons for complaining

ssen

Pay penalty or receive fee

Post-journey

Submit complaint

Settlement or refusal

Reducing complaints within Norway’s railway operator with interactive, physical and digital interventions

be managed. Changing such behaviour is complex, because an undesired behaviour is the result and expression of a combination of multiple behaviours across several touchpoints over time. To illustrate this, we’ll use the work we’ve developed together with the national railway company in Norway as an example.

The Norwegian Railways was experiencing high levels of customer complaints about penalty charges.

These complaints were being made to staff on trains as well as via the organisation’s website. When failing to resolve their complaint at one touchpoint, customers often shifted to the next. The cost of complaint handling was extremely high and therefore

www.vy.no

A rational override intervention inserted within the online complaint form (http://bit.ly/2bXJPH) reduced the number of complaints by 70 percent

the business objective was a cost reduction for handling complaints. We trans­lated this business objective into several behavioural outcomes, including fewer unsubstantiated complaints.

Starting from these desired business and be­havioural outcomes, we moved towards designing three different behavioural interventions in nature, touchpoint and timing. The first intervention was a new script for staff members, the second was a new fare, and the third was a redesign of the online form to submit claims.

The first two interventions were based on known nudging techniques, including social norms and priming, while the third was based on a different type of intervention, a ‘rational override’. In this intervention, by purposefully adding extra decision points and clarifying questions at the right time, people pause, become aware of their actions, and re-evaluate their response. The approach was successful. We reduced the number of unsubstanti­ at­ed complaints by 70 percent through a combination of interactive, physical and digital interventions.

Meeting the desired behavioural outcomes resulted in a significant cost reduction for the organisation.

How to identify desired behavioural outcomes that match business objectives In the reverse design approach, the first step is to deter­m ine the behavioural outcomes that match the desired business objectives. By unpacking the behaviour into distinct elements, such as the ‘who’ Touchpoint 11-2 67

(segmenting based on behaviour), ‘when’ (steps in the journey) and ‘where’ (location, channel or touchpoint), the desired behaviours become clearer from the start.

Working with the Norwegian railway operator, we identified that most complaints are made by travellers that feel frustrated because they innocently could not show a valid ticket (e.g. they purchased a ticket but their phone had run out of power). The behaviour was influenced during and after receiving a penalty fee (‘when’) in both interactive and digital interactions (‘where’). Based on a defined list of behavioural outcomes, relevant behavioural intervention strategies can be developed.

There are more than a hundred known intervention techniques based on cognitive mechanisms, more broadly known as biases and heuristics. Cognitive mechanisms are universal and relatively stable cognitive processes that describe, at a high level, the way the majority of people think and behave under specific circumstances.2 For example, the ‘self-serve bias’ describes how people generally attribute success to themselves, while any type of failure is thought to be caused by the system. Such mechanisms can be leveraged by proven interventions that have been tested in controlled environments as being effective in changing behaviour.

In the work we did in Norway, we included interventions related to priming individual responsibilities, chunking information in checklists, and using social norms to curb peoples’ perception of injustice.

mechanism. The starting point at the beginning of the prototyping phase is therefore not a hypothesis to test and validate, but a pre-defined outcome to achieve.

The outcome is therefore not an impression of what works and what doesn’t, it can be measured in terms of observable behaviours. In the case of the Norwegian railway operator, the observable behaviour could be measured and quantified by number of received, unsubstantiated complaints.

From intuitively competent to surgically effective Designers, by their very nature, create interventions that affect human behaviour, due to their empathy and tendency to learn by doing. Such interventions, however, are primarily informed by intuition and trial and error, in the form of prototyping. Cognitive science offers designers a complementary skill-set that provides a precise understanding of human behaviour, as well as guidance on how to influence it effectively through specific behavioural intervention strategies. This empowers designers to achieve desired results faster and with higher chances of success.

Continue the discussion on Slack!

Question for the author(s)?

Have your own perspective to share

Finding the optimal intervention design through experience prototyping Service design offers a way to translate cognitive mechanisms and validated intervention strategies into desired behaviour within a given context.

There are many ways to institute a behavioural intervention strategy. Service design offers the ap­ proach and mindset to determine the optimal one.

We use experience prototyping to ensure we design the most effective intervention for a specific cognitive

2 Thaler, R., H. (1991). Quasi rational economics.

New York: Russell Sage.

68 Touchpoint 11-2

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Touchpoint 11-2 69

Tools and Methods

Building Service Design

by Playing with Purpose Using LEGO® Serious Play® in service design LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) enables end users to work directly with service designers in a collaborative process. LSP can be used to prototype during the speculative design phase, it can involve end users in the development phase and it can be used with experience prototyping to align strategic direction across all functions.

Michael Phillips is Lead Facilitator at Serious Play Works and a Certified LEGO® Serious Play® Facilitator and Scrum Master. He has facilitated workshops with many organisations and individuals for over 20 years. He recently ran an ideation session to stop hate speech online as part of the Tech4Good ‘Share No Evil’ campaign. contact@seriousplayworks.co.nz

72 Touchpoint 11-2

LEGO® Serious Play® LEGO® Serious Play® is a facilitated workshop process where participants are asked different questions by a facilitator in relation to a project, product, service or strategy. The participants answer these questions by individually building symbolic and metaphorical models with identical LEGO® brick packs and present these to each other. The participants build individually with strict time limits, and then create shared models together without a time limit.

