vol 9 no 2 | november 2017 | 18 €
Measuring Impact and Value
32 The Three Layers of Service Design Impact Craig Cisero, Veronika Ji, Stefania Marcoli,
Chiara Diana 46 Designing for Impact and Value Bernadette Geuy, Rachel Hollowgrass, Titta Jylkäs 70 Design Methods for Strengthening Social Cohesion Aran Baker and Valentina Branada
the journal of service design
Touchpoint Volume 9 No. 2 November 2017 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 Nancy Birkhölzer Stefan Moritz Aviv Katz Erik Roscam Abbing Project Management Cristine Lanzoni Art Direction Jeannette Weber Cover Image Jeannette Weber
Service Design Network gGmbH Mülheimer Freiheit 56 D-51063 Köln Germany www.service-design-network.org Contact & Advertising Sales Cristine Lanzoni 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
Measuring Impact and Value
I’ve been lucky enough to have attended quite a few service design conferences over the years, and heard peers in the community stand on stage and share their advice, techniques, questions and insights. While they all have had value to me, a small handful stand out as offering what I saw as ground-breaking insights at the time. One of these talks took place in 2012, at the SDN’s Global Conference in Paris. Livework’s Ben Reason took to the stage and explained how his agency had started pairing service designers with in-house business analysts. This partnership provided a role which could speak the language of business people, applying number-crunching skills to both justify investments in service design projects before a project started, and measure results and ROI towards the end. Being able to measure the impact of service design activities has always presented a challenge. Services are often complex, comprised of multiple interactions with multiple touchpoints, over widely varying time spans. While the re-design of a touchpoint (let’s say a website focussed on sales) can deliver concrete numbers indicating success (e.g. conversion), things get much more complex at a service level, when multiple touchpoints come into play. In this issue of Touchpoint, we have tackled precisely this challenge: How can service design best measure the impact it achieves? Service design must become more mature in justifying itself to decision-makers, both before and after it is applied. I hope the insights and methods herein help you answer that question, when you next sit down to plan or review a service design project.
Jesse Grimes for the editorial board
1 SDN members 2 SDGC attendees 3 Social media followers 4 Newsletter followers 5 SDN website page views 6 SDN website visitors
Nancy Birkhölzer is IXDS‘ CEO. She enjoys building organisations and teams with a unique spirit and culture. Nancy was recognised as one of the “100 Women of the Future” by Deutschland – Land der Ideen, and chosen as one of the “15 Thought Leaders & Innovators 2015” by WIRED magazine. Stefan Moritz is an entrepreneur, corporate change-maker and customer experience champion. He is Vice President Customer Experience at Veryday, one of the world’s top-ranking design and innovation consultancies. Aviv Katz is Senior Associate at Innovation Unit. He has coached leaders and led teams, working across health, social care, justice and local government.
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The cover of this issue of Touchpoint is more than meets the eye! We’ve put our own organisation under the microscope, and measured the impact of some of our initiatives, over a time period of five years. It’s rewarding to see visually beautiful proof that the impact of the SDN’s activities shows strong growth year-on-year.
Jesse Grimes, Editor-in-Chief for Touchpoint, has nine years experience as a service designer and consultant. He has worked in London, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf and Sydney and is now based in Amsterdam with Dutch agency Informaat. Jesse is also Vice President of the Service Design Network.
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
Erik Roscam Abbing is director Netherlands of Livework, a global service design agency. Erik has consulted and taught globally on topics like design thinking, brand driven innovation and service design. Birgit Mager, publisher of Touchpoint, is professor for service design at Köln International School of Design (KISD) in 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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12 from the editors
6 news 10 kerry’s take 10 From Journey Maps
to Journey Measurement Kerry Bodine
12 cross-discipline 12 Legal Design: Collaborating
with Lawyers to Improve Access to Justice Lieke Beelen, Frederik Westerouen van Meeteren
18 Nudging People to Give
4
Using Behavioural Insights Ine Vassøy, David Wiggins
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20 feature:
Measuring Impact
and Value 22 An Iterative, Experience
and Practice-led Approach to Measuring Impact Cat Drew
26 Humanising Frankenstein
Jo’Anne Langham 32 The Three Layers of
Service Design Impact Craig Cisero, Veronika Ji, Stefania Marcoli, Chiara Diana
n nitio Cog
38 You Can’t Manage What
You Can’t Measure Patrick McGowan, Raven Manocchio
40 Mind the Gap
Shaun Gummere, Guy Felder 42 Cracking the Code to
Workplace Productivity Matthew Swift, Coby Lerner
46 Designing for Impact and
Value Bernadette Geuy, Rachel Hollowgrass, Titta Jylkäs
c ontents
70 82 58 64 Education and Research 66 Measurement Beyond 50 Tools and Methods 52 Measuring Design Value of
a Differentiated Service Platform Dr Kiwoong Nam, Dr Bruce. W. Carnie, Kevin Sunghoon Cho
58 Meeting Service Sandbox
Jane Vita 61 Six Hacks for Service
Designers in Agile Settings Jesse Grimes
Surveys‌ Nahal Tavangar
70 Design Methods for
Strengthening Social Cohesion Aran Baker, Valentina Branada
74 Partnering for Service
Design Education Holger Fricke
78 profiles 78 Anne Stenros
82 inside sdn 82 Congratulations to the
Service Design Award 2017 Finalists
88 Applying Service Design
to the SDN Chapter Foundation Process
90 Service Design Within US:
The First SDN National Conference in the U.S.
91 Reflecting on the First SDN
U.S. National Conference’s Student Competition Touchpoint 9-2
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Secure Your Official SDN Trainer
Finalists Announced!
Accreditation!
We are delighted to share the work by this year’s fourteen Service Design Award 2017 finalists selected by our international jury of service design experts. A warm thank you to the new Head of the Jury, Kerry Bodine, and the international jurors of 2017 who did an amazing job judging over 100 submissions. The shortlisted projects are internationally recognised as benchmarks of world class service design. Congratulations to the nine winning professionals and five winning students for their fantastic work and the contribution they have made to the field of service design! The winners will be announced at the Service Design Global Conference on November 2nd in Madrid, and will present their projects on stage on November 3rd. We are excited to learn the winners and hope you will join in the celebrations with us at SDGC17! We are also looking forward to show casing the winners and finalists in the first ever publication about the Service Design Award, which will be released by Spring 2018. Make sure to read more about the finalist projects on page 82.
Research carried out by the SDN in 2017 showed that an astonishing 90 percent of the respondents expressed a desire for an accreditation programme that provides transparency to available training offerings, and provides a measure of their quality. Based on these results, we have launched the SDN Trainer Accreditation initiative, to help establish a standard and ensure higher quality within a market that’s growing rapidly. SDN Accredited Trainers will enjoy benefits such as an official certificate, a two-year SDN professional membership and the authorisation to
© Hanna Freres
Service Design Award 2017
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award SDN co-branded certificates to training participants. The accreditation and self-assessment of trainers will be visible to potential clients on our global community website, establishing them as highly qualified trainers. We’re calling all service design trainers to become Accredited Trainers.
Apply for accreditation before 31 December 2017 and get a special 25 percent discount off the regular price! www.service-design-network.org/ accreditation
Join our New Corporate Plus Membership!
Want all your employees and colleagues to get the most out of the SDN? Then why not join our flexible Corporate Plus / Academic Plus membership? The new membership enables companies, agencies and academic organisations to have six or more members from anywhere in the world linked to one SDN account. With this membership, your organisation benefits from a fantastic 50 percent discount per person compared to the individual, professional membership. This is perfect if you are seeking flexibility and would like 10, 20, 30 or even more employees to
have access to our great resources. Members are an important part of our international community and attend our events with a special discount. If you are thinking about joining forces with the SDN, don’t hesitate to get in touch for more information or a price quote by contacting: membership@ service-design-network.org
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Congratulations to our Enthusiastic new Chapters: SDN Hungary, SDN Bulgaria, SDN Belgium and SDN Ireland!
This autumn, the SDN has been delighted by the enthusiasm and diverse initiatives organised by the newest international Chapters! We have seen SDN Hungary and SDN Bulgaria play a big role in enabling the service design community to connect and grow in Eastern Europe with their Chapter launch events through August and September. SDN Hungary held a highly successful
Chapter Conferences and Diverse Initiatives
The summer has been a busy time for our already-existing international Chapters! SDN Netherlands has hosted two topical workshops exploring the cutting-edge themes
first event in Budapest with over 80 attendees, in which they reflected on the development of the discipline over the last five years with local pioneers such as Telenor Hungary. SDN Bulgaria hosted a Creative Journey Conference in Sofia, successfully introducing service design methods to an audience of over 200 people. SDN Belgium hosted an energetic kick-off event with over 70 participants in Ghent to co-create a vision for the Belgian Chapter. The Irish Chapter ran a series of service design drinks and themed industry talks to link and develop the service
design communities in Dublin and Cork. We can’t wait to see how these ambitious Chapters move forward! Check out upcoming events by your local Chapter: www.service-designnetwork.org/chapters
of service design in unusual places and in agile settings. SDN Finland has been expanding the horizons of their community with an ‘Event Canvas’ workshop and book club meeting. SDN Denmark has been strengthening their community by hosting regular meet-ups and events
in different cities. We were excited to see SDN Canada as a key partner supporting the launch of ‘Converge’, a second national Canadian service design conference to take place on December 1st. In mid-August, the US service design community came together in Chicago to celebrate the very first US SDN National Conference, under the theme ‘Service Design Within US’. The conference was initiated by SDN Chicago and organised collaboratively with the other US Chapters. The event was a great success with over 200 attendees representing over 80 organisations from across the country. Make sure to read more about the event on page 90.
US SDN National Conference ‘Service Design Within US’
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The First Chapter Awards Launched for SDGC17
The first ever SDN Chapter Award Ceremony will take place during the SDGC17 Members Day Event on November 1st 2017 in Madrid. There are now 29 international Chapters with teams of volunteers working hard to raise awareness and grow the market for service design because they passionately believe it is the key to social and economic success in their area. The Awards commend five Chapters for their great work, commitment and achievements when it comes to Chapter events and initiatives. The ceremony at SDGC17 will highlight the value of our Chapters, celebrate their success and raise awareness amongst members about their work. The winners will have their initiatives showcased as examples of best practice that our community can learn from. We can’t wait to find out who the winners will be! Stay tuned to hear more in the next issue of Touchpoint, at the SDGC17 ceremony and via our global media channels.
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LOOKING FORWARD TO A MILESTONE SDGC17
The Service Design Global Conference 2017 has generated huge interest from people worldwide, with main programme and Members Event tickets sold out since late September. We have been overwhelmed with the response and for this reason we’re determined to deliver a great experience through a highly curated programme, which includes 70 speakers from all over the world and many side events for attendees and the general public. With Madrid’s La N@ve and Central de Diseño as our main venues, SDGC17 is aiming to create a great service design atmosphere to accompany Madrid’s local flavours. We would like to thank our many sponsors for joining us in bringing this 10th anniversary event to life,
as well as the local team and volunteers for making it possible. We invite everyone to stay tuned and to follow all our channels to catch up with the latest #SDGC17 news, and after-conference coverage.
@SDGC2017 and @SDNetwork instagram.com/ servicedesignnetwork facebook.com/ ServiceDesignNetwork service-design-network.org/ sdgc/sdgc17
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Nordic Service Design,
Service Design Impact Report:
the Documentary
Health Sector
The SDN is excited to announce the launch of the Nordic Chapter initiative ‘Nordic Service Design, The Documentary’. SDN Sweden, SDN Norway, SDN Denmark and SDN Finland collaborated with the Swedish producer LuckyDay to make a documentary which connects, celebrates and promotes Nordic service design. The project involved interviews in all four countries with service design practitioners and leaders to explore what is unique, forward-thinking and relevant about Nordic service design. The documentary also aims to raise awareness about the power of service design whilst showcasing best practice examples on a national and global level. The launch is taking place in the form of a roadshow during the autumn and winter period of 2017. If you are based in the Nordics don’t miss out on this great opportunity to celebrate Nordic service design!
The Service Design Network is proud to announce the publication of the third Impact Report, focusing this edition on the value service design is delivering in the health sector. The worldwide challenges in the health sector today are enormous. Population ageing and the impact of chronic diseases are creating new demands on the quantity and types of care being delivered, while at the same time budgets are under threat and legislative changes to insurance coverage add further complexity. Furthermore, ethical issues related to scientific and technological advancements must be tackled. In short, the health sector is in need of radical innovation. Service design – with its promise of a humancentred and innovative approach to tackling these challenges with fresh thinking – is helping to re-invent and co-create a better future, delivering value for both healthcare recipients and healthcare providers. It’s design, influencing how technology is applied, as a means to make life better for people!
Advertise in Touchpoint
Take a look at the trailer and stay tuned to find out more: youtu.be/4KqrGQlrzaE
Promote your company or institution throughout the world of services, rising interest of future clients, customers and employees! We set up interesting advertising options for
This publication is valuable for a broad readership. It is a source of insight and inspiration for both those operating in the health sector, as well as the policy-makers and politicians that surround it. Service design practitioners can get up-tospeed with the state of the art in how their discipline is being applied to healthcare challenges, and academics and students will benefit from the best practices contained herein. Download or order your printed copy from November 15th at www.service-design-network.org/ books-and-reports and follow the community on facebook.com/ sdnhealthsector
you, and SDN members enjoy special discounts. To see your ad in the next Touchpoint, contact us at journal@ service-design-network.org.
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From Journey Maps to Journey Measurement
Journeys are central to the discipline of service design.
months and involved an average of nine phone calls, a home visit from a technician, and numerous web and mail interactions.” Customer satisfaction scores for individual channels each consistently scored over 90 percent. But satisfaction for the entire end-to-end journey was nearly 40 percent lower. Ouch.
In fact, my definition of service design is: the envisioning
Journeys are better predictors of
of people’s journeys and the organisations required to support them. But in the years since early service designers pioneered this field, journeys have been adopted by other disciplines, as well — most notably, by the field of customer experience. Unfortunately, many organisations that are new to service design or customer experience get caught up in artefacts like journey maps and service blueprints, acting like these deliverables are the end goal themselves. I’ve gone on the record multiple times on this topic, and I’ll say it again here: It’s not about the maps. Rather, we need to use journeys as a framework for managing services and experiences — and changing our organisations to better support them. Now, customer experience practitioners are taking on that challenge and driving a shift in the ways that organisations use journeys. Enter journey analytics: the measurement and analysis of key customer journeys — not just individual touchpoints. It may seem like common sense to measure how well your organisation 10 Touchpoint 9-2
supports people as they try to achieve their goals. But the data to support this notion took a long time to surface, as many prime examples stayed hidden and well-guarded behind corporate walls. Fortunately, McKinsey & Company’s anonymised (but published!) data will help you make the case for pivoting your organisation’s measurement strategy.1 Here is my summary (with my major takeaways as the headings): The journey doesn’t equal the sum of its parts
A media company looked at the new customer onboarding experience, “a journey that spanned about three
1 www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/ marketing-and-sales/our-insights/fromtouchpoints-to-journeys-seeing-the-worldas-customers-do
likelihood to recommend
McKinsey’s models of customer satisfaction and willingness to recommend both have R-squared values for journeys that hover around 50 percent for the electric utility, health insurance, cable/satellite TV and hotel industries.2 I’d love it if these values were higher, but it’s reasonable to assume that there are other factors that account for about half of customers’ satisfaction scores and referral behaviour. What’s notable is that depending on the industry, the R-squared scores for journeys range from 56 – 117 percent higher than those for
2 Ok, I’m gonna have to get a little nerdy on you here, so hang with me. In statistics land, R-squared values always fall between 0 and 100 percent. An R-squared value of 0 percent means that the model in question — for us, the hypothesis that touchpoints or journeys account for satisfaction or willingness to recommend — explains NONE of the variability in the data. (Think of a bunch of random dots on a graph that you can’t draw a single line through.) A value of 100 percent means that the model in question explains ALL of the variability in the data. (Here, you’d have all the data points aligned perfectly through your line. When does that ever happen?)
k e rr y ' s ta k e
touchpoints alone. Ergo, journeys are better predictors of the outcomes you care about. Journeys present more opportunity for differentiation
In one (unnamed) industry, McKinsey compared satisfaction with both touchpoints and journeys across companies. The gap between the companies with the best and worst journey performance was 50 percent wider than between those with the best and worst touchpoint performance. And a wider gap equals more potential for you to differentiate from your competitors. Where to start Journey analytics will be the way your organisation measures the value of service design and customer experience in the future. Here’s how you can get started: 1. Prioritise your most important journeys.
Not all journeys are created equal, so you need to identify those that matter most to your customers and to your organisation. When McKinsey looked at the pay TV and auto insurance industries, it found that average satisfaction with each company’s three key journeys correlated with faster revenue growth. To be specific: “a one-point improvement on a tenpoint [satisfaction] scale corresponds to at least a three-percentage-point increase in the revenue-growth rate.” Wow!
2. Create metrics around journeys and journey phases.
It’s no longer enough to measure the efficacy of your web site, your store, an at-home visit, or any other individual interaction. The people using your service don’t think of what they’re trying to achieve in these channel- or department-based ways, and it’s time for us to adapt to cross-silo metrics that reflect people’s real goals. This, of course, doesn’t mean that you should stop measuring individual touchpoints — but instead, look at those touchpoints within the context of a greater end-to-end journey.
If you’re not a data hacker yourself, that’s ok. Just make sure your team hires someone who loves getting hands-on with data.
3. Invest in a journey-focused analytics platform.
The ‘Voice of the Customer’ vendor landscape is quickly shifting to offer dashboards and measurement frameworks that center on journeys. Look for a platform that can aggregate data from multiple sources like social media, call centers, digital properties, and surveys — and then provide journey-centric views of sentiment, behavioural, operational and financial data. Kerry’s Take If you sensed a theme throughout this article, I hope it’s this: data. Your ability to understand and frame both qualitative and quantitative data within the context of the customer journey will be the make-or-break factor for the success of your current and future service design efforts.
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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Legal Design: Collaborating with Lawyers to Improve Access to Justice Bringing human-centred innovation to the legal sector
Lieke Beelen is service designer and founder of Visual Contracts. In 2015 she won the Hague Innovators prize, together with lawyer Janneke Boerman. Since then she worked on legal design and legal innovation.