LSP is based on some key theories including play, constructionism, handmind connection and imagination. At the centre of LSP and constructionism is the concept that when we ‘think with objects’ or ‘think through our fingers’ we unleash insights, modes of thought and perceptions that most adults have forgotten they ever had. Constructionism states that learning happens most effectively when people are active in making tangible objects in the real

world. In this way, constructionism is connected with experiential learning and builds on Jean Piaget’s epistemological theory of constructivism.1 LSP process is unique because it creates what Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘flow’.2 This is when the participant is in an absorbed state with the activity and workshop. The flow state is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, because the person is fully immersed in what they are doing. This state makes LSP a particularly useful process for service design because it captures the essence of peoples’ thoughts without interruption.

1 Cakir, M. (2008). Constructivist Approaches to Learning in Science and Their Implications for Science Pedagogy: A Literature Review.

International Journal of Environmental & Science Education, 3(4), 193-206.

2 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1990). Flow: the psychology of optimal experience (1st ed.). New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 9780060162535.

tools and me thods

Close-up of shared model built with LEGO bricks

Service design and LSP For the purpose of the LSP service design workshops, service design was defined as an approach to create services holistically. It considers touchpoints endto-end, front-to-back, and in every channel. There are three main phases of interactions: ‘Before’ (awareness and consideration), ‘During’ (purchasing and introduction) and ‘After’ (usage and advocacy).

LSP was used to explore the user activity and system activity (employee, technology and support processes) at each stage and each touchpoint. By looking at the desirability (emotion), utility (function) and usability (value in use), we could align organisational and business capabilities with customer needs, wants and experiences.

LSP service design workshops The LSP service design workshops followed three key principles of Design Thinking: — Holistic – all participants see the ‘big picture’ as well as the details — Empathic – there is a human-centred focus (including users and producers) on real needs — Co-created – an iterative approach is followed which brings users and producers together Building the ideas into actual models removes the fear of failure or being incorrect, because the models are simply prototypes that can be further modified. The LSP process is an iterative one Touchpoint 11-2 73

because the participants are constantly building and rebuilding models once they have shared them.

In addition, a fourth dimension – time – is incorporated into the models by moving bricks and modifying the models. This is important because the customer requirements and ability to meet them may change through the cycle. It is also important because companies try to align customer and employee experiences. As the models change in time, the resulting service design strategies can be modified accordingly.

LSP and speculative design LSP was used during the speculative design phase to prototype potential service design models. This involved participants – service users and designers – being asked to look five to ten years into the future and speculating about how things could be and what they would want at that time. LSP sparked discussion and critical reflection during the sharing phase. Using LSP in the speculative design phase helps reveal what is happening now by looking at the future in a different way and working back to the current service offering.

Involving stakeholders and end users The LSP service design workshops brought together both stakeholders and end users in the development process, where they were asked to build solutions individually and then later to build a shared model of the best solution for both parties. This allowed participants to work together to build a shared model in real time, adding and removing elements during each phase and at each touchpoint.

Aligning strategic direction and functions A LSP-based experience prototype is a simulation of the service that focuses on the specific touchpoints involved, allowing designers to test the solution with the active and engaged participation of the user. This allowed testing of the prototyped services from the speculative design phase with the overarching strategic intent.

Conclusion LSP is ideal for service design because alternate solutions and ideation can occur simultaneously and collectively.

LSP and Design Thinking are about identifying and working collectively with a challenge to create improved solutions. LSP helps designers and users ideate and create 3D metaphorical prototypes to reach consensus on the optimal solution.

LSP is also an iterative process by design. Building prototypes and changing them ensures that all the solutions are made visible. Participants can easily see how different touchpoints influence each other, including front-to-back and side-to-side. Participants can also identify disconnects, imagine alternatives or identify some areas that are unresolved. The models can be easily modified and connected with others.

New shared models can also be created.

LSP creates commitment and alignment between the participants because shared models are built and modified until all the participants agree with them, setting a context for further development. It also can create alignment across touchpoints, ensuring clarity between strategy and service.

Building and sharing metaphors allows peoples’ perspectives to shift and generate new ways of under­ standing. We generally understand new or complex things in relation to what we already know. LSP develops shared thinking and a common language to understand or experience one thing in terms of another, and for objects to borrow qualities from each other. This helps to create new service design concepts which incorporate the new thinking.

LSP is thinking through action and service design is ultimately something alive, not static. LSP and service design complement each other because they are about thinking by doing, building knowledge by building things, constantly iterating and improving, and using experience to lead us in creating new designs.

Note: The LEGO® Serious Play ® Workshops were held in Auckland New Zealand, between March and June 2019. The workshop groups ranged in size from 6-21 participants.

74 Touchpoint 11-2

tools and me thods

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Touchpoint 11-2 75

Manytyping: Seamless Mixed-tool Prototyping for Multichannel Services An emergent experiential prototyping practice In ‘manytyping’, techniques such as desktop walkthroughs, paper prototyping, investigative rehearsal and 2D or 3D mock-ups are used together. By switching seamlessly between techniques during one prototyping instance – or using parallel techniques – complex Adam Lawrence is Partner at WorkPlayExperience, a service design consultancy with a uniquely theatrical approach. An actor and stand-up comedian, he is also adjunct Professor at IE Business School, co-initiator of the Global Service Jam and co-author of This is Service Design Doing.

Peter Sloth Madsen is a ‘hybrid’ between actor, dramaturge, facilitator, innovation consultant/ service designer and scrum master, with an MSc in Digital Design and Communication.

He specialises in partici­ patory design via theatre and has more than 15 years of experience with methods such as forum theatre, applied improvisation and playback theatre.

With thanks to Natalia Agudelo, Susana Branco, Bård Brænde, Dorota Gazy, Patti Hunt, Paul Z Jackson, many other service design and AI colleagues, and User Centered Strategy.

76 Touchpoint 11-2

experiential prototypes are possible very early in a project. It’s low-tech, fast, immersive and surprisingly easy.

Many techniques are used to prototype services, from low-tech methods such as desktop walkthroughs and paper prototyping, to electronic sketching (e.g.