“The law is meant to create order in society and exists to prevent and solve conflicts in a just way.” This is what Dutch law students are taught in their first year of law school.1 However, if we look at how law is applied, one could question if this is really happening effectively. After all, it seems as if we are maintaining the status quo. One of the main reasons for this is the language in which the law is written. Legal language is difficult for everyday people to
Frederik Westerouen van Meeteren is the founder of Anything Connected, which focuses on the Internet of Things. He is part of the Visual Contracts community and is developing new applications based on user data, without acting unlawfully or making customers feel uncomfortable.
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comprehend, and it is currently not effective at supporting the practice of law itself. We can start with an example: A privacy statement should inform people about how companies deal with the data they collect from their customers. But how many people actually read those documents? Most people just fill in a form and click ‘I agree’. Moreover, those that do read those documents often discover that they
were written by and for lawyers, instead of for themselves. This is the challenge I took on in 2015, after winning The Hague Innovators Prize, together with lawyer Janneke
1 Inleiding in het Nederlands Recht – Mr. J.W.P. Verheugt, Uitgeverij de Zuidas, Amsterdam, 2015w
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Boerman. The project would lead me on into the field of legal design. In our project, we used Facebook’s privacy statement in order to explore how we could make the abstract topic of privacy more tangible, therefore encouraging consumers to read privacy statements (and, ideally, to actively take steps to safeguard their privacy). Applying a context mapping approach, we mapped the needs and perception people have about privacy with regards to their Facebook usage.2 From these insights we defined a design vision in which we tried to trigger people to learn more about privacy-related issues on Facebook, and in turn to lead them through the whole privacy statement. From a legal perspective, a company must inform its customers about how it deals with customer data before those customers begin to use the service itself. This is called ‘informed consent’, and it is currently receiving a lot of attention. In our project, we sought to learn which situations triggered the greatest interest in privacy and translated them into posts that we could share on Facebook. For example, one of our posts explained what happens with your data when you post a picture on Facebook, and what data Facebook learns about you.
Because this project was limited by the funds we were awarded, we only were able to test the first prototypes in order to explore how text and visuals can be combined in legal documents and how design can support greater awareness of privacy issues. We weren’t able to determine long-term behavioural effects, or how it could further be integrated into the service. These would be logical next steps to explore. On this topic, a recent PhD thesis by Stefania Passera has demonstrated that visual structures improve efficiency and comprehension when reading contracts.3 Based on my experience with the Facebook privacy design project, I founded Visual Contracts, in which I am further exploring how legal design methods can improve access to justice. In the process of starting up I also came across challenges in selling ethical (service) design, such as creating transparent privacy statements and convincing companies to make people more aware about their privacy. As designers we can and should motivate our client businesses to make ethical choices, just as sustainable business practices have become widely valued. Similarly, human rights should be addressed and integrated into the philosophy of doing business. While social enterprises are addressing this right now, big corporate firms must also follow suit if we want to reach the levels of equality stated in several of the UN’s sustainable development goals by 2030.4 A lack of human-centred legal innovation Current innovations in the legal sector are aimed at making the law more efficient or less costly, mostly from a technical perspective. In addition, legal tech innovation is seeing the development of tools that apply artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. While these are important developments to make the law accessible and
An example post for Facebook was used to trigger people to think about their privacy.
2 https://visualcontracts.eu/images/privacy-op-het-internet.pdf
3 Beyond the wall of contract text - Visualizing contracts to foster understanding and collaboration within and across organizations, Stefania Passera, Aalto University publication series DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS, 134/2017 4 UN Sustainable Development Goals: http://globalgoals.org
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1. What does Facebook know about you when you upload a picture?
2. What do they do with that data?
3. With whom do they share your data?
4. Facebook knows much more! Explore now in the full visual privacy statement.
Triggering people to explore the full visual privacy statement5
affordable for everyone, they don't really improve access to law, or at least don’t put the law into user’s context. Legal topics and issues are more often considered as a ‘necessary evil’, rather than something that can empower citizens in practicing their rights. This represents an opportunity for service designers and design thinkers to contribute to the legal industry with their knowledge and skills, starting with using empathy to solve these legal access challenges. This represents an opportunity - if not a need - for service designers to contribute to legal innovation by helping lawyers to create more empathy with laymen. While some law firms already have 'legal service designers', they may not have the design research skills (amongst others) as those in the service design community. 14 Touchpoint 9-2
There is a significant opportunity to equip those in the legal field with the tools and skills applied by service designers. To create a profound understanding we need more service designers working in this rising field of innovation. What is ‘Legal Design Thinking’? At Visual Contracts, we see ‘Legal Design Thinking’ as a crossover area of legal thinking, Design Thinking and service design, visual thinking and user experience (UX) design. So we look at legal design from several different angles. Because legal topics are often abstract and difficult to relate to, we create accessible and engaging legal documents as a tangible entry point to understanding the principles, restrictions and relations of
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Two screenshots of the full visual privacy statement5
elements within these documents. Doing so helps bridge the gap between the legal world and laypeople. Legal documents could and should be a means to create sustainable customer relationships. We use visual thinking combined with design research to simplify and visualise legal documents, to brainstorm and create (shared) mental models, and explain complex stories in an engaging way. We also believe that lawyers can apply visual thinking to communicate with their clients. More holistically, we look at the whole service experience a company offers, starting with an inside-out perspective to understand and empathise with the legal profession, in order to understand what legal content they want and need to convey. Moreover, in our vision, Design Thinking has great potential impact within the practice of law, because it
focuses on improving the quality of people’s lives. While the law tries to drive societal behaviour by determining the ‘guidelines for good behaviour’ and ‘punishment of misbehaviour’, Design Thinking uses empathy and design research techniques to relate to people’s perceptions in individual situations. For this reason there is also a big overlap in what legal systems aim to accomplish, and the purpose of Design Thinking does, particularly focussed on ethical outcomes. Finally, as an innovation in the legal world itself, we use UX design to build the bridge
5 Clickable prototypes Facebook Visual Privacy Statement (in Dutch): ‘What happens with your data when you upload a picture’ https:// share.proto.io/MWDKRO/ and full visual privacy statement https:// share.proto.io/FBR87S/
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Visual Thinking
Design Thinking
Figuring out the relations within a complex story and visualising them
Understanding human needs to design solutions that enhance quality of life
Legal Design Thinking Source: www.visualcontracts.eu
Understanding the context of use of law and needs of people interacting with law
Understanding the basic principles and restrictions (of relations of elements) within legal documents
Creating order in society and preventing and solving conflicts
Create engaging online user experiences
UX Design
Legal Thinking
A framework for legal design thinking
between current innovations and the still largely paperbased practice of law, by creating engaging online user experiences and meaningful solutions for websites and applications. These techniques combined result in what we call ‘Legal Design Thinking’ - understanding the context and needs of people interacting with law and being able to apply improvements based on these insights to make justice accessible for everyone. Entry points for service designers Significant opportunities exist for service designers to co-create with lawyers. In our work, we have identified some general guidelines to keep in mind when working on a design project with lawyers: 16 Touchpoint 9-2
Lawyers are trained in systems thinking - They are — good in solving mazes and identifying obstacles. — Lawyers are trained in ‘getting it right’ - They focus on the risks certain details could imply. This typically makes it harder to brainstorm together, because they will evaluate every idea for potential risks. L awyers tend to think more in ownership of ideas — This relates to protecting intellectual property and their competitive advantage. This last point especially can introduce some challenges. One of the first rules of brainstorming is to build upon each other’s ideas. Going further, thinking out of the box, and then developing an idea into a more realistic concept is something designers are trained in. However, a lawyer will need to open their mind to this way of thinking.
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In addition, prototyping with lawyers introduces some challenges. Lawyers are accustomed to evaluating documents based on their final version. So when a designer draws sketches of a concept or builds a model, the lawyer tends to perceive and evaluate it as an end result. Because they are trained to focus on the details, they are more resistant to reaching out to clients to test a certain concept or prototype.
The law tries to drive societal behaviour by determining the ‘guidelines for good behaviour’ and ‘punishment of misbehaviour’.
How to overcome challenges in collaboration? There are methods to overcoming the challenges mentioned above. Here are four techniques to get you started: 1. Align your communication and use visual thinking to identify different viewpoints. Make it concrete, especially because details catch a legal expert’s attention.
2. Use your empathy skills to step into the shoes of the lawyer and not just the lawyer’s client. Help them to show different perspectives out of legal boundaries. 3. Use ‘right’ and ‘left’ thinking games to warm up and break the ice with anyone and act as energisers. 4. When structuring a legal document, a mind-map will help provide a helicopter perspective, and represents a familiar tool (most lawyers are familiar with flowcharts and mind-maps). Sections of the document can be written, keeping it short and structured. The challenge is then to first identify what sections are related, when you look from a client’s or layman’s perspective. This can be a huge advantage because most lawyers tend to brainstorm by writing rather than in a visual manner. These are just the first findings in collaborating from a legal design thinking perspective. There is much more to explore and improve. With this first introduction I hope to inspire service designers to collaborate with lawyers and create access to justice and empower people to practice their rights. If you would like to keep updated on the developments in legal design,join the SDN Legal Design group on LinkedIn.
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Nudging People to Give Using Behavioural Insights Donating to charity is often seen as a simple act of generosity done by those who can afford it, but in fact, the amount we donate is not directly correlated with our ability to give, or even to our benevolence. A number of factors play into the web of reasons we may or may not choose to donate in any given situation. Ine Vassøy is a Lead Service Designer at Spotless, a London-based service design agency founded in 2004 that transforms businesses through innovation.
David Wiggins is a Product Manager at BT, with over 25 years’ experience in customer service environments. BT is a leading provider of global communications services and solutions, whose purpose is to use the power of communications to make a better world. More info at www.btplc.com Spotless team: Ine Vassøy, Kayleigh Thompson, André van Heerden, Andy Walker, Richie Kennedy and John Anthony.
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In the UK, giving to charity is a popular and respected gesture, and many online platforms have recently emerged to facilitate that generosity. When BT found that its commission-free online fundraising service, MyDonate, was being passed over in favour of paid platforms, they wanted to know how they could improve their service. Why were people opting to pay more? What factors were dissuading donors, and how could MyDonate adapt to encourage more donations?
To answer these questions, we took a cross-disciplinary approach, pulling in principles and tools from behavioural economics to help guide our service design. The well known principle of ‘anchoring’, for example, helped us determine an effective starting amount to display on the fundraising pages, nudging users to give just a little extra. We studied how these kinds of nudges could be used to increase donations, attract more users, improve retention and reduce customer support needed.
s p o n s o re d c o n t e n t
MyDonate ecosystem
Exploratory research with donors, fundraisers and charity employees led us to five design principles that guided us through our process:
We learned that people who saw a photo of their chosen fundraiser while deciding on the amount of contribution, for example, were more likely to follow through with the process, and actually ended up donating more. When we tested a feature that encouraged donors to write personal messages to recipients, people said they felt a stronger bond to the fundraiser. We also introduced other features such as the timeline, to strengthen the community of donors, fundraisers and charities. But while many people value this personal bond with the recipient, that does not necessarily mean they want to broadcast their generosity to their entire social network. Most donors tend to donate without being signed in which led to their donation being initially marked as anonymous. This was frustrating for the fundraisers because they wanted to know who was donating to their cause. By adding a privacy adjustment option in the donation flow that allowed donors to show their identity to only the fundraiser, we were able to facilitate deeper investment in the community on both sides, without pushing away those who wished to stay anonymous.
1. Give clear direction through simplicity 2. Be human and use social cues to guide behaviour 3. Create loyalty through community 4. Appeal to self-image and personalisation 5. Engage at the right time and place Our key goals were to increase the number and value of donations through the website. After observing customers and listening to support centre calls, we believed many frustrations could be resolved by simplifying the user interface. We stripped away irrelevant content and created a more personalised experience for the users that were logged in. We also created an ‘invisible’ sign up process to encourage users to log in. Our hypothesis was that these changes would minimise users’ impatience and frustration, which would improve customer retention and free up resources by reducing the number of calls to the support centre. When we tested this hypothesis, the effect of the new designs was clearly positive. These simple changes had great effect on user retention, as people were no longer opting out of the experience due to confusion. When it came to donation quantity and value, however, these simple changes did not have the big effect we had hoped for. The real focus needed to be on timing, community and reputation.
Design concepts for a donor’s donation journey
In this project, we gained deep empathy with users by applying behavioural economics techniques. Our designs are under development to be implemented, after which we plan to measure the longer term effects of our design decisions. By understanding the seemingly irrational rationales behind people’s actions, we were able to give MyDonate the confidence to make radical changes to the donation platform. To learn more about our methods visit www.spotless.co.uk/spotmethods. Touchpoint 9-2 19
f e at u re
f e at u re
Title
Measuring Impact and Value
An Iterative, Experience and Practice-led Approach to Measuring Impact Measuring the impact of service design in a world of public sector management metrics has always been tricky. Social outcomes take a long time to be realised. Proxy ‘output’ measures often tell us what is happening rather than why it is happening, and can drive perverse behaviours. Problems that service design addresses sit Cat Drew is Delivery Director at UK-based Uscreates. Previously, Cat has been Head of Projects at the UK Government's Policy Lab, and worked in other policy roles in No.10, Cabinet Office, GDS and the Home Office. Cat has written and spoken widely on the role of data and design, including at TedX Westminster.
within complex systems, and it is often difficult to isolate a specific intervention from changing elements or innovations surrounding it. There is a growing recognition that services are never fully (re)designed and need constant evaluation to evolve and improve. Impact measurement needs to reflect this. Rather than something measured at the end of the project, it needs to be iterative and become part of continuous service development. And rather than relying on purely quantitative data, it needs to become more experience and practice-led, with frontline staff and service users empowered and supported to use it to make continuous improvements in the service they deliver, or their own behaviours.
In 2017, at the Measured Summit in New York, experts and students came together to discuss how to measure the impact of design. At the follow-up event in London, six months later, we were still discussing the basics: why are we measuring impact, and for whom? Traditionally, in the nondesign world (of our clients), impact has been measured through evaluation, to prove something has worked (or to argue 22 Touchpoint 9-2
it will). As designers, we also measure impact formatively, to reflect on and improve the service we are designing, as well as the process for designing it. Table 1 shows that by expanding the groups of people that use these two approaches can lead us to different forms and functions of impact measurement.
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Why do we measure impact, and for whom? Evaluative/summative: to prove something works
For the public, to understand if/how their money has been spent effectively. For commissioners, to understand what initiatives to further invest in; to make the case for funding initiatives; and to be accountable to the public for spending their money in an effective manner. For designers, to make the case for further design work, and/or make the case for the value of design.
Formative: to learn and iteratively improve something
For users, to self-reflect on what their data is telling them about themselves, and to make a change. For staff, to learn and reflect on what is working, and improve processes and ways of working (getting positive and negative feedback). For designers (again), to reflect and learn about how well the design process is working, improve it and create best and next practice.
The challenges around evaluating design are well documented. — Social outcomes often take a long time to appear, particularly where the approach is preventative. For example, you might only see the impact of increasing financial self-management on homelessness figures five or ten years later. — As a result of the previous challenge, organisations have created output or proxy metrics to measure more immediate impact, which can be useful. For example, primary school assessments of childhood obesity give a more current indicator of early intervention initiatives that will reduce Type II diabetes in the longer term. However, these tend to be either an existing interaction measure (e.g. GP visits or waiting times) or an easily-quantifiable measurement (e.g. an annual weight measurement). They capture what is happening, rather than why and how people feel. This is where much of the value of service design is
delivered. Metrics are quite often driven by what the organisation deems is important rather, rather than what users value (e.g. train passenger surveys about punctuality and price, rather than anxiety or stress experienced during the journey). And these practices can also lead to perverse service behaviours. In the UK, the police’s ‘Offences Brought to Justice’ target drove the police to target young people (so-called ‘low hanging fruit’) rather than more dangerous criminals, in order to drive up their impact measurements. Social challenges are part of bigger systems; specific — interventions do not take place in isolation. For example, a service-level intervention to prevent homelessness will be affected by rent price increases or changes to the benefit or welfare system. Place-based approaches to health will be affected by the particular physical (buildings, transport, environmental) and human (communities, services, politics) elements in that place. Some new types of innovation are Touchpoint 9-2 23
actively encouraging this complexity. ‘Combinatorial innovation’, as it is being trialled in the UK through the NHS test-bed programme, deliberately tests a number of technological innovations at the same time, or alongside other new approaches, which means setting a control is impossible. Traditional evaluation frameworks are scientifically grounded with control groups and a small number of quantitative variables. But these function less well in the messier world of social challenges, where it is difficult to dissect the effect of a specific change from other parts of the system that are swirling around it.
In a constantly evolving world, a service re-design is never complete and impact measurement is part of delivering a constantly-improving service.
This calls into question not only the usefulness but indeed validity of traditional, evaluative, end-of-test impact measurement alone. As a civil servant, I have been guilty of writing “we are going to pilot [...] with a view to rolling it out nationally” in various strategies. It means that pilot programmes are set up to succeed rather than to be allowed to fail, even if the experiment proves not to work. There are examples of expensive trials that were set on a course to succeed by their political masters, despite evidence to the contrary.1 Instead, I would argue for an iterative, experience and practice-led approach. — By iterative, I mean plotting a series of proxy measures that give a sense of how you are moving towards outcomes (and using this data to pivot throughout). Theories of change are useful in helping to think through how an action results in an outcome. By mapping the causal links and assumptions, one can
1 Nina Holm Vohnsen (2011) Absurdity and the sensible decision
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also identify a wide variety of metrics and indicators that can track interim progress. Colleagues from the agency Nile and the Royal Bank of Scotland, presenting their redesign of the Scottish £5 note at the SDN conference in London in 2016, explained how they measured the ripple effects of design throughout the process as well as the large splash at the end. These can take many forms: output data, surveys, responses to cultural probes, feedback and customer insight. Digital data provides a world of new possibilities, allowing people to track activity and behaviour as it happens, follow how people are using digital services, (e.g. trend research and social media listening), as well as real-time forums for posing questions and surveys. For example, Uscreates developed a ‘Children’s Centre in a Box’ for the UK’s Children’s Society, by messaging parents each week to measure how they were using the activities provided within the Box, and using this to measure which ones were most valuable, and which ones needed improvement. — What is interesting about this data is that it is much more qualitative, behavioural and experiential than traditional proxy measures. By experience and practice-led, I mean both valuing qualitative feedback and insight from users, as well as the tacit knowledge and opinions of frontline staff on whether an idea is working or not. There is a debate on the value of ‘intuition’ in professional decision making. It is clearly resisted in the scientific world of reason. However, where it is based on cognitive experience and is combined with other metrics, it provides another valuable, sense-making measure. Supporting frontline staff to have a more central role — in assessing whether something is working or not offers wider value for how services and policy are continuously improved. Getting user feedback is fairly standard for service designers. But if we are to promote the use of practice-led judgments of value, we also need to support frontline staff to widen the cognitive sources on which they are basing their assessments, including listening to users. We also need to help people make sense of unstructured qualitative data.
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In short term this can be done by supporting them to code/assess it, and in the longer term by using AI to quantify sentiment from video and text responses, freeing up staff to create ideas for improvements. Therefore iterative, experience and practice-led measurement belies a different type of culture and mindset around how we continually develop and improve services. Our work with organisations wishing to move to a more preventative and early intervention approach has highlighted a need to move from a culture where frontline staff are gatekeepers of a service at the time of crisis - following process and activity/time targets - to one where frontline staff are problem-solvers, doing what they feel is best to achieve the right outcome for the person. In the latter world, frontline staff have control over their service, using impact data and their own trusted feedback to see how it is working and being empowered to change and improve it. In a constantly evolving world, a service re-design is never complete and impact measurement is part of delivering a constantlyimproving service. But it is not that easy to roll back decades of public sector management and create a mindset that the RSA calls ‘think like a system, act like an entrepreneur’.2 Leaders need to promote a reflective and learning culture so frontline staff can actively look for feedback from users, be trusted to give it themselves, and make improvements to the service they deliver. Service design, through its involvement of staff in the design process, and the artefacts it creates (e.g. a problem solving conversation guide rather than tick-box forms) is a powerful vehicle for the culture change. And what of users? They are also included in the audience in Table 1. As well as developing and improving services, iterative impact measurement can be part of their delivery. A preventative approach also requires greater self-awareness and resilience-building within users. Impact measurement should not be seen as a one-way stream, with organisations sucking up data
and making decisions. Rather, gathering feedback and data and relaying it back to users (on its own, as a selfquantified visualisation or with additional tailored advice) can be part of the service offer itself. The act of recording data about your health can prompt you to adapt healthier living behaviours. Research and implementation are intertwined through apps like ‘mappify’ that pulse checks people’s health, or ‘Colour in City’ which used digital technology to collect people’s experiences of their city, prompting behaviour change. The idea that a service is static - is designed, evaluated and stays the same - looks increasingly out of date. Services, both their digital and face-to-face components, need to change and evolve with the systems that surround them. As well as designing the service, designers need to upskill frontline staff to lead this iterative change. Perhaps more importantly than summative evaluation (proving that something works) is formative evaluation (learning what works and improving what doesn’t). In traditional frameworks, evaluation comes at the end of the process. Instead, we need to see impact measurement as part of the delivery of the service itself, with frontline staff and users looking at the variety of iterative measures, reflecting on how well things are working, and shifting their behaviour and making changes if they are not.
2 Burbridge, I (2017) The System Entrepreneur
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Humanising Frankenstein Measuring and improving citizen experiences
Insufficient attention has been paid to developing a systematic method for evaluating the effectiveness of the experiences created by public sector service design. Citizen experiences are at times monstrous: rambling, fragmented and frightening. This paper describes research used to assess the experience of Jo’Anne Langham has 22 years of experience in service design and in leading user-centred design teams. During her work in industry she established research and design teams and lead large scale public sector design projects. Jo’Anne was awarded the prestigious ATO Commissioner’s Scholarship in 2010.
starting a small business in Australia as a pilot study for a larger research program for evaluating effectiveness. This research study applies the theoretical model for Experience Effectiveness (XE), a framework with metrics to compare, evaluate and improve government-citizen services. Our aim is to tame the Frankenstein of service design: public sector services. What is a successful citizen experience? A good citizen experience relates to the successful completion of tasks to meet an obligation or receive a benefit from the government. Such experiences encompass a wide variety of government services at all levels. Examples include: completing a tax return, receiving welfare benefits, attending public education, receiving healthcare, paying taxes or obtaining a licence. If a citizen fails to comply, there are consequences, such as fines or penalties which must be paid regardless of whether the non-compliance was accidental or deliberate. Therefore, the achievement of compliance is a primary goal for successful citizen experiences.
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An experience must facilitate compliance and protect the citizen from accidental or unforced errors. Government authorities are also increasingly aware of the value of welldesigned services for citizens, such as the prefilling of tax return data, digital visas and streamlining health insurance claims at point of sale. In these cases, a great deal of supporting activity occurs behind the scenes with little or no intervention from citizens. However, many services cannot be fully automated and require citizens to control or manage their obligations. Assessing these self-directed experiences is exceptionally difficult. Services are assigned by the government to be administered by multiple departments.
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Overarching programmes are then deconstructed into competing priorities and delegated to areas with different responsibilities. Products, services and processes are designed as self-contained components, often within different quality frameworks and with an inconsistent understanding of the original intent. Subsequently, these ‘parts’ are evaluated separately, which individually may be satisfactory, but together are incomprehensible. For example, a simple task such as reporting income for a welfare benefit can easily become complicated if the associated website uses different terminology or instructions than can be found on the related forms. The communication is further jeopardised when the call centre instructs callers to do something which contradicts the instructions on both the forms and the website. Such seemingly straightforward designs can quickly become problematic. The lack of design integration and the use of different terms stems from distributed accountability as well as insufficient evaluation of effectiveness. Many government departments have attempted to address issues of performance evaluation through the application of services measures such as satisfaction or loyalty utilising SERVQUAL1 or the Net Promoter Score2 . However, satisfaction scales are insufficient to evaluate experiences delivered by the public sector as a citizen may perceive a good or positive experience yet still fail to meet their obligations. The citizen satisfaction or perception of the service is then immaterial. Public sector experiences must also be designed to withstand fraud and deliberate non-compliance or evasion. Additional security and compliance checks are necessary to ensure the integrity of the system, but may hinder the ease or usability of the experience. ‘Loyalty’ is also irrelevant in these circumstances because the public sector maintains a monopoly on the supply, leaving citizens little choice but to persist in their compliance efforts regardless of the personal cost. Satisfaction scales are also deemed inadequate as they are applied inconsistently at different service or product levels with different levels of rigour due to multiple
1 Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V., & Berry, L. (1988). Servqual: A multipleitem scale for measuring consumer perceptions of quality. Journal of Retailing, 64(1), 12. 2 Markey, R., Reichheld, F., & Dullweber, A. (2009). Closing the customer feedback loop. Harvard Business Review, 87(12), 43-+.
stakeholder interests. The consequence is that there is a focus on the quality of components at the expense of a holistic evaluation of the experience. Furthermore, macro- or organisational-level performance measures, such as productivity or revenue collection, provide insufficient detail to identify underperforming components of the experience and may actually counteract customer service as they drive efficiency rather than effectiveness. Our approach to evaluating the effectiveness of citizen experience encompasses indicators that demonstrate compliance facilitation, experience integration, effort reduction, accessibility and error prevention. The design must also ensure that all citizens have a fair and accessible method for fulfilling their obligations, regardless of intellect, experience, resources or capabilities. The XE Model The XE Model is a synthesis of the measures and principles from a number of relevant domains including: new public management and new governance, service design and management, universal design, information technology, human factors and ergonomics, usability, and user-centred design and human reliability assessment. From an extensive review of the literature and subsequent categorisation process, three classes emerged as dimensions of XE: ‘Product’, ‘Process’ and ‘Service’. The three dimensions account for the citizen’s personal interaction with (governmental or quasi-governmental) service providers, the complexity and integration of the process and the usability and accessibility of the tools or products that are used during the experience.
Experience Effectiveness System, product or tool descriptive criteria
Product
Citizen experience Task performance criteria
Process
Service
Human descriptive criteria
Figure 1- Experience Effectiveness (XE) model
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Product
Process
Service
Cognition
Flexibility
Perception
Error management
Responisiveness (two-way)
Ergonomics
Efficiency
Competence
Aesthetics
Stability and predictability
Courtesy
Accessibility
Security
Credibility
4 small business operators
Usefulness
Complexity/simplicity
Equity
Awareness
Completeness/seamlessness
Co-Production
8 experienced business operators (>3 years)
Context
Interactive expectations
inspector General of Taxation (senior representative)
Emotion
4 tax agents for small business operators
Temporal considerations
Contextual inquiries and observations
Interviews 12 tax officers specialising in small business 5 tax administrative designers
Table 1 - Components of the dimensions of XE
Table 2 - Samples used for the study
Any combination of the dimensions may exist for an experience. The ‘citizen experience’ occurs at the juncture of two or more of these dimensions (Figure 1). Additionally, the evaluation approach utilises the experiences and perceptions of all of the actors involved, including an expert reviewer. The multi-viewpoint evaluation provides an opportunity to view the experience from different lenses and detect flaws that may be invisible from a single client perspective. This simultaneous and multi-viewpoint method also enables a cross-validation of the data through triangulation. Within each of the dimensions of XE there are further factors (Table 1). These factors are used to assess each part of the experience. For example, the evaluation of lodging a tax return may include assessing each of the contributing activities, such as keeping records, calculating expenses and income and completing the lodgement. Each activity is then evaluated according to the product, process and service dimensions. Therefore, evaluation occurs at the ‘experience’ and the ‘activity’ levels.
For the case study, we used the experience of an individual beginning to trade as a small business. This experience was chosen due to the complexity of the service ecology, its heterogeneity and criticality of the sample population in the Australian taxation context, as well as the potentially high risk of administrative failure. The expert review of the scale was designed as an online survey. Design specialists were invited to categorise and assess each of the 66 scale items. Forty-six designers in Australia responded to the evaluation. The result of this evaluation was used to refine and update the XE measurement scale. The pilot study followed a sequential exploratory strategy. Ethnographic techniques were used to gather contextual information with 12 small business owners and staff. Material from existing data sources such as reports on complaints data3 was used to understand the citizen’s perspective. Design specialists, subject matter experts and tax professionals were interviewed to gain insights from different actor’s perspectives on the constraints as well as determining a definition of successful compliance. The sample is shown in Table 2. A pilot measurement tool utilising a draft evaluation scale was also provided to all participants (and the researcher acting as an observer) to complete at the end of each session.
Evaluating the AE model – case study pilot and expert review To validate the dimensions in the model and ensure that the complexity of XE is fully described, we designed a qualitative study using a test case scenario as well as a draft measurement scale for a prototype of an evaluation tool. Concurrently, an expert review of the scale was conducted to assess the content validity. 28 Touchpoint 9-2
3 Inspector General of Taxation. (2016). 2015-16 annual report. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.
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Analysis Analysis was conducted in several iterative stages. Firstly, data was coded thematically. Each participant’s experience was translated into process maps and subsequently synthesised into a holistic client experience map. Emotions, questions, attitudes, errors and fail points were also identified and documented as part of the experience. Participants evaluated components of the experience (or sub-experience) using the XE measurement tool (Table 1). Based on these scores, each variable was given a rating out of 10 (1 = low or poor, 10 = high or strong) across each of the XE dimensions of product, process and service. The scores from each dimension were converted to a score out of 10. The total score out of 30 was then calculated for the experience. Finally, the results from the participants utilising the pilot measurement tool were compared with the coded qualitative results and the observations.
for establishing a business were complicated and confusing. In some cases, the obligations required considerable effort to complete. All business owners, including those who considered themselves knowledgeable and experienced, struggled through the start-up process. Setting up good recordkeeping practices was difficult for most businesses. Many participants expressed frustration at the apparent lack of logic in the process and high degree of specification required by government for tasks with little consequence for safety, risk or good business management. Government departments asked for the same information repeatedly, demonstrating little reuse or cross-agency sharing. The areas rated lowest in the experience were ‘set-up registrations’ and ‘set-up business fundamentals’. The identification of these areas provides clear guidance for the responsible service providers to improve the start-up experience.
Results: starting a small business in Australia Overall rating 15/30 Process: 12/30 Product: 13/30 Service: 19/30
Results: The use of the XE measurement framework Evaluation of the effectiveness of the client experience was markedly improved by the use of the XE framework. Data gathered from the different perspectives of user, subject matter expert and observer provided a clear understanding of the relative importance of different aspects of the experience to the various actors. Evaluating each aspect of the system as being categorised as products, process and services allowed the identification of systemic issues, such as failures in
The observations and interviews identified eight primary activities when starting a business. Businesses found it was necessary to interact with multiple government levels (federal, state and local council) and various industry bodies in the start-up phase. The instructions
Mean Lodge BAS Sell and buy Begin trading Set up business fundamentals Set up registrations Determine business model Do research Have an idea
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Figure 2 - Ratings of each aspect of the starting a small business experience (rating out of 10)
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- Inability to use existing tools ty uri ec
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Figure 4 – Further detail on the process
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Perception
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Figure 3 - Dashboard visualisation of the client
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process between government departments. Moreover, the XE model provided greater sensitivity in identifying issues and dependencies to be addressed in the experience. Through the synthesis and translation of the information, a circular dashboard was also created to provide decision makers with a visualisation of the data. The aim of this prototype was to enhance interpretation of a lower level of detail regarding issues whilst also enabling an understanding of the effect on the larger experience. The dashboard clearly demonstrates the weaknesses through colour-coded ratings. As shown in Figure 3 - Green: satisfactory; Amber: needing attention; and Red: urgent improvement required. Subsequent visualisations were created showing the evaluation of the ‘starting a business’ experience, whilst highlighting the areas within the two problematic activities (‘set-registrations’ and ‘set-up business fundamentals’). The diagram quickly draws attention to the areas that were determined to be the weakest. Improvements for future research The XE framework requires further improvements before it can be used as a practitioner tool. The current measurement approach is cumbersome and requires significant energy on behalf of the reviewer to complete an evaluation. Future studies will be used to refine the method and the tool so that it is available for practical application.
difficult to differentiate categories of service created in the model for the purpose of measurement. Establishing well-defined boundaries of activities within an experience will improve measurement reliability. T he development of more sophisticated measures — around context and co-production is required.
The most prevalent insight from this research is the fundamental flaw inherent in citizen experiences. Experiences are created by bureaucrats with officious expectations of how citizens should perform. As a result, citizens are expected to think and behave like public servants, rather than experiences services which are designed to fit their actual lives. Despite well-meaning attempts to incorporate the citizen perspective into the design, there remains a clear lack of understanding of the practical realities of the expectations placed on citizens to meet their obligations. The question that remains is whether the public sector is the best place for the design and evaluation of citizen experiences. Is it possible to remedy public sector service through evaluation? Can we make Frankenstein human?
There are also number of aspects of the framework that need further investigation. — A measure of complexity for the experience is required. The ability to compare experiences will be valuable, however this will not be possible with the current approach. For example, comparing Australia’s complex Fringe Benefits Tax (FBT) obligations, to something apparently ‘simple’ such as making a payment, would be difficult. A scale of complexity would aid in such comparisons. A simple method for defining the scope of an — experience is also necessary. Participants found it Touchpoint 9-2 31
The Three Layers of Service Design Impact A framework for mapping design and business impact We observed that when a strong business strategy is coupled with great service design, the questions always arise: “How are we going to know if we’re successful? And how do we know if we’re on the right track or when we need to change course?” At frog, we are focused on actively designing for business impact, making it an ever-present variable throughout the design process. Craig Cisero s a senior strategist at frog, focusing on business design, combining in-depth user research with market dynamics to increase the commercial impact of product and service design. Veronika Ji is a strategist at frog. Her passion for health trends, retail experience and business has inspired her work on many healthcare and retail projects. Stefania Marcoli is Principal Director frogHealth. She leads healthcare projects within frog, bringing more than 15 years’ experience in human-centred design and strategic thinking. Chiara Diana is Creative Director and Experience Strategy lead at frog, working across communication, interaction and service design, with a focus on solutions that span complex product-service ecosystems.
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In order to help our clients properly measure and manage the performance of service design once it’s implemented, we help them plan measurement models for the intended impact. We create these models using three different layers of business impact. In short: An organisation has business goals (e.g. to increase revenue), a strategy to achieve those goals (e.g. convert freemium to paying users), tactics to achieve the strategy (e.g. streamline the premium registration process). By measuring performance at each of these three levels (business goals, strategy and tactics), one can make informed management decisions and even correlate changes between levels. For example, it can be quite informative to correlate the changes in tactics with efficacy of fulfilling certain strategies. This article describes how we apply this framework to make a set of recommendations for service design projects:
— At the business goals layer, measure progress towards the organisation’s overall business objectives and impacts (e.g. revenue growth, market share gains) — At the strategy layer, alongside traditional strategic KPIs, identify hard metrics that represent the design principles as a reflection of the strategy (e.g. conversion rates, KPI models for specific design principles) — At the tactics layer, measure functional and emotional customer feedback to individual service features and improvements (e.g. number of steps to complete registration, perceived effort of registration) An assumption we start with is that service design projects often use business goals (such as revenue growth or customer retention) to measure success, without also measuring the intermediate steps for how to reach such goals.1 Measuring tactics and strategy in
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addition to goals helps the designer to understand which design decisions are driving business goals, and gives the designer a multi-dimensional tool to communicate the value of the design.2 We are proposing the three layers as a way to transform from map A to map B in terms of measuring the impact of service design (See Fig. 1). In map A, we would only know the overall distance and if the final objective is reached, without sufficient information on where we are in the journey towards the objective. In map B, with the measurement of the trip during the course of travel, we would gather more actionable insights that can enable us to optimise both the current trip and even the next trip.
Measuring the value of design has two main functions: decision analysis and communication. Decision analysis allows the organisation to understand the performance of service features, and change them to better realise its goals. Communication allows service designers to better align stakeholders around the value being created, thus getting buy-in that will drive the collaboration needed to realise the full benefits of the design. As more business impact is created, the greater is the sensitivity required to measure outcomes of service design projects. We propose the three layers of service design measurement as a way to manage the complexity. Practically speaking, the three-layer approach helps the service designer to move from a generic analysis: — “What are our business goals?” and “Did we meet them?” To an analysis that is more informative and actionable: — Strategy-business goal connection: “Does the market react well to our design principles?” and “Which design principles3 are not resonating?” — Tactics-strategy correlation: “Did the shift in touchpoint X help us reach design principle A?”
Figure 1
The theory: Why and what Service design is entering more strategic areas of client organisations, taking a more active role in proving its business value. This value justifies investment. This has many upsides, but also comes with new challenges: It requires service designers to be more sensitive to how they measure the value of their design.