Arduino) and virtual reality. Outside fully immersive environments like VR, it’s often said that several prototypes or prototyping methods are needed to illuminate a single service concept.

Each prototyping method has a bias, working well in representing some aspects of a service concept, but failing in others.

Desktop walkthroug1 , for example, is a powerful tool for simulating processes – especially at larger scales – but does

1 Desktop walkthrough is a popular prototyping technique where processes and experiences are played through on a map using counters or toy figures like Playmobil. It often feels like a combination of tabletop gaming (or military sandtabling) and puppet theatre.

not allow us to zoom in to see details of interactions. Investigative rehearsal2 is highly immersive and handles humanhuman and human-machine interactions well, but with its ‘human scale’, participants sometimes struggle to show details of interfaces or deal with larger geographies. 2D and 3D mock-ups are excellent at representing screens or devices, but because they are isolated models, they cannot show context in themselves.

Recently, we have observed practi­ tioners combining these methods among others, jumping between them within the same run-through, representing complex experiences and

2 Investigative rehearsal is a theatrical method where team members act out processes and experiences, with each participant playing the part of a human, machine or software interface. See Touchpoint 3.3.

tools and me thods

Desktop walkthrough level: stakeholders meet

underlying processes in an engaging, experiential way. This meth­od was examined at a recent explorative meet-up3 between the service design and applied improvisation4 communities, and the term ‘manytyping’ was coined.

Illustrative example A team is working on the service ecosystem, process­ es and user experiences around a farm produce vending machine. They have already iterated several prototypes of various sub-processes and have evolved a desktop walkthrough set: a cardboard-based vending machine, and various digital interfaces created as clickdummies. Now they want to combine them in a single run-through of the holistic system and experience.

3 ‘MiniCamp: AI meets SD’, Oslo 4-7 February 2019. Publications are in preparation.

4 Applied improvisation uses the principles, tools, practices, skills and mind-sets developed in comedy, jazz and theatre and utilises them for non-theatrical or performance purposes. See http:// appliedimprovisation.network

The desktop walkthrough forms the backbone of the manytype, and the process begins with one Playmobil figurine representing a tourist walking through a village. She encounters another figurine and a conversation begins.

At this point, rather than abbreviating the conver­ sation or playing it as ‘puppet theatre’, two of the team stand up.5 They step into an investigative rehearsal, where the ‘tourist’ asks for a local shop and is directed instead to the vending machine.

The tourist’s questions about directions and methods of payment are noted for future iterations.

The conversation ends and the tourist figurine explores the village while team members scribble notes about signage. When the figure arrives at

5 This is reminiscent of Schön’s work on reflection in action: “When good jazz musicians improvise together [...] listening to themselves, they ‘feel’ where the music is going and adjust their playing accordingly.” (Schön, D. (1987). A.(1987): “Educating the Reflective Practitioner”. San Franscisco: Jossey-Base, p. 30)

Touchpoint 11-2 77

The real thing: a farm produce vending machine in Germany

3D prototype/click model level: interaction with device

Investigative rehearsal level: stakeholders interactinteract

Click model level: interaction with device

78 Touchpoint 11-2

the machine, the de­sign­er playing the tourist stands up again, approaches the cardboard mock-up, reads the instructions, and buys some ‘eggs’ using a click model on a tablet taped to the mock-up. The tourist tucks the eggs under her arm awkwardly, and a colleague scrawls “carrier bags?” on the bug list.

During the desktop walkthrough, one of the team moves a paper token, representing a text message, from the tiny vending machine to a figurine working on a farm. The ‘farmer’ pulls out his phone, where a click dummy of a messaging app tells him “Alert! Machine 4; eggs 2”. It’s almost lunch, so he decides to act immediately and clicks ‘Delegate’. The message tokens move from his phone to various points on the desktop walkthrough, and a Playmobil truck heads for the chicken barn.

tools and me thods

Links to applied improvisation As well as using familiar prototyping techniques such as desktop walkthrough, paper prototyping, mock-ups and click models, this method incorporates or echoes practices from the world of applied improvisation such as ‘Switch Scene’6 , ‘Life Game7 ’ and ‘Fast Forward8 ’.

And there is one pre-existing overlap: the service design technique ‘Investigative Rehearsal’ mentioned above is based on ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’9.

Paul Z. Jackson (of The Solutions Focus and a leading applied improviser) reflects, “The technique reminds me of the best sort of applied improvisation – drawing on whatever is most appropriate at any given moment.

That's what AI principles like ‘Making Use of What's There', 'Accepting and Building' and 'Spotting Successes' are all about.”

Introducing

Design Thinking Inhouse

Applications and summary The manytyping technique has proved very useful in helping teams shift focus from individual channels and touchpoints of a service, to consider the holistic experience and underlying process. Patti Hunt of MAKE Studios and Service Design Hong Kong, writes, “As well as enabling an instinctive understanding of how channels and sub-processes connect, sticking to one ‘live’ timeline allows teams to examine important experiential factors, such as timing and dramatic arcs.”

Manytyping is also easily understood by less experienced co-creative partners, serves especially well to ­communicate the prototype to outsiders, and is far cheaper and faster to set up than a VR environment.

6 Switch Scene is a theatre improv game in which performers create more than one scene and switch between them on command, like zapping between channels on TV. 7 Life Game is a format by Keith Johnstone in which an audience member or invited guest is interviewed about their life, after which the performers recreate scenes or more playful interpretations.

8 Fast Forward is a technique often used in theatre improv, where the players jump scenes forward in time to investigate more interesting or critical moments.

9 Also called Forum Theater; see Boal, A. (2000). Theater of the Oppressed. Pluto Press.

Available as a digital download (PDF) for € 9.80. SDN members receive a special 15 percent discount.

Touchpoint 11-2 79

Insights from Delivering In-house Service Design Training I joined Lloyds Banking Group in November 2017 as the first fulltime service design trainer, specifically to support group-wide transformation efforts. This article outlines how I built a training infrastructure, and what I learned from carrying out service design training in an in-house setting.

Roman Schöneboom is currently UX Design Systems Lead at Credit Suisse. He is responsible for managing how high quality, digitally optimised, user-centric solutions can be delivered at scale, across all global entities of the organisation via the creation of supporting tools and services, such as design pattern libraries, playbooks and training and coaching. He is a certified facilitator for the LEGO Se­ ri­ous Play method, teaches at universities, writes regularly about his work and is an avid drummer.

80 Touchpoint 11-2

Situation The bank faced multiple challenges, including more than 500 IT systems, a priority on business goals rather than customer needs, product owners who behaved as miniature CEOs, and siloed teams that operated independently and developed their own working practices and methods.

To keep up with an ever-changing and very competitive market, Lloyds bank started a group-wide transformation effort in 2016 with the aim of becoming a more agile and customer-centric organisation.

This involved breaking up existing silos and organising teams in labs focussed on lines of business – such as everyday banking, savings and deposits – as well as a big push to train employees to prepare them for the new ways of working.

Employees could choose from trainings/ courses covering 16 different capabilities, such as Agile methodologies, systems thinking, service design, and more, which then would form part of their day-to-day work. Training courses were delivered by

a mix of permanent staff and contractors.

Unfortunately, the training content was not cross-referenced. Many trainings were theory-based with limited creative/collaborative exercises, and employee feedback suggested that participants struggled to put learnings into the context of their work.

Furthermore, there were not any write-ups or takeaways for participants, limiting the long-term impact of the trainings.

The value of prototyping Starting with a seven-week research phase, I utilised desk and ethnographic research to gather data about the business environment, peoples’ roles and responsibilities, and their training and up-skilling needs, as well as how Lloyds worked as an organisation, before I started building a service design training programme.

I built the programme, content and exercises in an iterative way, amending it by incorporating participant feedback after each training session. After six prototyping months and 15 sessions, I was able

tools and me thods

Initiatives to keep learning motivation high Workshop

Check-in call Refresher

Train facilitators

Initatives

Training full teams

Journey

Motivation/ Learning

Content

» Q&A » Articles » Online courses

» Webinar » Advanced Workshop » Method training

Identify potential facilitators 1 - 2 Weeks

Time

» New facilitator Continues with Team

Create and agree training plan 6 - 8 Weeks

to offer four versions of the training: Two-hour, four-hour, full-day and two-day advanced course. The programme now had a clear, connected learning flow. I made sure that all exercises were connected to relevant content and were designed with clear instructions and guiding questions.

Learnings from prototyping Training is essential for awareness-building. Making colleagues feel comfortable when using tools and templates for the first time, will help them to be less worried doing it on their own. Workshops drive support requests for team training or temporary project support, which can be directly linked to project teams and their business cases. In my case it also helped to start the right conversation about the amount of capabilities which have been taught, eventually reducing them from 16 to three, connecting the remaining content and tools more strongly to the daily work in the labs. I was able to get feedback if – and to what level – people wanted further training, and what people considered a minimum amount of training courses (approximately four) to gain solid service design knowledge. Both were hugely insightful for scaling and starting to work on train-the-trainer courses.

Tips for developing training in-house Budget Try to have your own budget. This will help you to react faster to support requests. By being able to strategically support teams with limited training budgets, you not only contribute to building up the business case for more in-depth service design activities, but also grow your network and create ambassadors.

The first quick win is to train your own team, because this will drive commitment and team-building, and service design colleagues will take a standardised approach into their project teams.

Branch out to other, preferably non-design/technical teams. Make sure those sessions are very adjusted to the audience needs, such as visualising the stakeholders they work with. Always try to get the PM or team lead in the session as well, because it will create buy-in for further in-depth training.

Train the trainer

Once training is established, start thinking of a trainthe-trainer programme to scale your efforts. However, be aware that this might take some time. Potential candidates are the ones who approach you pro-actively.

Create a six-month plan, expose them to a variety of content and courses, challenge them to apply the workshop tools to their own work, and give them the opportunity to facilitate one exercise at a time.

Promote the training

Write about your training and solicit written feedback from participants, and start writing case studies when supporting teams. Have a good and manageable platform to collect and share, and make sure it’s accessible. Content such as little insight videos, or participant feedback, will help you to reach more people in the organisation.

Track the training

Track impact for the training, less for yourself but to create further buy-in and budget. Have a pre- and post-survey to understand increase, as a minimum have a check-in with the teams two weeks later by phone. Offer something to read, a webinar recording, or webinar refresher for the team, and get them to come on an advanced course where you can always recap the first session. Feedback, in any shape or form, is important, because it will help you make the invisible training efforts and its impact, visible. Tracked data and numbers will provide insights on how many colleagues can be trained over what period of time, e.g. in a blueprint.

Touchpoint 11-2 81

Ecosystems, Blueprints and Journeys – Oh My! Toward a practice-oriented typology of service design metaphors Communicating the value of service design to those who are unfamiliar with our tools and processes can be a challenge. This creates problems for designers as well as the organisations and communities we hope to serve. Perhaps our use (and misuse) of metaphor to describe our work contributes to the confusion.

Joan Ball is an Associate Professor of Marketing at St. John's University in New York City and founder of WOMB Service Design Lab located at the Centre for Social Innovation in New York City.