1 The framework may be applied on a sliding scale. In this article, business impact starts at the business goals of the organisation. If working at less senior levels, the business impact layer may start with the business goals of that department, and accordingly measure the strategy and tactics that department is using to address those goals (rather than the strategy and tactics of the organisation overall). 2 Such detailed business analysis might be the responsibility of the client, however, the service designer may benefit from helping the client adjust their performance management efforts based upon key organisation shifts that a service design approach may create, such as increased customer empathy or rapid prototyping.
Separating out the layers helps the designers and their business stakeholders to make more sophisticated decisions in managing the components of the service design, while giving them more material to build a business case in complex environments. It can also help the business stakeholders, empowering them to manage the newly-designed services after implementation. The re-usability of service design deliverables has been cited an issue.4 An effective measurement strategy can be the first step in setting up an operating model that allows service design to live-on after end of project.
3 Design principles are a set of fundamental intentions or statements that designers use to guide the process, product and experience. 4 Feuerlicht, George. “Simple metric for assessing quality of service design." International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010.
Touchpoint 9-2 33
Tactical Layer Measure functional and emotional customer feedback to link them to individual service features
Strategic Layer Measure strategic KPIs and design principle metrics
Business Impact Layer Measure progress towards the organisation's overall business goals and objectives
Layer by layer: Detailed explanation and examples
Example tactics-related KPIs could be: KPI
Description
The Tactics layer
This layer includes immediate customer feedback to tactical service features or improvements. Tactics are distinguished from strategies because they are specific actions or changes rather than overarching plans. This could be a change in flow at the retail shop that reduces wait time, a new CRM interaction that increases personalisation, or any other tactical change deployed by the service designers. A measurement at this layer is unique in that it gives specific feedback on a specific feature. For the designers, it provides an immediate feedback on the efficacy of their design and offers levers for iterative improvement. The key shift for most organisations on the tactics layer is to expand from purely functional feedback (“How many minutes did interaction X take?”), to include both functional and emotional customer feedback on the interaction (“How long did the interaction feel like?”). Measuring emotional impact is important because organisations are likely to apply a service design approach to establish a closer relationship with their customers. Such emotional metrics can be measured through use of technology such as voice analytics or through survey techniques.
Digital analytics
Functional customer feedback: It captures the objective analytics on certain experiences, e.g. “How long or how many clicks did this process take?”
Customer perception analysis
Emotional customer feedback: It collects qualitative, self-reported feedback on perceived experiences, e.g. “How long did the process feel like?”
tNPS (transactional Net Promoter Score)
Emotional customer feedback: It asks customers for feedback right after selected transactions or experiences. It’s important to note that traditional NPS is not a tactics measurement because it asks the user to recommend a service overall.
Emotional analytics
Emotional customer feedback: It is voice/text analysis and delivers insights on customers’ emotional reactions.
Figure 2: Illustrative L1 measurements
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The Strategy layer
This layer contains metrics that reflect the organisation’s success in addressing strategies, which can be defined as the plans and principles that guide the execution of specific service features. They are distinguished from business goals because strategies represent the approach to accomplish an end goal (better conversion rates is an approach to increased revenue). Measuring the fulfilment of strategies is beneficial to organisations because it helps to understand if a collection of tactics is helping to advance a particular service design strategy, and how to optimise those tactics moving forward. Additionally, measuring the strategic layer independently of the business impact layer helps identify strategic success independent of business success. They may not always move hand in hand, as evidenced by an academic research on the effect of service innovation on organisation-level financial performance.5 Fulfilling the design principles with no shift in business impact can signal an ineffective strategy, or may signify that the intended business results did not materialise due to other market conditions (such as the entry of a new competitor, or in the case of the referenced academic study, an increase in costs). Sometimes a service design project fails due to conditions outside of the actual design team. In these cases, the three-layer approach can help the designers and the stakeholders to isolate these causes from the metrics, analysing the real causes and measuring the effect of the project objectively. Conversely, in the case of a positive business outcome, the service designer can build a stronger correlation between the positive business impact and the service design strategies if they have evidence that the service strategy was fulfilled.
strategic KPIs and attempting to measure “soft” design principles with hard metrics. In essence, design principles can be represented by a single quantitative KPI, or a model of multiple KPIs. For example, “Principle X” may be a combination of engagement and emotional sentiment. These KPIs can be combined in different ways to show the bigger picture of the principle.6 Example KPIs in this layer could be: KPI
Description
Conversion rates
Depending on the business, it measures the rate of converting customers from one status to another (e.g. Freemium to paid).
NPS (Net Promotor Score)
It measures customer’s overall feedback on a service, e.g. “How happy are customers?” and “How willing are they to recommend the service to friend?”
(# Targeted promotions/#generic promotions) & (Offer activation rate)
It measures one principle: “Reward Customers Delightfully”. For an example service (see case study), the KPI reflects “How many promotions are sent to loyal customers?” and “How attractive are the promotional offers?”
(Average Customer Effort score) & (‘First call resolution’ rates)
It measures another principle: “Make it Effortless”. For the aforementioned service, the KPI reflects “How much effort do customers spend overall?” and “How often customers get the problem solved at the first try?”
Organisations are often accustomed to applying KPIs such as conversion rates that evaluate the outcome of a strategic plan. However, a key shift towards measuring performance of service design is going beyond traditional
Figure 3: Illustrative L2 measurements
5 Aas, Tor Helge, and Per Egil Pedersen. “The impact of service innovation on firm-level financial performance.” The Service Industries Journal 31.13 (2011): 2071-2090. 6 This can be done in a number of ways. Simply modeling movement of multiple KPIs on a single graph can be a starting point. Some situations may even allow for an index of multiple KPIs that can be tied together with a weighted average or other custom calculation.
This layer includes measurements of the broad outcomes the organisation seeks to create. They are distinguished from strategies and tactics because they are the sum of the organisation’s strategies and tactics. For example, a for-profit public corporation will be looking to please
The Business Goals layer
Touchpoint 9-2 35
shareholders by growing revenue and increasing market share in their industry. Alternatively, a public health system may be seeking increases in key population health measurements. In the best case, these business goals are shifted by the service design strategies and tactics. However, they may also be affected by the many other competing sets of strategies and tactics that are being executed within the organisation. When service designers measure business goals alone, it exposes the immediate results of their work to the complexity of other factors in the organisation. Example KPIs in this layer could be: KPI
Description
Revenue
Common business goals: An organisation is seeking topline growth, or is looking to become more efficient or to become more profitable.
Market share
Common business goals: An organisation seeks to become the market leader in an industry or to defend a current customer base.
Stay relevant in a changing strategic setting
A traditional organisation expects a shift in their industry, wants to understand if their new initiative (such as digital transformation) would help them to be competitive with this industry shift.
service design, should the business impact be negatively affected by the aforementioned other conditions. We used the three layers framework to recommend key shifts in the current measurement strategy that would allow the organisation to manage service design moving forward. The Tactics layer:
Traditionally, the organisation was using a series of metrics to gauge reactions to specific processes via follow/up calls and online surveys. However, most of the analysis was broad (e.g. “Rate the service on a scale of 1-5”), or functionally analytical (e.g. length of call). We suggested to incorporate metrics that give more information on the emotional impact of tactical changes. For example, people judge support interactions on how long the interaction felt, instead of simply reporting length of call. Some customers would be surveyed after key processes to enquire how long the interaction felt to them. Changing service details could reduce how long the call felt, even if the length was actually the same. The Strategy layer:
The strategic pillars of their new customer experience can be described in summary as: “Connecting, Assuring, Rewarding and Effortless.” ‘Rewarding’ was composed of two sub-descriptions: ‘Delight’ and ‘Magic’. We created a KPI index for each of the strategic pillars. For example, the design pillar of ‘Rewarding’ was measured by a KPI index consisting of offer activation rate and number of targeted promotions/number of generic promotions. The Business Goals layer:
Figure 4: Illustrative L3 measurements
Case studies: A telco in a shifting setting In 2017, a major European telco was preparing for a company-wide digital transformation that would include a re-design of over 100 customer flows. In that same year, they were facing the prospect of a new market entrant who planned on disrupting the marketplace with aggressive pricing and new service models. The measurement would need to measure the business impact of the service design, but also measure the tactics of the 36 Touchpoint 9-2
The classic business objectives were unchanged by the project. However, the team was now positioned to correlate shifts in weekly/monthly/annual financial figures with changes in tactical and strategic service design metrics, which provided more space to make persuasive business cases for their design initiatives. Closing The three layers of service design impact can be used in many ways, but they are most useful as an exercise with the client to plan the right measurement strategy. We believe this exercise is best applied at the end of the strategic phase of a design engagement, when a set of strategies and tactics for the service have been identified.
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How to combine the three layers of service design How to combine the three layers of service design impact to analyse performance impact to analyse performance TACTICAL PERFORMANCE
STRATEGIC PERFORMANCE
BUSINESS PERFORMANCE
ANALYTICAL CONCLUSION
POTENTIAL NEXT STEP
A
“The business impact can be strongly correlated with the success of the strategy and tactics deployed in our service design project.”
Tell the world about your success
B
“Our tactics, though receive good customer feedback, are not impacting our strategic objectives or business goals.”
Review tactics
C
“Our tactics get good customer feedback and are helping us reach our strategic objectives, but it has little impact on business goals.”
Review strategy
Illustrative case Scenario C: A music platform developed a strategy to convert more freemium users to paying users, in order to achieve their goal of increasing overall revenue. A year later, the service designers and the leadership team reviews the performance across three layers: – In the Tactical Performance layer, users are more satisfied with a streamlined subscription upgrade process and various promotional offerings. – Correspondingly, in the Strategic Performance layer, more freemium users were converted to paying users due to the improved service. – However, in the Business Performance layer, the revenue wasn’t increased much. They discovered that as a new competitor is providing more attractive freemium services, causing an increase in churn rate, and thereby converting the freemium users to paying users, although successful, did not drive business performance due to switching users. The service design worked, but needs to be strategically revisited.
The service designer and their client can identify and align on KPIs that measure success on each of the three layers. Once aligned, the KPIs can be shared with IT teams to ensure that the correct data is being captured to effectively measure the intended business impact. Overall, we hope this framework serves to improve the maturity of business analysis within service design. At the very least, it can serve as a mental model for the designer, and a conversational tool to use with their clients, to tell a better story, and choose the right collection of KPIs to apply, helping all stakeholders better manage the complex path between a service design workshop and long-term business goals.
Touchpoint 9-2 37
You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure Executive leaders we work with subscribe to a basic principle: you can’t manage what you can’t measure! Born from traditional management thinking, this principle does not stop at products: it applies — more so — to services. Managers measure product performance using sales figures and financial outcomes, but Patrick McGowan delivers service design, management and innovation expertise to enterprises, government agencies and innovative start-ups. Patrick founded and runs The Service Design Group, a customer experience and service design consultancy in the United States. He also teaches service innovation to MBA students.
Raven Manocchio is Design Principal at The Service Design Group. He holds numerous design awards including American Graphic Design Award, Addy’s, Davey’s, and Red Dot. He has a BA in Art History and Exhibition Design from Hampshire College.
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measuring service performance requires a deeper understanding of service types and measurement models. Understanding service and measurement types At The Service Design Group, we recognise four service types and four ways to measure them. We call these ‘service measurement types’. We identify these based on years of service innovation, design and management experience across multiple industries, including benchmarking service performance between companies in specific industries. Understanding service measurement types helps designers identify measurement models for service design initiatives. 1. Consumption services pair with
share, likelihood to return or recommend) provide the best measure for consumption services, because these service types rely on referrals and repeat business to succeed.
loyalty metrics
Consumption services account for the majority of service-based businesses. Customers experience consumption services in singular transactions, such as dining at restaurants or staying at hotels. Loyalty metrics (satisfaction, wallet
2. Subscription services pair with utilisation metrics
Subscription services, such as Amazon Prime, Dollar Shave Club and any ‘software-as-a-service’ (SAAS) providers, continue to rise in popularity. Subscription
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services offer customers a recurring lease on a product or capability. Utilisation metrics (adoption rate, frequency of use, contract expansion and renewal rate) provide the most appropriate measurement for subscription services, because these services succeed only if they attract enough people (adoption), keep them (renewal) and up-sell them (expansion). 3. Shared services pair with performance metrics
Shared services appear most often within large enterprises and government agencies. Shared services provide predictable approaches to common tasks, such as procurement or human resources. Performance metrics (throughput, availability, capacity and error rate) best measure shared services, because these metrics reveal whether the service delivers the efficiency, predictability and standardisation promised (or not).
revenue or improve profit margins? Is it to grow or protect market share? Or, is the goal to improve quality of life for a segment of the population? The client must define the goal in specific terms, such as ‘improve profit margin by three percent’, ‘become the number two market-share holder’, or, ‘raise the graduation rate for lower income students to 80 percent’. 2. Determine service type
Next, determine the type of service best suited to achieving the goal. For example, if the client is seeking to improve margins, they should optimise a shared service. If the client wants to grow market share, they could create a new subscription service. Or, if the client wants to improve graduation rates, they must create a service capable of driving outcomes (what we call an outcome service). 3. Establish metrics
4. Outcome services pair with funnel metrics
Outcome services solve complex needs. For example, an individual might enrol in a weight loss programme to lose weight, gain muscle and improve health. Alternatively, a government agency might fund an initiative to revitalise an economically-depressed area, hoping to improve graduation rates and annual household incomes. Funnel metrics — metrics which describe the ratio of participants who achieve key milestones and move to the next — best describe outcome services because they reveal whether participants achieve acceptable ratios across milestones or not. Best practices for embedding measurement in service design Understanding service measurement pairs sets the stage for measurement and monitoring in service design projects. At The Service Design Group, we use the following best practice framework to embed measurement and monitoring in our service design work. 1. Define the goal
Before design starts, the client and the service designer must establish the goal of the initiative. Is it to increase
Then, establish metrics based on service type. If the client aims to optimise a shared service, establish performance metrics. If the client will launch a subscription service to grow market share, establish utilisation metrics. Or, if the client will tackle graduation rate with an outcome service, establish funnel (milestone-based) metrics that describe the path to graduation. 4. Model results
Next, model results and assess feasibility. In the case of the client wanting to improve margins by three percent, we can determine the throughput and error rate required to produce the margin increase. Furthermore, we can assess whether the throughput and error rate seem reasonable and achievable. Similarly, we could model the required thresholds and assess the feasibility of the market share and graduation rate metrics. 5. Design the service
Now, design the service! We have a goal. We know the service type. We have metrics. And we know the required performance levels. Time for serious service design! Embed metrics — and ways to measure them — in everything you do and you can demonstrate your design’s success. Touchpoint 9-2 39
Mind the Gap Service design from discovery to governance
All organisations exist in tension between efficiency and innovation. Both are essential for their long-term vitality. And each would consume the other.
Shaun Gummere is Vice President of Service Design at Cantina, a strategic design and technology agency in Boston, Massachusetts and the former Chief Design Officer at Story+Structure, an innovation design firm in Concord, Massachusetts.
Guy Felder is a product and marketing expert. He serves as Chief Strategist at Story+Structure, an innovation design firm in Concord, Massachusetts.
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Google has placed its innovation arm, Google X, one-and-a-half miles from the organisation’s main campus. Similarly, in Apple’s early history, Steve Jobs created a ‘skunkworks’ that was similarly removed from the headquarters. This is a quarantine of sorts. Keeping smaller innovation away reduces the risk of having the innovation simply disappear into the efficient organisation. This is where many service design engagements start — and often end. To deliver the benefits of change, we must manage this tension. Because while efficiency allows organisations to achieve impressive results, it also requires stasis, preventing or slowing responses to disruption. Organisations are in many respects designed to reject the unknown. The challenge, then, is to ensure innovation takes root by crossing into the efficient operation of the organisation. In our consulting, we’ve learned to respect the turbulent gap between the twin poles of efficiency and innovation. Below are elements we believe must be in place to see design infiltrate the efficient organisation.
First, the executive champion must be explicitly aware of the role they’re to perform. Often, leaders are casual observers, the result of a well-intentioned effort to ‘stay out of the way.’ Leaders need guidance on the part they play within innovation initiatives — as a bridge between current operations and the future state. They must, after all, package this change to gain support both from above and below. Second, and further to this point, the work must connect to the operational realities of the organisation. Too often, the transition from current state to future state involves ‘a miracle occurs here.’ In every organisation there are realities: technological, process, business and fiduciary. If the results of service design work can’t be supported by the technology platforms in place, it isn’t going to survive. If the work can’t be tied to larger organisational goals, it will lose relevance. What gets measured gets done. Third is change management. Efficient organisations resist change as a matter of survival. Effective change management overcomes this resistance. Service design
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that engages employees from the bottom up while aligning leadership’s understanding of how the change can live within the organisation has the best chance of survival. Fourth, and finally, survival of the work must be sustained through inclusion in organisational governance. This is the essential step that translates change into day-to-day activities understandable to the efficient organisation. In practical terms, this happens by articulating and assigning goals. We believe service design is well positioned to undertake this work. In a project at a large public university in Texas, we worked to drive change in several ways. The foundation was the co-creation of service blueprints involving assumptive mapping and service safaris. This shifted the perspective of the organisation from ‘inside-out’ to ‘outside-in.’
Staff rituals, aligned to goals and objectives, will support the transition of service design from innovation to day-to-day governance. However, we found people struggled to connect the map to the life of the organisation and to their individual responsibilities. They embraced innovation in its conceptual form, but were hesitant to make it real, where it could be measured. To overcome this, we undertook two activities. First, we facilitated a visioning session to inspire staff to dream big and move from a daily management mindset to a possibilities mindset. Second, we sought to connect the map to organisational strategy by leading a goals, objectives and initiatives workshop. This technique, more often associated with strategic planning, helped bridge the gap between what could be and what should be. Metrics – revenue, programme creation and satisfaction – made explicit and measurable how the blueprint would be realised. It led to changes in reporting lines and workflow, as well as the establishment of the role of ‘Student Experience Leader’, the ultimate owner of the desired experience.
Nonetheless, we had limited influence over how the executive sponsor positioned this work to the larger organisation. The message that change was primarily a driver of short-term revenue created a disconnect, eliciting deep staff anxiety. Despite putting the essential pieces in place to see change transition to governance, the pace of implementation slowed. Larger, universitywide operational realities overtook the division-level innovation. As a result, later at an institution in Southern California, we ensured a close working relationship with executive leadership was in place from the start. This allowed us to collectively frame and translate the innovation work on a parallel track to the staff-led change. Picture it as a kind of ‘tick tock’ approach. Similar service design activities in this project fully transitioned into the efficient organisation through more than 200 individual performance plans, themselves expressions of organisational goals aligned to a service blueprint. So, these engagements differed in significant ways. As we learned in Texas, it’s not enough to get the blessing of leadership. It’s all too easy for the story of change at the executive level to get out of sync with the actual work underway. Likewise, shifting high-level organisational priorities can be opaque to the innovation team. This is a grave source of risk. Service designers must create the conditions to bridge these two worlds. In our work in Southern California, we did two things differently. First, we incorporated goals, objectives, and initiatives early, and co-ordinated with leadership to translate the efforts of the innovation team into measurable activities. Second, and more importantly, we created teams, including executive leaders, to carry out each initiative. This structure both flexed and persisted from divergent ideation to convergent implementation. Having the leadership team involved in this way made them better upward promoters of the work. With success imminent, many external organisational stakeholders were eager to get involved to take part in the wins leadership was telling them about.
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Cracking the Code to Workplace Productivity The computer is the most powerful productivity tool of our time and arguably the most important tool in the knowledge worker’s toolkit. Can you imagine trying to use your computer without your favourite software application? Without a hard-drive? Or even a dated version of either? Not very productive. Only when working in concert with each other do they create value. And only when they evolve along with the needs of their users does that value persist.
Matthew Swift and Coby Lerner employ usercentred and participatory methods at brightspot to design services for clients in higher education, tech, government, healthcare and culture. Their backgrounds in business, design, and consumer psychology inform their work at the intersection of service design and space planning.
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Workplaces are also tools for productivity, and they too are made up of hardware and software. The spaces and fixed elements constitute workplace hardware and the services (e.g. room booking, tech support, catering, etc.), norms and culture constitute evolving workplace software. While designing exciting and beautiful offices has received a lot of attention in recent years, the most successful workplaces are the result of investment not only in designing the built environment, but also the services, norms and culture necessary to unlock the productive potential of the workplace. Like any service design exercise, the human dimension complicates workplace strategy. Most workplaces must support a wide-range of activities carried out by a diverse group of people with different skills, needs and expectations. Subsequently, effective workplace software is not one-size-fits-all. It varies
across organisations, geographies, and even departments within the same company. And it evolves over time. What works for one organisation might not work for another. And what works for an organisation today might not work for them tomorrow. Not only must organisations think about both workplace hardware and software, but also they must continually assess the value and impact of each. To illustrate a variety of approaches to developing and assessing workplace software, we will share a few examples from our work. Increasing scholarly output through informal support New York University was planning to open two new storefront technology labs on their main campus. In recent years, existing labs had effectively turned into kiosks for printing, checking email, and browsing social media – not a great
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return on prime Manhattan real estate. It was critical for the new labs to be highly utilised and have a big impact on student productivity. NYU asked brightspot to help ensure that the new labs were a success. After interviewing students and auditing existing labs, we learned a few things: — There was growing use of (and demand for) both high-end (e.g. 3d scanning/modelling, additive manufacturing) and mid-level research technology (e.g. digital media production/editing), but the majority of technology in the labs was low-level (e.g. Creative Suite, Office) — Technology-based research, teaching and learning were increasingly social activities, but the current labs were configured predominantly for individual activities — Students prefer to learn new tools or technology informally from their peers (either their friends or fellow members of a student club) In close partnership with the design team, we developed a strategy for each lab that would: — Provide spaces and technology for both individuals and groups to access a wide range of technologies (both mid-level and high-end) — Decrease total number of fixed computer workstations — Provide flexible, bring-your-own-device spaces that can act as study, event, or meeting space, depending on need — Emphasise peer support by promoting tech consultation services with student staff and creating a service point that enables side-by-side work
Once the new lab was built, we surveyed users and found that: — Group collaboration was up by 63 percent — Low-impact utilisation was down by 56 percent (i.e. students were coming to the lab to do more than just check email) However, after a series of interviews, we also learned that students felt the student staff were “unapproachable”. The staff service point – which was intended to be a highly interactive space where staff could consult students side-by-side – resembled a staff workstation. Computer monitors, telephones, and a variety of office supplies conveyed an unintended but clear message to students: You are interrupting. Fortunately, this was an easy fix. By removing or rearranging a few items, the service point quickly became more welcoming and the student staff more approachable. Enabling focus in an open environment through norms In another project, brightspot was approached by a large global tech corporation that, despite offering a robust set of workplace services to employees, had struggled to deliver on one vital offering: A quiet space for focused work. The need to create a quiet atmosphere for engineers was at odds with the company’s commitment to openness and the spontaneous collaboration facilitated by an open workplace, and many employees were requesting studios and semi-private work spaces. Furthermore, the problems of the physical environment had caused Touchpoint 9-2 43
Engaging teams through change management Reward Gateway, a London-based startup that helps employers create highly engaged employees through the use of a platform, is deeply committed to leading by example. They had outgrown their office and, despite the affection everyone had for their original home, needed a larger space. Given their understanding of the physical environment as a primary channel for communicating 44 Touchpoint 9-2
their values with their employees, they wanted to ensure that moving to a new home with a new approach to space assignment wouldn’t be disruptive. In essence, though nothing was particularly ‘broken’, they had the opportunity to upgrade their software and hardware together and reap the multiple benefits associated with co-ordinated planning. The new work environment was designed to better respond to how employees were working, while also encouraging them to work in new ways. For example, prior to the move, only 33 percent of employees were satisfied with the availability of spaces, and just 13 percent were satisfied with meeting spaces. The new office was planned to better meet the needs of their work patterns, including more and better conference spaces. At the same time, they were moving from assigned desks (with a relatively higher satisfaction rate of 59 percent) to unassigned desks, in order to accommodate increased collaborative spaces and reduce the footprint of individual workstations, causing concerns. A change management plan was required to get employees involved, excited and ready for changes such as this. In order to make this change as easy as possible, we worked to ensure everyone understood why the move to unassigned desks was valuable. We provided them with a number of strategies to ease the transition while reducing the barriers to flexibility. For example, we held design review sessions to explain the change, worked to identify
Distraction Audit Prohibits Focus
14 Discourages Focus
1 3
5 4
No Impact on Focus
12
6
2
Impact
counterproductive and passive-aggressive behaviours to develop among staff. We developed a suite of space recommendations and guidance to address components of the challenges presented by the space, but ultimately we had to develop a solution that would also support healthier interactions in an environment that was going to remain open. We began by assessing the impact of a variety of distractions, asking people to rate both the frequency and impact in order to understand what needed fixing the most, and subsequently developed a pilot programme to encourage a new set of behavioural norms in the workplace to address them. We sought to update the software in order to fix a perceived problem with the hardware. The pilot programme would allow us to quickly measure the impact of a suite of recommendations that: A. Encouraged employees to reframe the issue of focus as a team responsibility; and B. Offered tactical guidance to employees on how to better communicate their needs to others. Employees were informed of these new practices, recommendations and tactics through a series of comic strips. They were also given small toys as symbols to be placed on top of their computers at times of intense concentration, to discourage others from interrupting. The toys also served as tangible reminders of the pilot. After running the pilot programme, we conducted a series of activities to evaluate the programme and gain insights into the initiative. Observations, interviews, and a focus group allowed us to assess the use of – and response to – the new norms, while surveys documented reported shifts. All of the distractions targeted by the pilot decreased (e.g., a more than 40 percent drop in the frequency of visual distractions from people walking through work areas), and with them a significant increase (71 percent) in employee satisfaction with the desk area. In addressing the workplace software, we were able to measure a change in the pilot team’s perception of their hardware.
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10 9
13
11
15
16
8
Distractions 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Encourages Focus
Necessary for Focus Never
Music Personalisation Scents Messiness Pets Calls at desk Equipment noise Eating Talking in social areas
Monthly
Weekly
Frequency
10. Lighting levels 11. Temperature 12. Glare 13. Talking in desk area 14. Colleague interruption 15. Talking / Walking nearby 16. Movement / Walking nearby
Daily
Hourly
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Move in
Design start Plan
Inform
Depart
Pilot
Launch
Support
Settle
Reflect
Getting people involved gather input • W orkplace assessment • W ork modes development • D esign input • L ocation survey
• Design Selection
test design
make changes
refine design
• Test features • Pilot week
• I mplement ‘quick wins’
• Design refinements • Postoccupancy evaluation
Getting people excited share vision
say farewell
• D esign vision
• O ffice farewell • O ffice cleaning
move in • Sneak peek
celebrate success
• R ibbon cutting • S pace story • O pen house
• Share successes • Host events
• Showcase the change
Getting people prepared address concerns • I nformation session • C hange reference esign • D information
set expectations • M ove details
train and coach • Managers meeting
new storage solutions for personal items traditionally stored at the desk (i.e. coats, bags), and developed norms to ensure effective and equitable use of the new space, such as hanging coats in the closet upon arrival, and changing desks periodically. The result was a 33 percent increase in satisfaction with individual workspaces, paired with a 138 percent increase in satisfaction with the availability of spaces. By concurrently planning the hardware and software of their new home, while also developing a change roadmap to ensure an easy transition, we were able to measure dramatic increases across a number of indicators. Reward Gateway experienced a 14 percent increase in reported employee engagement, and a 156 percent increase in satisfaction with how the workplace supports team effectiveness. Additionally, more than two-thirds of the office was excited about the changes, and between 75-80 percent felt prepared for how to work in the new office.
• O rientation
• W orkplace norms training oaching on • C new features ire drill and • F space safety
collect feedback • C ontinuous feedback
Creating feedback loops Just as developers or product managers create feedback loops to understand the impact of new code or the relevance of a new product feature, organisations must develop feedback loops to continuously design, assess and refine their workplace. The needs of the employee are constantly evolving. The sooner you can get feedback on the performance of the workplace, the sooner you can respond to those needs. Moreover, the better you understand the relationship between the built environment and the way people engage with and understand their roles within the organisation, the easier it will be to design better experiences. Either hardware or software in the workplace can be adjusted to compensate for deficiencies in the other, but your employees will thrive when you can plan them together.
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Designing for Impact and Value Mapping the service design lifecycle to the business’ case for change
Initiating and implementing a change-driven project involves the steering of different activities – from design to business and technology – as well as navigating inside the culture of an organisation. Service designers, business partners and technologists have different responsibilities, different drivers, and use different terms and methodologies in their work. Bernadette Geuy is a design lead at the University of California, Berkeley, working at the intersection of design, business and technology to transform services delivery. She has an MBA and co-chairs the San Francisco Chapter of the Service Design Network. Rachel Hollowgrass is a user experience designer at the University of California, Berkeley. She enjoys balancing the rich needs of the diverse university community. Rachel has contributed to projects at Apple, Stanford, Kaiser and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Titta Jylkäs is a doctoral candidate in service design at University of Lapland, Finland. She is doing her research in collaboration with Volkswagen Group focusing on strategic service design in the digital transformation of customer services utilising artificial intelligence.
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Service design in making a business case A business case1 is a vital document which explains why a project should be initiated. By describing the business opportunities, planned actions, expected costs and benefits, a business case works as a tool for the decision maker to guide a project, including its design activities. A business case is also the result of a process of collaborative actions between different stakeholders. In the business case for a new Student Information Systems (SIS) software development operation at the University of California, Berkeley, there has been a clear need to better integrate the efforts of designers, business analysts and development teams, in order to optimise limited resources
1 For example: How to Build a Better Business Case, Product Management Journal www.productfocus. com/resources/ journal-articles/business-casehow-to-build/
and to contribute the greatest value and impact to the institution. Arguing for value and impact Value and impact, when encompassing more than overt monetary concerns, are abstract concepts, and therefore have different meanings to different people. Initiatives require investment in capital and resources. Without evidence of quantifiable return or financial value, soft goals such as change are difficult to defend. Investments are typically made to either increase revenues, reduce costs, to address a risk, in response to a mandate, or to enter or respond to changing market conditions. The less tangible – and harder to predict – outcomes are the value and impact that the initiative will bring. In addition to suggesting metrics for tangible cost and revenue opportunities, service design has the potential – through visualisation and articulation – to make the intangible concrete and understandable.
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It can be argued that designers might lack fluency in the language and methods of business, or be challenged in the extrapolation of research findings and design solutions into a strong value proposition. However, there is potential in finding the needed qualitative and quantitative resources for a change-driven business case through close collaboration between design, business and technical colleagues.2 To avoid mis-prioritised efforts and ineffective or unrealised solutions based on strong, cost-driven reasons, designers can argue for softer goals by gaining insights into the organisation's values and decision-making processes throughout the project lifecycle.
2 Geever, Tom (2015). Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience [Chapter: Understanding Relationships / Stakeholder Values]. O’Reilly Media
Mapping key design activities to the business case for change The Impact and Value Touchpoint Map presents a way to augment the service design lifecycle by identifying key engagement activities for designers and business partners. Through better coordination and alignment of efforts, designers take greater responsibility for translating research findings and insights into substantiated success criteria and in making the case for change. Intake The Map starts with the intake process, and calls for close co-operation with business analysts, and bringing in the perspective of end users and their needs into the scoring process. While business analysts focus ‘inside-out’ on the functional and business process implications of a project, designers look ‘outside-in’ and across business processes and at touchpoints that may Touchpoint 9-2 47
span multiple services. The goal for this step is to get alignment on values in the scoring process so that the most promising opportunities are ranked appropriately. This is also where designers and business analysts can exchange perspectives early on about opportunities being considered, which will inform the subsequent research and analysis activities. Scoring should take into consideration the scope and importance of a given opportunity, how many people are impacted by the change, and the relative value to this community. Expected results or Return on Investment (ROI) case, time constraints, work-around alternatives and alignment with the mission and goals of the organisation should also be part of the scoring methodology.3
As the designer moves through their lifecycle doing research, ideation and design, they will work with their end users and business partners to design surveys or other mechanisms that will measure the key metrics before and after. Technical feasibility and financial ROI assessments will benefit from engagement with the designer as a complex project progresses through one or more go/no-go gates to implementation. Designers are also critical in validating the initial opportunity, reframing the problem as necessary, and finding an appropriate solution that will not only be functional but will also be easy to use.
Activity — Prepare design brief and share plans for conducting design research
Activity
Score
Research
Assess and rank opportunities using a methodology to identify initiatives that have the greatest potential value and impact
Artefacts
— Identify value drivers, success criteria and metrics — Measure as-is
Business Analysis
— Conduct research — Analyse and compile information for the ‘case for change’
Ranked opportunity catalogue Assess Feasability
Artefacts — Design brief — Research and analysis report
Research and Analysis Once an initiative is approved for further research and analysis by sponsors, the designer creates a design brief4 that includes a hypothesis for their research opportunity as well as the success criteria and metrics. A key goal here is to work with a business analyst to map out key elements that will be needed to complete a business case document and determine which data elements to collect and measure.
3 Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H.; Arpaci-Dusseau, Andrea C. (2014). Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces [Chapter: Scheduling Introduction]. Arpaci-Dusseau Books 4 Liedtka, Jeanne; Ogilvie, Tim; Brozenski, Rachel (2014). Designing for Growth Field Book [Design Brief]. Columbia Business School
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— Case for change — Benchmark metrics
Design and Specifications During this stage, design, business and technology staff will be working closely together to create the best possible solution. Each will approach the work from a different perspective and set of skills and experiences. The creative and expansive nature of design that takes into consideration the user journey and experiences will be tempered by constraints and input from business analysts and developers. The goal is to collaboratively develop the best solution and minimise rework or missing
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the expectations of end-users. During this phase, the Return on Investment (ROI) and Return on Experience (ROE) elements should be identified, based on research findings and expected outcomes, and support the business case.
Activity Design & Prototype
Solution design in collaboration with business and technology
Artefacts Business Specs
— Designs — Business specifications — Technical specifications — Business case
Tech Specs
Impact review A lifecycle would not be complete if there was not a step for reflection and learning. The goal here is to create the conditions for continuous improvements to the lifecycle processes, to get better at predicting the ROI and ROE, and to increase the value and impact of the software unit to the organisation, over time.
Important pre-work In establishing this model, the organisation must do important pre-work and align in support of the mission and goals of the organisation. Intake should be based on a methodology that uses shared criteria for scoring the relative importance of a new initiative. Additionally, the organisation will need to develop the modes and criteria for collaboration across lifecycles, and within touchpoints, such as regular meetings, processes, artefacts, communication, and information sharing. Conclusions The prescription for success with a change-driven business case is to engage early and often with business and technology colleagues, and to learn the language of business to make design arguments more robust by identifying the potential value and impact. Designers inherently push boundaries. This collaborative approach ensures that design efforts are rooted in project dynamics and constraints, while pointing toward the best possible solutions. Solutions emerge when designers iterate through the service design lifecycle, identify success criteria with stakeholders, and assess overall impact.
Activity — Assess planned vs. actual value and impact — Lessons learned Impact Review
Artefacts — Impact review — Benchmark metrics
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Š Christian Kaindl
Tools and Methods
Measuring Design Value of a Differentiated Service Platform A novel typology for a fresh juice business How can a service provider differentiate its products and services in a competitive market situation? Many service providers try to introduce innovative and distinctive ways to deliver their offerings. However, without understanding potential outcomes of changes in the service platform, it is difficult to execute and manage the new service projects appropriately. Having considered the involvement of customer for the service provision, knowing Dr Kiwoong Nam is an independent researcher interested in researching quantitative business management studies for qualitative subjects (e.g. design and value). Dr Bruce. W. Carnie is a lecturer and has worked in design management for a number of sectors including the textile business and higher education in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and the UK. Kevin Sunghoon Cho is a CEO of the juice brand Beesket. Kevin is particularly interested in developing new businesses in the food and beverage sector and consumer-focused products.