Her research and practice centres on understanding how transformative services influence individual, organi­ sational and community resilience. She is particularly interested in the influence of changing culture, tech­ nology and social structures on human wellbeing. ballj@stjohns.edu

The use of metaphor in service: A brief overview Metaphor has been used in service literature since its earliest days.1 From service ecosystems and blueprints to customer journey maps and servicescapes, service designers use a variety of metaphors to describe service concepts, tools and spaces. This is not surprising, because conceptual metaphors underlie how people understand and experience the world around them.2 But do the metaphors we use to describe service design activities enhance our ability to clearly communicate the value of service design to our clients and customers?

Might the mixing of metaphors in particular provide a clue to the

1 Goodwin, C., Grove, S. J., & Fisk, R. P. (1996).

Collaring the Cheshire Cat’: Studying Customers' Services Experience through Metaphor. Service Industries Journal, 16(4), 421-442.

2 Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980), Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

82 Touchpoint 11-2

disconnection between service designers, organisational stakeholders and potential partners?

These questions prompted me to examine research in some key service and marketing journals to identify how the use of metaphor has shaped service design and the design of services. It is my hope that this preliminary report of findings from the academic literature will prompt a broader conversation among service design practitioners and academics about how the language we use influences the way we understand and practice service design.

No singular metaphor is likely to describe the complexity that exists within and among service offerings. That may be why researchers and practitioners tend to describe service concepts, processes, design elements and roles using multiple or mixed metaphors. The following examples illustrate how this might cause confusion for people who are new to service design.

e d u c at i o n a n d re s e a rc h

Buys product

Found product Researched product

Goes to store

$

Goes home

?

Problem with product Complaint

Mixed metaphors

Conceptualising ‘actors’ within a service ‘ecosystem’, for instance, suggests that those involved in service exchanges must take deliberate or intentional action and that service occurs in a complex network of interacting entities in a physical environment. The study of ecosystems within ecological science demonstrates, however, that non-living, non-intentional entities also play a significant role in the preservation and health of an ecosystem. Therefore, the use of the term actor in the context of the ecosystem metaphor may lead practitioners and researchers to inadvertently ignore the important role of such entities.

This potential for confusion is compounded when emerging technologies that can act (such as AI and robots) are involved, especially if designers intentionally or unintentionally anthropomorphise things that may not have inherently human characteristics. Furthermore, the word ‘actor’ can also be interpreted as a theatrical actor, especially in light of the use of the ‘front stage’ and ‘back stage’ theatrical metaphors used to describe service activities in the context of service ‘blueprints’, which introduces an architectural reference.

The overlapping use of ecological (e.g. ecosystem, actor), architectural (e.g. blueprint) and theatrical (e.g. actor, front and back stage) metaphors in these examples might not pose a challenge for service design

professionals, who have been trained to describe customer journeys through servicescapes represented with blueprints. It does, however, illustrate the potential for confusion among those unfamiliar with service design tools and tactics.

Toward a typology of service metaphors To date there has not been a critical review of metaphors and their implications for service design. A search of the word “metaphor” in three leading marketing and three leading service journals (Journal of Services Marketing, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Service Management, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science) resulted in more than 340 articles that were examined by myself and an additional researcher and organised and analysed to identify areas of coherence, alignment and contradiction.3 While this analysis does not claim to represent an exhaustive list of service metaphors, the results illustrate the different, intersecting and sometimes contradictory metaphors that are often employed to describe abstract

3 Schmitt, R. (2005), “Systematic metaphor analysis as a method of qualitative research”, The Qualitative Report, Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 358-394.

Touchpoint 11-2 83

Towards a Typology of Service Metaphors Metaphor type

Examples

Service concepts

Theater, Ecosystem, Value network, Relational network, Honeybee colony, Ant colony, Citadel, Amoeba-like, Value constellation, Constellation of offerings, Learning system, Architecture, infrastructure, Anatomy/Physiology, Systems, Cultures, Community, Collectives, Servicescape, Portal, Environment, Forum

Service processes/tools

Blueprint, Maps, Fragments, Moments of truth, Wiring, Growing, Utilitarian, Engineered, Scripted, Directed, Co-Created/Destructed, Cues, Clues, Blindspots, Touchpoints, Service scripts, Building blocks, Fail points, Waiting points, Intersections, Relationship, Interaction, Interface, Journey, Narrative/Story Arc, Transaction, Navigation, Social exchange, Encounters, Connectivity, Peaks, Flow, Information exchange, Orchestration

Service roles

Customer: Co-creator, Co-designer, Co-producer, Consumer, Brand Champion, Pinocchio, Investor, Saboteur, Terrorist, Actor, Stakeholder, Audience, Voyeur, Spectator, Improvisor, Follower, Balance seeker, Sensory seeker, Functional analyser, Player, Adopter, Traveler, Tribe Employee: Employee as Customer, Actor, Entrepreneur, Stakeholder, Brand champion, Experience creator, Service guide, Rifleman, Environmental engineer, Legislator, Matchmaker, Teacher, Santa Claus, Police officer, Cheerleader, Detective, Director Suppliers: Network, Supply chain

Fig. 1: Toward a typology of service metaphors

service concepts.4 Figure 1 presents three broad service metaphor typologies that emerged from the analysis: Service Concepts, Service Process/Tools, and Service Roles, with representative examples of each.

Service Concepts The conceptual metaphors that emerged from this preliminary analysis represent a breadth of choices for describing the complexity of service systems and their component parts. This raises interesting questions about what might be gained or lost when service is described as an ecosystem versus, for instance, a

4 Maglio, P.P. (2015), “Editorial column-Metaphors of service and the framing of service science, Service Science, Vol. 7 No. 4, pp. iii-iv.

84 Touchpoint 11-2

learning system versus a theater or a honeybee colony.

Might communicating service using one metaphor make more sense in a given context than in another?