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how customers perceive value from offerings is critical to the strategic development of new services. The customer perceived value for the service delivery process is essential for new service development1. This study aims to identify the customer-oriented touchpoints through service blueprinting and examine the perceived value through utilisation of ‘design value typology’. Design has become the key contributor to successful business. However, despite the acknowledgement of its importance, it is often difficult to justify the contribution of design to business outcomes. In particular, within the service industry where various modifications of design elements occur, the evaluation of design is arguably critical for managing design projects. Since design has broadened its role in business, it is problematic to limit the contribution of design to tangible elements of offerings. Instead, the major
role of design is to enhance the firm’s competitive advantage by adding value to the products and services.2 In this context, design in this study can be defined as “the various activities in a business which deliberately stimulate senses of targeted stakeholders”.3
1 Alam, I., & Perry, C. (2002). A customer-oriented new service development process. Journal of Services Marketing, 16(6), 515-534. 2 Borja de Mozota, B. (2006). The four powers of design: A value model in design management. Design Management Review, 17(2), 44-53.
tools and me thods
Other-oriented
Self-oriented
Extrinsic
Intrinsic
SE
SI
Emotions
Emotions
- Efficiency
- Play
input/output, convenience
fun
- Excellence
- Aesthetics
quality
beauty
OE
OI
Emotions
Emotions
- Status
- Ethics
success, impression management
justice, virtue, morality
- Esteem
- Spirituality
reputation, materialism, possessions
faith, ecstasy, sacredness, magic
Figure 1. The combined typology of consumer value4
Notwithstanding that the link between design value and business performance is missing from this study, we aim to measure value of the broadened design aspects for a fresh juice business. Value theory Value is traditionally considered as the result of subtracting cost from what is offered (e.g. the perceived product quality or value). However, due to the diversity of products and services in the contemporary market, a consumer needs to consider complex and multiple factors for choosing a brand. Therefore, a holistic understanding of value is more relevant to tackle current issues in service marketing. The abundance of offerings triggers customers to consider irrational aspects of the offering. The irrational decision cannot be explained by logical causes, such as functionality and price. The rational and irrational aspects of consumption are converged on the notion of value in the contemporary business theory. Among the holistic concept of value, the typology of consumer value is noteworthy regarding the
3 Nam, K.W. (2016). The Impact of Design for consumers in the Food and Beverage Industry: Design Value and Measurement. PhD thesis, University of Leeds
consideration of desired outcomes as a definition of value. This study utilises Holbrook’s typology of consumer value for understanding the holistic concept of value. Holbrook distinguishes the dimensions by identifying whether value is 1) intrinsic or extrinsic, 2) self-oriented or other-oriented, 3) active or reactive. Given that the third classification (active or reactive) is often disputed, this study divides the value dimension into four dimensions as demonstrated in Figure 1. Service blueprint The service blueprinting technique is useful for identifying touchpoints. Given that touchpoints can provide practical information for improving a service, it is necessary to analyse the targeted business with the blueprinting technique. The measuring tool The interview data (qualitative data) for design considerations were compared with physical evidence in the service blueprints. The reliability of the tool was also
4 Nam, K.W., & Carnie, B.W. (2014). The Value of Design for Customers in the Service Industry: Contributions and measurements. Proceedings of the 19th DMI: Academic Design Management Conference, 1366-1400
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Self-oriented – E xtrinsic value (SE)
Other-oriented – Intrinsic value (OI)
Other-oriented – E xtrinsic value (OE)
Self-oriented – Intrinsic value (SI)
customers in choosing the ingredients, the ‘Legoinspired’ tool was invented (See Figure 3). Customers choose three ingredients from the stall and give the ‘basket’ to the cashier. A RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag is inside of each ‘ingredient block’. The cashier simply scans the ‘basket’ and the system automatically calculates the price of the drink. Customers are also provided with the nutrition information for their drinks (such as calories, the amount of vitamin A/B/C, etc.). As a result of this unique service provision, Beesket has prospered in the highly competitive local market (South Korea) and expanded the business to the global
Figure 2. Design Value Typology and its plotting
confirmed quantitatively in the preliminary research. As a result, the tool which emphasises emotional responses of design consideration (e.g. physical evidence in the service blueprint) from customers was developed. The analysed result can suggest the potential (and specific) design elements for improvement. As proposed in the previous research (Nam, 2016), each value dimension is placed at the points of a radar chart (See Figure 2). The area of the diamond shape becomes the design value of the business. Combining theoretical backgrounds with qualitative understanding and the interpretation of quantitative data enables researchers and practitioners to demonstrate practical action items. In this context, approaching the practical issues with the mixed methodology is particularly important to tackle current business problems in the service industry. Beesket Beesket is the combined words ‘bee’ and ‘basket’. It was launched as a Korean retail brand in 2012 for the fresh juice market, and introduced a differentiated ordering process. Unlike the traditional juice business, customers choose the ingredients of their juice. To encourage 54 Touchpoint 9-2
Figure 3. The Beesket basket
Figure 4. Picture of a Beesket store in Korea
tools and me thods
Physical Evidences
Interior Menu Others Employees
The ‘basket’
Employees
Observe
Checking ingredients
Give ‘basket’ to employees
Inform promotions & Explain how to order
Wait for ordering Or Help customer
Scan the ‘baskets’
Customer Actions
Tableware Packaging Receipt Nutrition card
Cash er
Pay the order
Wait
Receive drinks & nutrition card
Prepare drinks
Calling order# (or pager)
Line of interaction
Onstage/ Employee Actions
Take card / cash
Line of visibility
Backstage/ Employee Actions
Preparing promotion materials
Order guide (visual materials)
Notify Kitchen
Preparing ingredients
Internal system for order
Storage for ingredients
Line of internal interaction
Support Process
Numbering / Calling system
Figure 5. The service blueprint for the order and receive process at Beesket (distinctive features are marked in yellow)
market. The positive business outcomes of Beesket are not only from the distinctive design aspects of the brand but also from the novel platform which facilitates this positive experience for customers. In order to demonstrate the uniqueness of this ordering process, a service blueprint for Beesket’s order and receive system is described in Figure 5. The distinctive features are marked in yellow. The measured results A survey on other juice brands was carried out by a research agency in Korea. Researchers physically visited the store to collect data for Beesket. A total of 136 representative individuals participated in the survey, and they were asked to respond to four questions (along a seven-point scale, from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’) derived from the physical evidence and design
considerations. The points of each dimension were averaged and plotted in a radar chart. The result using Design Value Typology is demonstrated in Figure 6. As shown in Figure 6, three design value dimensions (related to emotions such as efficiency, quality, fun, beauty, self-esteem and personal reputation) of Beesket are above the industry average. Overall, the results can be interpreted to show that Beesket’s unique service platform and the visualisation of service deliver superior design value to their customers within the same industry sector. The implications of the study The overall procedure of measuring design value in this study is as follows; 1) analysing the service system with service blueprint method, 2) performing structured interviews, 3) creating a set of the survey question, and 4) measuring and analysing the collected data. By following Touchpoint 9-2 55
S-E dimension 7
6 5 4 3 2 1
O-I dimension
Industry average
O-E dimension
0
Beesket
S-I dimension
Dimensions
Self-oriented – Extrinsic
Other-oriented – Self-oriented – Extrinsic Intrinsic
Other-oriented Intrinsic
Industry average
4.97
4.54
4.86
3.87
Beesket
5.30
4.94
5.55
3.46
Figure 6. The diamond of Design Value Typology (Beesket and industry average)
the procedure, this study identified a measuring method for design value of fresh juice businesses with a differentiated ordering system. It is challenging to demonstrate how a service provider can develop a distinctive service platform at this stage. However, there are some key implications and messages from the current study for practitioners. First, this study proposes a novel approach to examine design value in the service industry. By employing the mixed method, it is viable to assess the value of design quantitatively. The quantitative result derived from a thorough understanding of design can indicate specific areas of improvement for a service provider. Secondly, the rigorous data collection is necessary. The analysed result can isolate areas of practical opportunities for improvement if a business is compared with the industry-wide scale of data. Lastly, this study confirms 56 Touchpoint 9-2
the effectiveness of the service blueprint method for identifying the potential touchpoints for innovative service delivery. Although this research is a post-hoc evaluation of the existing brand, the result clearly indicates that the innovative idea for enhancing the service delivery platform can be identified through the service blueprint method.
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A playful, yet incredibly powerful, card game for co-creation. Each pack contains a wealth of exercises that increase energy, save time and get better results from any workshop or brainstorm. Learn more and buy your own deck at www.kingdomcards.be Use offer code TOUCHPOINT for a â‚Ź10 discount.
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Meeting Service Sandbox A method for ideating digital services in a physical environment
Jane Vita, over the past 19 years, has worked in many of the design competencies, with projects in a range of different industries. At Digitalist, she facilitates dialogue around the service design practice. In client projects, her role is to act as a lead consultant, helping clients to discover their digital future.
The Service Sandbox is composed of a range of building blocks that represent what creators should consider when co-creating and promoting service experiences in physical spaces. It allows service creators to roam and explore services rather than follow a linear path, opening up possibilities across a range of services within users’ daily routine. In its first version, the set includes tiles to simulate a variety of home types and other living facilities, as well as tokens for smart devices, sensors, detectors and home appliances. Description cards and canvases help the service creators to ideate about customer values, living situations, personas, home types, features and service concepts. Future versions will include other necessary assets to make
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many other physical spaces accessible at a glance, for designing hybrid services which combine physical and digital environments. Why Service Sandbox was developed The Service Sandbox methodology was developed by Jane Vita, Digitalist Group’s Lead Service Designer, as part of her doctoral studies. Her research focused
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on building a user-centred framework that utilises concept layers, or building blocks, as the groundwork to help professionals understand the role of technology in physical environments, and to give them tools that could meaningfully maximise technology’s role. The layers are a reproduction of the factors that are important to consider when designing hybrid services, combining physical and digital. The first Service Sandbox set was created for Fortum, a Finnish energy company, in the context of smart living. The Service Sandbox helped the team to simulate, prototype and design smart living services. Why ‘Sandbox’? A ‘sandbox’ is a style of game in which minimal character limitations are placed on the game, allowing the gamer to roam and change a virtual world at will. In contrast to a progression-style game, a sandbox game emphasises roaming and allows a player to select tasks. Like a real sandbox, the method and tools empower people to explore with minimal constraint. How does it work? Due to the proficiency of the Service Sandbox and the different concept layers, we allowed a determination of the workshop duration to be made by those planning the session. The determining factor was how deep they
“The Smart Living Sandbox was a fun and new way for us to work together. We used the Sandbox for simulating the smart living environment at Fortum and it was very useful in creating the environment to demonstrate the services we wanted to test out. It allowed us to discuss openly about decisions since it was a very open platform.” Maria Uhari-Pakkalin, Head of Customer Experience Design, Fortum OYJ
wanted to dive into the concept and associated layers. The main goal of the workshop is to experiment and play. The method can be applied in workshops ranging anywhere between three hours to a two-day workshop, depending on the requirements and aims. We suggest having a maximum of 20 participants, four to five participants per group, and two facilitators to run the sessions.
Build
Ideate
Define
1. 2. 3. 4.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
1. 2. 3. 4.
Define the kind of environment you are building Describe the type of resident (persona) living in that home Add personal assets for that resident. They can range from smart devices to bikes and cars Add smart appliances
Pick themes to ideate around Create the resident’s values based on those themes Think about life situations where residents will most value a service Use sensors and detectors to prototype how technology can help deliver that value Clean up! Remove all assets that are not connected with your concept Enhance the experience by looking at the different ways of interacting with the residents
Define the service features Place these on the Features Evaluation Canvas Place the features in an Experience Hierarchy Canvas and try to leverage the whole experience Use the other supportive canvases to bundle, then pitch it!
Table 1: Session stages.
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Figure 1. Service Sandbox assets
The sessions are structured in three stages of: Build, Ideate and Define (see Table 1). You can get a better overview on the Service Sandbox from Figure 1. The value of using Service Sandbox Service Sandbox is a co-creation tool. It works as an integral part of a service design process and it adds an experiential value to the way we design services in physical space. While there are countless tools out there to map experiences, describe paths and journeys, we needed a tool to explore and play freely, in an open environment, and in the context of a Smart Home. This playful way of working unlocks the creativity, engagement and enthusiasm of different stakeholders in the organisation. Open for feedback and findings We created the Service Sandbox to shape and build more meaningful services. Since we can’t do it alone, we decided to share the knowledge and improve the methodology together with the community. That is why the Service Sandbox is distributed under a Creative Commons license. It is open to anyone that wants to collaborate. We have already begun calls for ambassadors that will help us 60 Touchpoint 9-2
to localise and translate the assets and content to other countries and cultures. We have already found eager people to assist us in Brazil, the US, Canada, Finland, Sweden and Mexico. The only thing we ask in exchange is that people give us feedback and help us to measure the impact, and improve how people are using the tool. Would you like to know more or start using it? You can download the entire initial package from the Digitalist Service Sandbox website: www.servicesandbox.net.
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Six Hacks for Service Designers in Agile Settings Service design is a holistic activity which should align with organisational strategy. What should you do if you find yourself in a Scrum team? Regardless of whether you’re a seasoned service designer, or just starting out, there’s a good chance that your education and first project experiences consisted of relatively luxurious spans of time in which to carry out your work. Several weeks to carry out contextual research? No problem. A few more to build and test a prototype? Nary a complaint. With the mandate to scope your projects and determine your timelines, you could move through your chosen methodology at a pace that suited you. But thanks to the growing adoption of Agile, you might find your way of working thrown upside down. Ideally service designers deliver our best value when we stay outside the “Scrum” (literally and figuratively), fulfilling our strategic role and avoiding the hectic pace and too-narrow focus of two-week sprints. Our work should provide guidance to tactical and operational activities, rather than playing a direct role in them. But sometimes such a detached position isn’t feasible, and we need adopt the Agile mindset, accept that we’re led by a product owner (and not a service owner), and find a way to work within a team.
Fear not, service designers in Agile settings! Here are six hacks you can carry out to expand your strategic perspective and influence, while still working to tick items off a product backlog and get that next iteration of your product (service!) out the door. These have been devised thanks to Informaat’s consultancy work and hands-on experience with several large Dutch organisations who have transitioned to Agile, and where service designers such as myself have played a role in Agile teams. After all, while being limited by an operational role makes true service design difficult, the Agile transformation itself does provide chances to strengthen the role of (service) design in the organisation.
1
Jesse Grimes, Editor-in-Chief for Touchpoint, has nine years experience as a service designer and consultant. He has worked in London, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf and Sydney and is now based in Amsterdam with Dutch agency Informaat. Jesse is also Vice President of the Service Design Network.
Canvasses are your friend
Set aside time to focus the team’s attention on the strategic aspects of your project, and use existing canvas-based techniques to do so. Despite the fact that Touchpoint 9-2 61
Agile teams work under tremendous pressure to deliver incrementally, everyone will benefit from having shared input and a common understanding of the “big picture”. If they haven’t initiated the activity themselves, invite product owners and the rest of the team into short, intensive sessions to fill in documents such as a Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas, as early as possible. Even better, consider canvasses designed expressly with service design in mind, such as the Lean Service Creation toolkit from Futurice. When multiple service designers are operating independently, make sure to connect and share the same vision, principles and ecosystem view. You’ll be surprised the value these activities and deliverables generate.
3
Involve your team in involving your customers
2
Involving real end users in the design process is crucial to fulfilling the expectations of a service designer. And despite the fact that your Agile method might have iteration and user testing baked-in, there’s often the assumption that testing is carried out exclusively by UX’ers and service designers. Instead, convince non-designers to observe research sessions. The investment of an hour’s time looking over the shoulders of real customers can pay great dividends by replacing the fuzzy concept of end users with living, breathing humans. And where existing user research methods prove problematic in an Agile team, help identify more suitable, leaner ones.
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Create a CX Design Library While this hack requires the effort of several disciplines in the team, it delivers great value and helps ensure that as a service grows, it does so efficiently and maintains a consistent end user experience. The library consists of sets of documents which are created, maintained, and consulted by four separate teams: — Brand and communications team (Brand value and principles, Brand identity, Tone of voice, Image library) — Design management team (Channel and design principles, Reference designs, Structure and navigation templates, Patterns and UX guidelines) — Digital identity team (Digital identity, Pages and templates, UI components, Elements) — Front-end team (Reference code (web components), Platform-specific code) While these documents may already exist (in which case you can be proud to be working in a well-honed machine!), they are likely stored separately, updated irregularly, and difficult to find. Seize your strategic mandate and your orchestrational skills, assemble them in an easy-to-refer-to library, and rest well, knowing that your team will be even more efficient as they deliver consistent experiences.
4
Construct a Journey Dashboard
More and more service designers are naming their data scientists and analytics teammembers as their ‘BFF’s. And that’s because as today’s complex services become even better developed and delivered, they have the potential to generate immensely valuable data on how they are used by customers. Don your orchestrational cap once more, and team up with a data scientist to discover just what insights you can glean from the sea of data. Categorise these insights using Google’s
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HEART framework (‘Happiness’, ‘Engagement’, ‘Adoption’, ‘Retention’, and ‘Task success’). And then oversee the creation of an internallyaccessible dashboard on which the data can be continually monitored. Too often, the power of analytics is focussed on dry ‘web stats’ (unique visits and referrals) or commercial performance (conversion figures and dropouts). Instead, apply a service design approach, starting from an analysis of individual touchpoints, and deliver a dashboard in which service experience is measured and displayed at a journey level. You’ll deliver valuable new insights to both your team and higher-up stakeholders, and you’ll get a holistic view of how your service is performing.
Sprint ahead of the rest
5
In Scrum (as one of the most-applied Agile methodologies), the team progresses through a sequence of milestones that are repeated in sprints as short as two weeks. While your routine might be driven by sprint plannings and demos, and your focus driven by the product backlog, you can also partially disengage from this cycle, and work in advance of your team. If your backlog indicates that a complex new feature starts development two sprints from now, why not prepare yourself? Set aside a portion of your time to carry out feature-scale ideation, prototyping and research (or even a small-scale service blueprint), and do so in conjunction with your UX partner. Once that sprint begins, the design work will be better informed, and you won’t have the feeling that you cut corners simply because you had to start and end your work within one sprint.
6
Chip away at the pure product mindset
I’ve had heated discussions in which I’ve tried to convince product owners that - despite what their job title suggests - they were truly creating only an element of a larger service. In large organisations, product owners bring with them a laser-sharp focus on delivering excellent products to the market. But sometimes you need to force them to recognise the fact that their product won’t launch into a vacuum; it will exist and be used alongside many others in a complex and rich customer experience. You’ll need to work in two directions. Firstly, from a service level: Ensure that product owners are aware of each other’s initiatives. An organisation wants to deliver a consistent (and delightful) customer experience that doesn’t lay bare the fact that the products themselves were independently developed. Think in touchpoint terms if it helps: If your product owner is responsible for the app, have they briefed the call center on a new feature that might suddenly generate support calls for which the agents are unprepared? Secondly, work from a product level: As you work within your Agile team, step back continually and evaluate for yourself how the latest iteration of your product fits within the bigger service picture. This is a product-service alignment, and while not part of a pure, productbased methodology, is critically important when the product is a component of a larger service.
In closing, I’d like to reiterate that the application of service design is already compromised when it only influences tactical and operational activities. To fulfil your strategic capabilities as a service designer when you're working with only an operational focus, try and convince your organisation to raise the profile and increase the mandate of service design by placing it at a more strategic level. These hacks were inspired by the SDN Netherlands event presentation “5 Agile Design Hacks, and How To Do It Properly in the Near Future” by my Informaat colleague Rob van der Haar on 19 September 2017, and by my own experience.
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Š Freddie Marriage
Education and Research
Measurement Beyond Surveys… Collecting more holistic, comprehensive feedback throughout service systems Service designers need to collect user feedback throughout various touchpoints in order to create superior experiences. But how? And when? And to what end? The term “feedback” is often heard as a necessary means to gauge the success of a product or service, but it is rarely discussed in-depth or examined in terms of how one Nahal Tavangar is a multidisciplinary design strategist. After studying international relations (B.A.) in Washington D.C. and working in the public, private and non-profit sectors, she discovered human-centred design to be the connecting thread in her ongoing interest of solving complex problems across disciplines. She recently completed her M.A. in Integrated Design, with a focus on service design, from Köln International School of Design (KISD).
actually carries it out to get valuable, comprehensive insights.
How often have you heard (or given) the directive to “collect feedback” on a product or service, only to find that it ended up on a long to-do list of project deliverables, eventually taking the form of a simple survey or a few customer interviews with standard questions? Collecting feedback is not a given – it needs to be designed! We are living in the age of the Experience Economy, which is defined as the evolution of our changing economic value from products, to services, to creating memorable experiences.1 The Experience Economy accounts for the industry shift in placing more value on the customer’s overall experience, rather than merely the creation of a product or service. In order to gauge
1 Brown, T. (2009). Change By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
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success and improve at a rate that keeps up with competitors, increasing emphasis is being placed on providing channels through which customers can provide feedback. However, attempting to gather feedback in order to measure the impact of services is challenging in many ways. Namely, unlike products, which have a more established “end” point, services are often ongoing and ever-changing. They are fluid experiences with multiple touchpoints that include a wide-range of uniquely-felt emotions from the people interacting with them. In order to be able to measure how successful a service is, one must find ways to collect more comprehensive, representative feedback, rather than simply relying on a survey distributed at the end of the process. Although more traditional methods for collecting feedback, namely surveys, have and continue to serve an important role in this process, they are not sufficient
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for those of us who wish to create superior services. Providing only one conduit for collecting user input tends to attract the same ‘type’ of user (e.g. an extroverted person with strong written or verbal skills) and limits the type of feedback that one receives in return (often soliciting either very negative or very positive feedback), with little in-between.2 Feedback isn’t black and white; in creating services, success is much more than a “yes” to the question, “do you like this service?” If we truly want to incorporate feedback into the service system, we need to pay closer attention to what methods and tools we use, and ‘design’ the process of asking for user input. Holistic feedback: attempting to capture the ‘meaning’ behind the ‘facts’ As service designers, we understand the value of including user input during the design process, in addition to collecting input on implemented services. We believe that gathering feedback during the creative process drives good design. Because designing services often requires us to be on-the-ground with users and use empathy-building tools to understand a customer journey, we know the value of trying to understand before we create or judge. As playwright, author, and Worldwide Creative Director of TBWA, John Hunt, aptly states: “Insight appears when you look for meaning rather than facts.”3 The core of my research for my M.A. thesis, “Designing Holistic Feedback,” was around the question of how one can attempt to collect more qualitative, comprehensive feedback (i.e. ‘holistic’ feedback) and what methods and tools does the design field bring to this alreadyestablished market research field. While the definition of ‘feedback’ is broad and has its origins in cybernetics (the study of regulatory systems in electronics), for the sake of my research, I chose to explore
2 Wheeler, D. (2015). The Rising Revolt Against Customer Surveys. TheWeek.com [Online] Retrieved January 5, 2017, from http://theweek. com/articles/577882/rising-revolt-against-customer-surveys. 3 Hunt, S. and Sam Nhlengethwa (2009). The Art of the Idea and How It Can Change Your Life. Brooklyn, New York: powerhouse Books.
Workshop participants chose three images to describe their experience – soliciting significantly more complex and emotional feedback than participants who filled out the paper survey or took part in the group interview.
feedback as the information collected (what I refer to as the ‘output’) from an interaction between a customer and any given feedback method (what I refer to as the ‘input’), as a result of experiencing a product and/or service. Following my research, I argue that feedback collection in a service system should ideally possess the following three qualities in order to collect the most ‘holistic’ feedback: 1. Multi-channelled: Services should include a few very different methods in order to ensure that a wide-range of users with different personalities feel comfortable in providing their input. 2. Designed: Not only should the look and feel of the method be thought through, but the environment in which feedback is solicited (time and place) should be planned in order to profit from otherwise untapped potential touchpoints where people are more willing to provide input. Touchpoint 9-2 67
In a design-driven feedback loop, unlike a traditional feedback loop, customers play a more active role in the process, often co-creating with companies (original diagrams taken from the M.A. thesis, “Designing Holistic Feedback”)
3. Constant: it is not enough to ask for feedback only at prototype stage, and then when the service is fully complete. Include feedback methods throughout the process and collect multi-channel feedback at various touchpoints, even after the design process is done. Merging market research with design: A typology of feedback methods Choosing which feedback tools are appropriate and when to use them is very important – not only because feedback loops ensure that the service is continually fulfilling user needs, but also because thinking through the qualities of the methods and tools ensures that the type of feedback solicited is more broad and diverse in nature. In other words, the ways in which we solicit opinions (i.e. input) dictates the type of feedback we ultimately collect (i.e. output). In response to being unable to find a comprehensive typology of feedback methods, I attempted to bridge the gap between what I found in the market research field and what we all know from the design field. I identified 28 commonly-used feedback tools and sorted them into 14 main feedback methods, seven of which are taken from the social sciences and seven from the design field. I then outlined their traits and usage and classified them in three main categories: ‘Tools to Ask’, ‘Tools to Understand’, and ‘Tools to Create’. With this information, I created a model for visualising them based on a combination of the input characteristics of 68 Touchpoint 9-2
the method (‘Visual’, ‘Auditory’, and ‘Introspective’) and the output characteristics, or the type of feedback received (‘Verbal’, ‘Written’, and ‘Active’). The hexagon figures subsequently created serve as a first step in visually comparing feedback methods. When printed on transparent paper and held up against each other, the combination of methods produces a fully coloured-in hexagon. This indicates that the methods chosen are diverse enough in their elements to encourage the widest array of users to provide feedback. I argue that in order to collect more holistic feedback, one must ideally use one tool from each category (‘Ask’, ‘Understand’, and ‘Create’) in combination.
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To explore this first-hand, I conducted a small-scale experiment where I asked a group of international students the same question – to provide feedback on a common experience they all had – and used three different feedback tools to collect the results. The first group responded using a standard survey, the second group participated in an in-person group interview, and the third group was prompted to choose three cards with stock-photo images that best described their experience and explain why they chose each card. The experiment proved to be insightful: the survey provided standard, quantifiable data; the group interview revealed insight into the diversity of personal experiences and the power of social interaction in the feedback process; and the image prompt revealed latent human needs and provided rich descriptions of personal experience through the use of metaphors. Each tool served a particular purpose and provided important information, and their combination provided me with a more comprehensive idea of the group’s collective experience. Furthermore, interestingly, it was clear that the image prompt yielded a far richer, qualitative overview of the needs and emotions of the participants than the survey and group interview. This led me to conclude that in addition to combining different ‘types’ of feedback tools in the service system, it is valuable to take time to explore alternative ways of collecting customer input that attempt to draw out latent insights not otherwise captured by traditional means.
One example of an ongoing feedback method during the creation process: Participants in a workshop prototype solutions
In conclusion, my research serves as a preliminary exploration of the topic of feedback and expounds upon, what I believe, to be a topic that has great potential for further development and testing. If we can further develop a tool that assists us in choosing the right combination of feedback methods, we will be in a much better place as service designers to reach customers in the way in which they prefer to be interacted with – therefore collecting more ‘holistic’ feedback.
An electronic copy of the M.A. thesis, “Designing Holistic Feedback: A Typology of Methods and Proposed Framework for Soliciting More Comprehensive, Qualitative User Input” may be requested by contacting nahaltav@gmail.com.
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Design Methods for Strengthening Social Cohesion A service design approach to community-based resiliency Using a co-design process, we created a model for a new community-based service focused on disaster preparedness for New York City neighbourhoods most impacted by climate change. The project is designed to bridge the gap between isolated, medically-fragile residents and advanced care/services. Aran Baker is a designer and urban practitioner who works in the intersection of climate change, equity and public health. She has an MS in Design and Urban Ecologies from Parsons School of Design in NYC, and is a Civic Design Fellow with IDEO and the Knight Foundation.
Using this project as a case study, we explore opportunities for service designers to connect institutions and players at different scales across a vertical divide. We also explore concepts of interdependency and how to build and strengthen social cohesion while empowering community. We hope to provide a new lens on the service design co-creative process, bringing a much-needed social focus to the global resiliency conversation.
Valentina Branada is a Chilean designer passionate about using design strategies for social advancement. She explores collaboration and participation in the design of public services, using her practice to understand systems, empower, provoke, and open new dialogues. Valentina has an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons.
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Challenges facing isolated residents During climate-related emergencies, many of NYC’s residents, such as seniors and those with illnesses and/or disabilities, become isolated in their homes, without a pre-existing mechanism to identify or treat them. This problem was acute in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn during Hurricane Sandy, in 2012.1 Geographically isolated, Red Hook has a 45% poverty rate, high levels of asthma and diabetes, and Brooklyn’s largest public housing development. The storm’s damage left the
neighbourhood without access to medical care. If it wasn’t for a medical student’s efforts going door to door with intake forms, over 350 people would not have received the medical care they urgently needed.2 This project grew directly out of that grassroots effort.
1 Schmeltz MT, González SK, et al. “Lessons from Hurricane Sandy: a Community Response in Brooklyn, New York.” Journal of Urban Health. 2013;90(5):799–809
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Illustration of the check-in service design concept in use during a crisis, showing co-ordination efforts. Around 400,000 NYC residents live in areas prone to flooding. Furthermore, the frequency of climate-related events is projected to intensify, including hurricanes, and – of primary concern – heatwaves. Despite this, there is no citywide mechanism or strategy in place to meet the needs of isolated, medically fragile residents in these crises. Climate change is a socio-spatial issue – not everyone is impacted equally. The problem of climate, equity and access to care is complex, and each community has unique needs. This means that universal, one-sizefits-all solutions do not work. Service proposal and vision Using Red Hook as a case study, we envision a neighbourhood-wide support network, comprised of residents who check-in on medically-fragile and elderly neighbours in advance of summer heatwaves, the autumn hurricane season and winter storms. The purpose is to help them stay prepared, empowered, and connected to services. Our goals are to 1) bridge the gap between isolated residents and first response, and 2) embed disaster preparedness and climate change knowledge into everyday life and build social cohesion. Although what
2 Kraushar, ML and Rosenberg, RE, “A Community led medical response effort in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.” Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. Cambridge University Press, 2015
we are proposing is entirely new, we seek to integrate with (and build upon) existing social networks and local organisations. Social cohesion In the global resiliency conversation, there has been an over-emphasis on physical infrastructure solutions, such as flood walls, floodgates and engineering solutions, but not enough emphasis on social infrastructure, social cohesion and the capacity of communities to plan ahead. Eric Klinenberg defines social infrastructure as: “The people, places, and institutions that foster cohesion and support.”3 The strength of our social infrastructure – our social connections and communication networks – will undoubtedly save lives in future climate change events, and we need to recognise its importance. The role of social cohesion in post-disaster recovery has been widely studied by scholars,4 but its role in pre-emptive efforts has not yet been explored in depth. Through this project, our goal has been to design a strategy and supporting methodology to strengthen social capacity given these collective challenges we face.
3 Klinenberg, E. “Adaptation: How can cities be ‘climate-proofed?’” The New Yorker 5 (2013) 4 Aldrich, D. Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-disaster Recovery. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012
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Top-down
Meso
Bottom-up
Diagram created in collaboration with Miodrag Mitrasinovic, Parsons School of Design.
Built at the ‘meso’ level Our research in Red Hook and into the citywide preparedness and response system revealed a large gap in the ‘meso’ sphere. The meso sphere is a social space between government (policy, law and regulative frameworks), private initiatives that include provision of professional medical services, and community (everyday practice, social networks and self-organised citizens groups). For example, community-based non-profits operate in this sphere. There aren’t enough mechanisms for traditionally top-down government initiatives to communicate and work effectively with bottom-up, grassroots initiatives, and vice-versa. For example, in times of crisis, it often takes days for the US government’s disaster-relief agency (FEMA) and other aid organisations to reach the communities they serve. The ‘Occupy Sandy’ relief effort showed us that responses which integrate local social networks work better than top-down approaches. As service designers, we have a unique opportunity to work in this space, building platforms to connect stakeholders at both the city and community levels, through a process whose core values and principles embodies the transformation we want to create.
The meso sphere is a social space between government, private initiatives and community.
72 Touchpoint 9-2
Unique approach of service design in resiliency To build this meso level platform, we first developed a design process embedded in the community we were designing for, built around community collaboration and feedback. The term ‘design’ in this context refers to both the tangible material products developed, as well as the methods and design process as a whole. We employed a co-design methodology, inviting multiple stakeholders into the creative design process from the outset, including (most importantly) Red Hook residents, whose feedback and collaboration are essential to the ultimate success of the final proposal. In co-design, we are primarily focused on the role of the designer as facilitator in a process of co-creation, which sees people as experts on their own experiences and contexts.5 We realised it was not enough to include different stakeholders in the design process, but we also needed to go further and establish a continuous presence in the neighbourhood and gain residents’ trust. To accomplish this, we: — Recruited an advisory team comprised of medical, design, law and disaster preparedness experts Conducted a series of design-led workshops at the local — public library and senior centre, with an open call to participate Used stakeholder mapping to understand residents' — assets and resources in times of crisis, establishing a feeling of ownership in the service from the beginning Attended community events, such as ‘Old Timers’ Day’ — and sporting events, as well as hosted public meetings — Participated in information sessions about health and preparedness to present the project and gather feedback Invited several residents to work with us as part of a — paid core team Maintained an online presence through a Facebook — page and website
5 Akama, Y, et al. “Design-led strategies for brushfire preparedness.” Paper presented at EARTH: FIRE AND RAIN, Australian & New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management Conference, Brisbane – 16 – 18, April 2012
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Community engagement was one of our largest challenges. This is because Red Hook residents are weary to participate due to their experiences with previous resiliency initiatives which resulted in no visible improvements. Our participatory design process and tools (see accompanying imagery) offered a tangible alternative for residents to actively participate and engage. While developing this community-based network, we also needed to align with both local organisations/ services and with citywide service providers and first response services, thereby establishing our meso level platform. For example, for the service to be effective, it needs to work with the NYC Department of Emergency Management, which co-ordinates response efforts at the city level. We also worked with stakeholders at the NYC Department of Health, and at the Governor's Office of Storm Recovery, among others.
Through stakeholder mapping with Red Hook residents, we were able to better understand the neighbourhood’s assets
Photo by Nathan DeHart.
and resources.
Expanding horizons Through sharing these insights, we intend to expand the horizons and contexts where service designers can make an impact. In this case in particular, to use service design to help transform the resiliency sector. We need new, adaptive models that strengthen social cohesion and self-sufficiency at the neighbourhood level, while creating important linkages and communication channels with government and citywide service providers. Service designers have the unique ability to connect traditionallysiloed institutions and players, while empowering community through a participatory design process and creating models based upon real needs. At its heart, this project creates a new value proposition based on interdependency and trust: Only together, in an organised fashion, can we do something about the collective challenges we face. We hope this project can serve as an example and open up new possibilities for collaboration.
Learn more about the Red Hook Check-in concept at www.redhookcheckin.org
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Partnering for Service Design Education Industry-university collaborations as catalysts in fostering a discipline The introduction of service design education at HAWK (University of Applied Sciences and Arts, in Hildesheim, Germany) has been significantly improved in speed and quality through collaboration with industry partners. Both its importance to society and its relevance in design education have been demonstrated in Holger Fricke teaches Design Management at HAWK and administers the professorship for Design Marketing. Before HAWK, he led teams at frog design (Milan), Aperto (Berlin) and Tchibo (Hamburg). He studied at Ashridge Business School in the UK, and at the University of Essen in Germany, and he holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration and Economics. His current consulting projects are in the lighting and consumer electronics industries.
practical outputs based upon real-life briefs and solid theoretical foundations. More than 20 years ago, Birgit Mager was named the first professor for service design in Europe, reinforcing the reputation of the Cologne University of Applied Sciences’ Faculty of Design (today known as KISD) as a forerunner in pushing the boundaries of design. Today, many of KISD’s alumni play pivotal roles in the service design and service management sectors. Design schools across Europe have followed in the footsteps of KISD, including HAWK’s Faculty of Design1 , a century-old arts and engineering school. Although we had no formal service design BA or MA programmes in place, we started from the perspective of design management, and its role in linking design to business and thereby pushing the boundaries of the design discipline. Over the last four years,
1 http://elearn.hawk-hhg.de/projekte/59/pages/ esa/history-of-hawk.php; as of 07.08.17
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service design has been implemented into HAWK’s Master of Design Programme. This has involved close collaboration in both research and education between HAWK and service providers in both the public and private sectors. Partner in research and development An early partner in this development was Hamburg-based Eppendorf AG (EAG), a world-leading provider of solutions in liquid handling. When approached by HAWK with the loose idea of ‘doing something together’ it was EAG’s head of R&D who suggested gathering a team of scientists and managers that would work closely with more than 30 Masters students in their first semester. The students went on to carry out intensive field studies in laboratories, hospitals and genetic treatment centers. They produced evidence that productservice combinations were likely to offer
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improved user experiences in and beyond laboratories, rather than products alone. Both EAG and HAWK benefitted from the co-operation, making it clear that it was possible to facilitate a learning programme that would meet our academic standards and simultaneously expose students to the unique circumstances of the medical industry and public (health) services. Another project was carried out for Sartorius AG (SAG), a global leader in high precision filtering and weighing headquartered in Göttingen, which included a whole range of topics ranging from logistics and education to service branding. Again, an entire class of Masters students set out to understand customers, service-providing parties and their ecosystems alike. The students profited from their exposure to everyday needs in a complex industry, providing them with insight to build their solutions upon. Extensive and detailed feedback was afforded by a large audience of highranking specialists and managers at SAG.2 As a last example of industry partnership, Viking, a leading Austrian manufacturer of lawnmowers and gardening equipment, asked our students to conceptualise services that would help address the sales network’s biggest needs. To do so, the HAWK teams set out to discover what those needs exactly were. While the results remain proprietary until the end of 2017, Viking manager Harald Aschaber already judged that “these results are far beyond all our expectations”.3 While service design and design management are transdisciplinary in nature per se, HAWK also tackles service design education in its regular interdisciplinary courses run jointly by at least two professors. In one of these integrative projects, titled ‘Designing for the Public Good’, students used their insight to design solutions for citizens participating in running their city and found ways to let unemployed citizens navigate the complexities of the German Federal Agency for Work (Bundesagentur für Arbeit; BAA).