Could the use of different metaphors in the same context be a useful creative prompt to help define the boundaries of a service system? Do metaphors rooted in nature provide different mental models for service than those based in structural or organisational frameworks? What are the implications of these choices when it comes to designing and communicating the value of service design to key stakeholders?

Service Processes/Tools The metaphors associated with service processes and tools describe representations of the entirety of

e d u c at i o n a n d re s e a rc h

the service experience (e.g. journey, orchestration, flow, narrative), snapshots of service experience (e.g. touchpoints, peaks, blindspots), descriptions of how service is created (e.g. co-created/destructed), and how service experience unfolds (e.g. interaction, transaction, social exchange).

Making intentional choices about how these pieces come together and how they relate to the service concepts we use to frame service communication has the potential to either provide clarity or, if the choices we make are less aligned, could hinder it. This does not mean that mixing these metaphors is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.

Rather, it merely suggests that understanding how these elements come together and how best to communicate seemingly contradictory concepts is worthy of further exploration in practice and through academic research.

Service Roles The service role metaphors in the academic literature are varied and surprising, which means they hold the potential for new thinking about our conceptualisations of customers, employees and suppliers in service systems.

Of note is the distinction between representations of customers as contributors to service (e.g. co-creator, co-designer, brand champion) and more negative representations (e.g. terrorist, saboteur, Pinocchio).

How might customers react to the responsibility of contributing to service at that level? Might some customers be burdened by those expectations and could their negative behaviour represent a rebellion?

In the case of employees, many of the roles described in the literature involve responsibilities that might be beyond the scope of their normal duties (e.g. brand champion, entrepreneur, matchmaker, cheerleader).

How might these roles influence employee interactions with customers? Might we better understand the relationship between employee and customer through the use of metaphor? Could we reimagine these roles and interactions between customers and employees by reimagining them through the lens of different service concept and process metaphorical frameworks?

What’s next This examination of service metaphors is meant to be a conversation starter rather than a comprehensive academic analysis. Instead, it is an attempt to move recent calls to bridge the academia-practitioner divide in service5 off the page and into the world by creating an opportunity to work together to explore the use of metaphor in service design practice. To that end, spreadsheets containing a full list of references and the raw preliminary review of metaphors can be found online (see sidebar).

In sum, it is my hope that this review provides a stepping-off point for further examination of this topic. Practitioners and academic researchers are invited to build upon this preliminary examination of key marketing and service journals to consider how metaphor is currently used to communicate service concepts and to explore how commonlyused service metaphors might help (or hinder) how stakeholders outside the field understand and embrace service design. Moreover, I hope it will inspire us to experiment with our use of metaphor in framing service design and more clearly communicating its value to people in and outside of the field.

5 Daly, A., Baron, S., Dorsch, M.J., Fisk, R.P., Grove, S.J., Harris, K., and Harris, R. (2014), “Bridging the academia-practitioner divide: the case of ‘service theater’”, Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 28 No. 7, pp.

580-594.

Full list of references and the raw preliminary review of metaphors Short link: http://bit.ly/metaphorresearch

Touchpoint 11-2 85

Eleonora Carnasa Meet the service designer

Eleonora Carnasa is a Bulgaria-based service designer and founder of Fabrica 360, a design and innovation agency. In this profile, she had a chat with Jesse Grimes, Touchpoint’s Editorin-Chief, about her efforts to grow service design in Eastern Europe, and how she overcomes the associated challenges.

Eleonora Carnasa is a Bulgaria-based service designer and founder of Fabrica 360, a design and innovation agency. She is the chapter representative of SDN Bulgaria and an SDNaccredited Master Trainer. eleonora@fabrica360.eu

Jesse Grimes: Nice to catch up again and see that you’ve been pushing service de­sign and design thinking ever more forward in your part of the world. Can you let me know a bit what keeps you busy?

Eleonora Carnasa: In my work I’m wearing different hats: On the one hand I am a service design practitioner and as such I am involved in innovation projects and in workshop facilitation. On the other hand I have to find a way to make my business sustainable in a very young market. Indeed, doing service design is the hard part, but selling it is even harder. And last but not least, I love developing training programmes that contribute to the development of the horizontal bar of the service designer’s ‘T-shapedness’, such as creative leadership, storytelling, systems thinking and platform design.

How did you come to start practicing and teaching service design?

I wasn’t born a service designer, and I don’t have a formal degree in service 86 Touchpoint 11-2

design. During my education 20 years ago, there was no such thing as Design Thinking or service design. I am an economist and I have an MBA. Later on, I specialised in service design at Central Saint Martins in London, and I took many classes, read books, became part of the SDN and applied my knowledge in practice. I am still learning.

I remember clearly how it all started for me with service design thinking. I used to work for the Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce and Industry as an innovation management consultant, and at some point made a specialisation at the European Innovation Management Academy. It involved a questionnaire you use to assess companies’ innovation management capabilities, and there were a few questions about the application of the design approach to innovation. They triggered me to dig deeper and deeper into the topic and educate myself. It was only a matter of time before I had set up my agency as a side project initially, which then became my main focus.

p ro f i l e

As someone wise once said, the best way to learn is to teach, and I enjoy sharing my knowledge with other people. Recently I received an offer from a private Bulgarian university to lead a three-month extracurricular course in Sofia, and I am still considering if it could fit into my agenda, but it is a positive sign of the growing interest in the discipline.

You have worked with different types of clients, both international corporates, as well as local firms in Bulgaria. What type of work do you find the most rewarding, and what differences do you see in the level of service design demand and maturity

In Bulgaria, service design is terra incognita for the public and healthcare sectors, which leaves us the private and non-governmental sectors as the only clients. Much to my regret, businesses still contact us predominantly for workshops and even teambuilding events. This despite the fact that I believe that service design is much-needed when businesses are operating in a functioning market economy in which service providers are competing between themselves to create better customer experiences.

We have a different picture at home, because we see many businesses don’t really care to improve because their sales are guaranteed due to a distorted market.

between your local and European clients?

I think that readers are often interested in the

The difference in demand and understanding of service design in the different corners of the continent is significant in my experience. When relocating for a project or workshops, it feels like travel in time. Right now, I am in Helsinki delivering a series of workshops on service design and creative leadership at Laurea University. So far, I had over 100 participants, and each one knows what service design is, with many wanting to pursue a career in the field. I even had participants from the public sector whose bosses have encouraged them to learn service design and apply it in their work.

Elsewhere in Western Europe I’ve been involved in large-scale service design operations with big budgets and huge support infrastructures. In those cases, service design (sometimes called Design Thinking within the organisations), was regarded as a means to achieve customer-centric business transformation with the potential to introduce changes to the organisational system. What I find exciting in those cases is leading and observing the required mindset changes associated with the design of services that are beyond the typical industry offering. The downside is that big companies are very political, there is no complete buy-in and support from the leadership, and in general they are slow to change.

Back home when working with start-ups, the challenge is quite different. They are quick to act, but lack the skills and understanding of design research and customer discovery. Venture capital money is spoiling them, and they don’t feel the necessity of putting in extra effort. I can share many examples of start-ups that don’t sell anything but themselves, moving from one accelerator to the next.

different ways that service designers have addressed the challenges of introducing, selling and practicing service design in new frontiers. You’ve made clear that Bulgaria is one of these markets which has yet to catch up to Western Europe in terms of the awareness of what service designers do, and what the practice can achieve. What have been your strategies to make service design successful there, and how have you overcome any difficulties?

Indeed, the market is in its infancy and there are not so many messengers to deliver the message.

There are a few small agencies like mine, but other than that no-one is investing in awarenessraising. If you do a LinkedIn search for service designers in Bulgaria, you will be surprised to find out that there are no people with the job title except for a very few freelancers. Simply nobody is hiring service designers yet.

My strategy is to create a lot of content and to attract followers by representing the SDN in Bulgaria. Luckily, I got some EU funding and I have an on-going project to create service design training materials and to organise free workshops. In addition, I just organised the first Design Thinking Camp in Sofia on August 29-30, with 25 international speakers and 16 workshops. The focus in Bulgaria is still on Design Thinking, and for the moment I am content on focussing on that term, as long as it delivers value to my clients and their customers.

So, still a long way to go to establish service design as a discipline in Bulgaria, but exciting times ahead!

Touchpoint 11-2 87

Congratulations to the Service Design Award 2019 Finalists The SDN is incredibly pleased to announce that this year's Service Design Award finalists have been selected by our international jury of service design experts! project / location

The Service Design Award, curated by the Service Design Network, was launched in 2015 in response to an increasing demand for high-quality case studies and academic output within the field of service design. As the first international service design award of its kind, we also recognise its contribution to the sharing of knowledge, experience and techniques, and the reinforcement of the value of service design within both the public and private sectors.

(October 10-11) in majestic Toronto.

Winners will be announced and celebrated on stage.

Over 100 projects were entered this year, facing higher submission standards than ever before. Twelve projects in the three categories of ‘Professional Commercial’, ‘Professional Non-profit / Public Sector’, and ‘Student’ represent our 2019 finalists and also help define the benchmark for world-class service design. It is thanks to their teams’ exceptional work and project contributions that we are taking our design practice to new levels.

Special thanks to the 2019 Jury: Taina Mäkijärvi, Cathy Huang, Adriana Ojeda, Luis Alt, Damian Kernahan, J. Margus Klaar and Florian Vollmer.

The 2019 Service Design Award ceremony will take place during the Service Design Global Conference 88 Touchpoint 11-2

Laboratoria Mobiele Alternativen / Belgium company

Twisted Studio client

The SDN, as a host of the Service Design Award, is delighted to showcase, promote and support the best new talent in our rapidly growing field. The complete list of shortlisted projects and finalist case studies is available at https://www. service-design-network.org/servicedesign-award-2019-finalists

Netwerk Duurzame Mobiliteit / Komimo category

Professional Non-Profit / Public Sector

project / location

Crack The Code: How One School Demystified Programming / Finland company

Kuudes Kerros Helsinki Oy client

Supercell category

Professional Non-Profit / Public Sector

inside sdn

project / location

project / location

project / location

Transforming a Social Security Organization Through Service Design / Chile

Lift the Lid / United Kingdom company

Designing a Viable Land for Future Generations / Portugal

Good Innovation

company

company

client

With Company

Uc Design School, Brandbook and Surandina Consultores

Alzheimer's Society

client

category

Government / Ministry

client

Professional Non-Profit / Public Sector

category

project / location

project / location

project / location

The Evidence of Design 2.0 – an Impactful Service Identity Designed with AI / Sweden

Heart Failure Self- Management Program / Canada

company

Hellon

Healthcare Human Factors & Ehealth Innovation

How Service Design Plays a Vital Role in the Transformation Journey of a Brazilian Insurance Provider: From a Brick-And-Mortar Business into a Health-Insure-Tech / Brazil

client

client

company

Mandatum Life

In house project

Seguros Unimed

category

category

client

Professional Commercial

Professional Non-Profit / Public Sector

Seguros Unimed & Sistema Unimed

Caja de Compensación Caja Los Andes

Professional Commercial

category

Professional Commercial

company

category

Professional Commercial Touchpoint 11-2 89

project / location

project / location

XPLORE / Germany / Sweden team

Clarify: Early Guidance Service for Separated Parents / United Kingdom

Sebastian Gier

team

university

Natalia Carrasco

Umea Institute of Design

university

client

Royal College of Art

BMW Group

client

category

Government/Ministry

Student

category

Student

project / location

project / location

Journey: A Post Death Settlements Service / Singapore

Service Design to Improve Women's Maternal Healthcare Services in Nepal / Norway/Nepal

team

Carina Lim, Mireille Lee, and Zhang Hanwen university

National University of Singapore (NUS)

team

Ida Christine Opsahl, Julie Nyjordet Rossvoll And Nora Pincus Gjertsen university

client

Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

Government/Ministry

client

category

Green Tara Nepal

Student

category

90 Touchpoint 11-2

Student

inside sdn

Pioneering a Chapter Co-ordinator Model SDN chapters are the essence of our global network.

While chapters are growing in number and maturity, the Global Chapter Team is continuously looking for new opportunities to support our various chapters' needs.

As we are currently approaching the amazing number of 50 local chapters, the recent and more established chapters have very different opportunities and chal­lenges.

Therefore, new models and initiatives are being devel­ oped to support our chapters to prosper as local and self-sustaining volunteer-based communities.

SDN Finland is among the most active SDN chapters. Since its foun­ding in 2012, it has grown continuously both in the number of members and community followers.

The chapter is now proportionally one of the largest and most active, hosts several monthly events and develops new kinds of activities to promote service design on various local forums for different audiences. This has kept the Core Team members busy along with their already engaging full-time jobs. It had become evident that the chapter activities could not be run adequately due to a lack resources, and that the chapter needed more support to keep its activities professional and in-line with the chapter’s mission.

One of the most pressing issues was to better co-ordinate the chapter activities. While the chapter is for­tunate to have engaged many volunteers, coordinating their input, sharing enough information and scheduling events demands a more efficient approach. These issues were raised in a member survey conducted during Spring 2019. SDN Finland Chapter Representative Teija Hakaoja said, "We especially were constantly behind in communication – the members got event information at the last minute, and the communication channels were unclear. Our Core Team was painfully aware of this."

To improve the chapter activities, the team wanted to recruit someone to take on an active role in managing events and communication. They

were lucky enough to find an excellent co-ordinator from among their members. This freelancer co-ordinator role includes responsi­bilities for communication, event organisation, administration support and additional development tasks when necessary.

"In the Co-ordinator role, I get to work with many different pro­ fessionals and create better experiences for our members. With the active help from the Core Team, I was able to pick up the work very quickly. The freelance model makes the job very flexible and possible to do alongside work and studies," said Lotta Salminen, the new SDN Finland Chapter Co-ordinator. Teija Hakaoja – one of the Core Team – is happy to have Lotta onboard: "Getting a Co-ordinator to work with the Core Team has been more than helpful.

We have a demanding, professional community and that is only a good thing. It shows that service design has a nice footing in Finland. We are eager to improve and serve our audience better. Earlier, we were constantly lacking in resources. With the freelance co-ordinator we can now professionalise our activities and keep our members happier,” said Teija.

Teija Hakaoja, SDN Chapter Representative (left) and Chapter Co-ordinator Lotta Salminen (right)

Touchpoint 11-2 91

Touchpoint Journal – Launching Event Series For a second time already, Creative Space LOFT33 hosted

Under the theme of the issue, presentations were held by Jesse Grimes, Senior Vice President of the SDN and Editor-in-Chief of Touchpoint, followed by Business Design Consultant, Kevin Quint. The presentations discussed the relation and application of service design methodology within the context of both international cor­ porates and early-stage start-ups as well as the difference in their mindset.

Q & A was held where the guest speakers shared tips from their own profes-

sional experience in the field of applied service design, training and coaching.

Touchpoint journal is already in its eleventh year of publication, having first been published in early 2009.

As an attempt to dive into this issue during the event, the Using Service Design in Start-ups. Learning from SMEs article written by Seidelin, Cathrine and Moeslund Sivertsen, Stine was chosen to be distributed to event’s participants. A hands-on exercise based on the article’s con-

tent was prepared for them in order to actively engage with the article’s content and interact with each other; acting as a personal questionnaire, participants discussed within groups the – according to the authors – three challenges on anchoring service design as an approach to innovation: 1) an organisation’s understanding of service design, 2) the placement of service design within the organisational setting, and 3) the notion of what characterises a service design project. The task was prepared and facilitated by Moira Douranou, Editorial and Distribution Manager of the Touchpoint journal.

The event closed with drinks and networking as well as sales of the issue and the promise to arrange the next meeting at LOFT33 for the local SD community.

The event was free of change for the participants. We thank you all for coming!

Jesse Grimes talking about service design

Group discussion on the challenge of

Touchpoint journal: Publications table

for innovation and start-ups

service design implementation

the launch of the latest publication of Touchpoint – The Journal of Service Design, Vol.11 No.1 – Service Design for Innovation and Start-ups, published on July 2019. The event, Service Design Köln – Service Design for Innovation and Startups, was hosted by the Service Design Network Headquarters’ Team, as an initiative to strengthen the service design local community in and around the city of Cologne, Germany.

92 Touchpoint 11-2

r u b ri k

How can I read Touchpoint?

Printed copies Individual printed copies can be purchased via the SDN website.

Benefits for SDN Members SDN members are entitled to a free printed copy of each new issue of Touchpoint (p­ostage cost not included).

In addition, SDN members r­ eceive a 50% discount on back issues (Touchpoint Vol. 1 to Touchpoint Vol. 6).

Online access Full-issue PDFs can be purchased via the SDN website.

Issues from our archive can be read online via the SDN website by becoming a community member for free, and may be read via Issuu website and app.

Selected articles are also published on Medium.

Benefits for SDN Members SDN members have access to full-issue PDFs and articles at no charge, up to and including the most recent issue.

www.service-design-network.org Touchpoint 11-1 93