PILOTPROJEKT VERWALTUNG Beantragung von ALG I Leistungsempfänger von ALG I+II in 2015
Stakeholder Antragsstellung
5,4%
LeistungsAbteilung Online-Portal
4.38 Mio. ALG II (Hartz IV)
Grundsicherungsleistung
FITs
81 Mio.
Service Center – SC
1,0 % 834 000 ALG I
Versicherungsleistung
»KUNDE«
Arbeitsloser/ -suchender
Arbeitgeber
Vermittlung – AGS
Eingangszone – EZ
Zentrale Nürnberg
User Journey – Problemstellung erster Kontakt
Arbeitssuchendmeldung / Vermittlung
persönliche Arbeitslosmeldung /Antragsstellung ALG I
Problemstellung
Leistungsbewilligung
Anruf beim Service Center
Daten über Online-Portal
EInladung zur Berufsvermittlung
Vorschläge für Stellen per Post
persönlich beim Sachbearbeiter
Antrag über Online-Portal
Anruf von BA: keine AL-Meldung
persönliche Meldung
Bewilligung per Post
persönlich am Service-Schalter
persönlich beim Sachbearbeiter
EInladung zur Berufsvermittlung
Vorschläge für Stellen per Post
bereits beim ersten Kontakt
1. Antrag per Post
Anruf bei BA: keine Unterlagen
2. Antrag persönlich
Bewilligung per Post
MISSTRAUEN
Arne
KUNDE
Vanessa
BUNDESAGENTUR
fehlende Transparenz
in Kommunikation & Beantragungsprozessen Information auf Internetseite
Daten über Online-Portal
EInladung zur Berufsvermittlung
Vorschläge für Stellen per Post
persönlich beim Sachbearbeiter
Antrag über Online-Portal
Anruf bei BA: keine AL-Meldung
persönliche Meldung
Bewilligung per Post
Christian
+
-
Fragestellung Wodurch kann Transparenz in der Kommunikation zwischen Kunde und Arbeitsagentur geschaffen werden?
Konzeptidee & Lösungsvorschlag Ein User-Tracking-Tool soll die Kommunikation zwischen Kunde und Agentur für Arbeit erleichtern und den Prozess der Antragsstellung transparenter machen. Eine Schnittstelle, die das Vertrauen auf beiden Seiten wieder herstellen soll.
Storytelling & Prototyping
Daniel Khan, Wiebke Tjarks, Yipan Wang
Work by master students Daniel Khan, Wiebke Tjarks and Yipan Wang . HAWK Hildesheim Sommersemester 2016
A poster illustrating preliminary research and service concepts for recipients of social welfare and unemployment benefits.
2 https://www.hawk-hhg.de/aktuell/default_215631.php, as of 07.08.17 3 http://www.hawk-hhg.de/aktuell/default_218783.php, as of 07.08.17
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URBAN REPORT
Das sichere Mobilitäts-Netzwerk
...deine Stadt, deine Idee, deine App.
Willkommen bei Urban Report, der App für deine Stadt. Hast du dich schon immer mal gefragt wie man dafür sorgen kann, dass deine Stadt auf deine Befürfnisse reagiert? Hast du gute Ideen und würdest dir wünschen, dass sie jemand an der entscheidenden Stelle hört und umsetzt? Kostet das nicht Zeit und Mühe? Nicht mit dieser App. Hier kannst du ganz unkompliziert deine Eindrücke und Wünsche mit deiner Stadtverwaltung teilen. Melde etwas, poste Ideen oder erfahre welche Projekte deine Stadt erst kürzlich umgesetzt hat.
1. Poste deinen Wunsch bezüglich der Stadtgestaltung
sicheres Mobilitäts-
Netzwerk
„Seitdem wir dem Netzwerk beigetreten sind, fahre ich wieder gern bei Harald im Auto mit!“ (Marie Rosenthal, 68 Jahre)
Das Netzwerk liefert den Senioren einen Rundumblick über die Möglichkeiten weiterhin mobil zu bleiben. Es zeigt Alternativen, auf die umgestiegen werden kann, aber auch Möglichkeiten sicher(er) weiterzufahren. Senioren und Angehörige können sich durch verschiedene Printprodukte, sowie auf der Internetseite umfassend über das Thema „Fahren im Alter“ und die Möglichkeiten weiterhin mobil zu bleiben, informieren. Auch der Hausarzt informiert, unterstützt und stellt Kontakte zu Ansprechpartnern her. Das Netzwerk bietet den Mitgliedern neben Vergünstigungen auch Prämien an, beispielsweise Fahrsicherheitstrainings. Die einzelnen Komponenten des Netzwerkes sind individuell auf die Bedürfnisse jedes Einzelnen anpassbar. Die Anmeldung erfolgt unkomliziert in einem der teilnehmenden Unternehmen, in Arztpraxen, Apotheken, im Internet oder in einer der vielen Service-Filialen.
2. Dein Post wird gesehen
3. Das Projekt wurde verwirklicht
4. Jeder kann es sehen
Problem
Idee
Umsetzung
Die Kommunikation zwischen Stadtverwaltung und Bürger geht nur sehr mühsam vonstatten. Es fehlt an einem einfachen Kommunikationsmitel, welches beide Seiten bedient.
Die Idee ist ein einfaches Kommunikationsmittel, welches dem Bürger erlaubt seine Bedürfnisse und Wünsche diekt und ersichtlich der Stadtverwaltung mitzuteilen. Gleichzeitig soll er Einsicht haben auf bereits umgesetzte Projekte.
Entstanden ist eine leicht bedienbare App, die jedem Bürger erlaubt seine Wünsche und Ideen an die Stadtverwaltung mühelos weiterzugeben. Die Stadt hat nun ebenfalls mit einer eigenen Benutzeroberfläche den direkten Blick auf die Bedürfnisse und kann so schneller und gezielter auf diese eingehen.
Master Students: Nicole Olik, Alina Naujoks, Monique Saparautzki, Jill-Catrin Thiel, Anne Ittner, Irina Fischer, Clara Höfs, Hannah Salk, Mario Kersten and Adriana Wagner Das sichere Mobilitäts-Netzwerk | SoSe 2016 | Pilotprojekt | Nicole Olik, Alina Naujoks, Monique Saparautzki, Jill-Catrin Thiel, Anne Ittner-Czech Irina Fischer, Clara Höfs, Hannah Salk, Mario Kersten, Adriana Wagner
Connecting citizens: illustrations of concepts to build mobility networks in rural areas (left) and an initiative to re-establish citizen's sense of ownership of their cities (right)
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Similar projects led to the development of co-buying solutions for Germany’s ever-ageing rural areas. Engineers at Sennheiser helped another team of students prove the feasibility of ‘Learning Ears’, an educational service aimed at children working in refugee camps. Managers at Deutsche Bahn (the German national railway) witnessed the results of largely independent work carried out by students under guidance of Prof. Stefan Wölwer (Interaction Design) and Holger Fricke. The generic initial question was “What services could improve the customer experience in regional transportation at DB?” To find answers, students applied their skills in ethnographic research to gather insights that formed the basis for decisions for an entire portfolio of solutions including concepts such as ‘Family Travels’,
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‘Capacity Information Panels’ and ‘The Future of the Ticket Vending Machine’. Publications of this project’s results stimulated further interest in collaborations from transportation and software companies alike. Partners in Education During their involvement with students, all partners gave multiple presentations that sometimes stretched far beyond simple project briefings. They opened their doors and arranged for access to their respective partner institutions in manufacturing, sales and development. And because the results of projects were usually presented on the partner’s premises, students were able to gain additional insight and receive feedback from diverse stakeholders on the partner’s side. Methodology and analytical techniques could also be introduced and applied with the help of visiting lecturers who are successful service designers in their own professional lives. Mathias Richter (Managing Director at Syneo Tools) and Stefan Freitag (Head of Design at Indeed Innovation) both acted as facilitators of co-creation workshops and shared their expertise with the teams. In guest lectures, Nancy Birkhölzer of IXDS and Barbara Franz of IDEO, among others, shared their insights into how superior service design becomes reality. The team of More-than-Metrics, the company behind customer experience tool ‘Smaply’, supported several of our projects with software and training. It must also not be understated that it is solid education in all the ‘traditional’ and technology-led fields of design that puts service design teams in the position to work on the highest technical and creative levels. This makes internal collaboration within the faculty a mandatory prerequisite for smooth and successful external partnerships. Workload and semester duration Both the semester length (16 weeks) and degree programme duration (four semesters) do not necessarily align well with industry’s own fast-paced requirements. At HAWK, it is our highest priority that students completely fulfil their curricula while their individual
well-being is also assured. This means that the average workload must be contained within European university standards, rather than match the typical demands of agency employment. Despite that, students often work long hours to digest research and come up with convincing solutions. We will soon examine if and how we can stretch partner collaborations over the entire duration of the Masters programme. In a joint effort with a global technology group, we will endeavour to organise a four-semester series of projects, all of which will meet academic requirements and ensure students earn a great deal of real-life experience. Forms of co-operation made simple Over the last four years we have managed to keep the contractual set-up of all projects simple. The HAWK legal and administrational departments have helped facilitate a straight-forward approach to the various forms of co-operation. In our service design projects, HAWK as an institution has regularly renounced commercial exploitation, but has reserved the right to publish all work and make use of it in research and education. At the same time, individual students’ legal positions regarding intellectual property remain intact. Outlook We hope that we have demonstrated what pivotal role private and public service providers can play in the enhancement of service design education, and how service design has evolved to become an integral part of Design Management courses at our school. Student project work from previous semesters illustrates how students immerse themselves into the discipline of service design and how ‘education-on-the-job’ which builds on underlying theory can result in great service concepts. We can take this as an indication of how such cooperative projects foster the role of service design in the respective organisations.
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Anne Stenros Meet the service designer
Last year the SDN launched the first Service Design Impact Report dedicated to the topic of the public sector. Due to its success and enthusiastic reception, the next two editions are already in the making. The next one will focus on the health sector, and will be published to coincide with the SDN’s Global Conference 2018, in Dr. Anne Stenros CDO is a thought leader on strategic design and creative leadership, speaking and lecturing around the world. Since September 2016 she is the Chief Design Officer (CDO) of the city of Helsinki. She has been rewarded with the Gold Estlander Medal (2015) and the Gold Medal of the City of Helsinki (2013). She is a founding member of Women in Tech Finland.
Madrid. Aline Alonso, the manager of the SDN Impact Report series, and Zeynep von Flittner, an Impact Report collaborator, had the opportunity to interview Anne Stenros, the Chief Design Officer (CDO) of Helsinki, about her vision of the design impact in the city of Helsinki. Anne sees the city as an organisation and her objective is to to utilise design knowledge and enforce an experimentation culture among the city leaders. Aline Alonso and Zeynep von Flittner: The city of Helsinki is undergoing a lot of changes. What is the role and the value of design in these transformations?
Anne Stenros: The city of Helsinki wants to renew the working culture and the leadership in the city. As a CDO, I have introduced something like a ‘Service Experience Camp’ to the top leaders of the city. They have really enjoyed the idea of small, agile, fast-speed workshops with templates that they can fill in by themselves or as a group. These have been very valuable tools to spark strategic discussions. 78 Touchpoint 9-2
I believe one very important tool of design is to make futures visible. From my experience, if we only use numbers or text, the discussions tend to be very abstract and 'un-emotional'. However, if we use any type of visualisation, for instance scenarios and personas, it enables the people present in those meetings to use their empathic skills too. In order to understand better how the future is going to be. This way we will not be talking only about hard numbers but values too; ‘what kind of future we would like to see?’
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How did these ‘Service Experience Camps’ work?
To open up the discussion about the future transformational trends, we created a foldable map with four scenarios for Helsinki by 2030, seeing the city as a civic platform. It was based on the idea that in the future, more and more is going to happen either in collaboration with citizens or as a bottom-up activity. The aim was to discuss the presence of this collaborative environment in the city. For example, in the scenario of the ‘Resilient Welfare City’, the collaborative environment almost doesn’t exist. On the other hand, in the ‘Civic Sharing City’ scenario, things happen in co-production in a very much actively-collaborative involvement. These parallel views can be combined, as all of them will happen eventually in the future. And serve as a base for discussion for the city officials and city leaders. We were looking for the different functions of the city, such as placemaking, lifelong learning and cultural life. With the aim to create the best citizen experience. We were looking for the generation of value, functional, emotional and also life changing values that would deliver real social impact. Design can support citizen democracy, and that is the biggest driver when it comes to the city’s organisation in the future. Cities have been closed organisations, but they must open up themselves and become platform organisations in the future, where each independent unit will become more agile and collaborative. It will take some time, depending on the cultural and social context of each city, but I believe this transformation is inevitable. The activities and methods you described are very similar to service design. Do you use the term service design to refer to them?
I would rather refer to it as strategic design because it didn’t follow the service design process ‘by the book’. It was more focusing on using design to get the people out of their comfort zone, than in a final service outcome. And this was possible to see in the faces of the civil servants during the workshops. In the first hour they were a little
bit confused. Their expectation of a workshop was that they would sit and listen to somebody, and now we put them in the centre of the action. But soon they got into the flow and got really engaged; much more than with top-down approaches. How does the use of these design methods impact the work of the civil servants and city leaders of Helsinki?
I heard from different departments that they are using this type of approach in their own strategic discussions. That shows that the use of the methodology is very valuable for them. We had ten workshops with more than 250 people in total. The outcome was a booklet called ‘City Compass of the Future’, in which we collected a summary of the discussions. Dynamic, attractive, open and equal are some of the trends for the future of the city. In the end, we built a map pointing to what should be done at the leadership level - the steps to get to the kind of future that we want to see. The last activity of the ‘Camp’ with the city leaders was to build a house of cards with the promises of each one of us answering the question: “What I am going to do in the coming four weeks to support the changes in the leadership level?” We use different types of design methods and tools to inspire people to approach everyday problems in a totally different way than they have been doing. And they enjoy it because it opens up new avenues. Rather than discussing about numbers – for example, “If we have these many people, how many houses we need to build?" – the discussion changes to, “If we need more housing, how can we ease the regulations to make it happen easier and faster?” Can you see the difference in their way to work? Is it already possible to spot the impact of the introduction of design?
I believe design has introduced new types of approaches and a new type of thinking for the city leaders. But also a Touchpoint 9-2 79
new way to understand where we are heading to. As we all know, linear thinking is not applicable anymore for the complex issues we are dealing with. I can see that the city leaders are more interested in the future and they are more willing to test new ways to approach a challenge. They enjoy very much this kind of multidisciplinary discussion and different viewpoints. Even the politicians, they love it! Since they are just among people that share the same set of values as they have, the exchange of viewpoints has a strength on its own.
good understanding of how happy people are. Data and technology can allow us to get a more coherent picture of society, with real-time understanding. In the discussion about impact, of course we can always improve. But if we build the most efficient machine, we can end up forgetting the human side. We need a person, a human heart, interfering in critical moments and saying: “No, we are not following the process now because of this human reason.” This is more relevant for me than this endless search for a more efficient system.
How do you measure the impact that you are creating? This year the focus of the Service Design Impact
We are just taking the first steps, so we haven't had the time to measure it yet. But after my two years as a Chief Design Officer, we will need to do this employee experience assessment in order to see how much it has been changed. However, we have to understand that there are so many other changes going on at the same time within the city of Helsinki that is hard know what is the impact of design alone. But I may say that as a public sector organisation, we don't have really a good criteria for measuring the impact. If we think about design in business, there are already some measurements, especially when we talk about the hard stuff, like technology. But if we want to understand the impact we should not only have the hard measures. The Mayor is more interested in what kind of cultural changes we can create within the city organisation to be more agile, resilient and effective. He is talking about digitisation of course, but on the other side he is emphasising the importance of soft values. So then, how do you believe this impact can be measured in the long term?
We can measure citizen satisfaction, like most companies have a system to measure customer satisfaction. But maybe we don't have to ask questions, because we can screen the understanding of the collective mind from data. If we start to use artificial intelligence following the discussion of citizens, we can come up with a quite 80 Touchpoint 9-2
Report is the health sector, and the publication aims to investigate the impact of service design in healthcare in different countries. The Finnish health system will undergo a big reform in the coming years. Does design have a positive impact on how current healthcare reform is being defined and managed?
The current healthcare reform is quite a top-down process and therefore gets a lot of criticism. I haven’t been personally involved in any of the discussions and don’t have much information. But I assume that a more collaborative and involving decision making process (which design could bring) would have benefited the adaptation and implementation of the decisions. The design process can help to create a buy-in, and a mindset change before starting to implement a decision. It can lead discussions and the creation of a shared set of values. During our processes, we mixed different city divisions with very different political views, and it was very interesting to see how people came up with shared ideas about how we should live in the future. From my perspective, there should be more pressure for cities to promote healthier lifestyle. We should think holistically and create visions on how the city environment can support a healthy lifestyle, for example with more bike lanes, offering sports, culture, etc. We have in Helsinki a very nice case, where design has been used in a very impactful way: the city’s new central library. Before the architectural project began, there have
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been many design projects done in order to understand the needs of the citizens and exploring new roles that the library could play in city life. This design work and the vision it created influenced the new mindset and culture change among different stakeholders before the actual project started. Making it much easier to start to implement new ways of working. The current library concept is not only about books, there are different hubs, it offers different type of activities; it is a learning space for citizens. The city strategy should influence the physical city and building decisions. And they need to be shaped by larger discussions on shared values, and how citizen experience should be. To wrap up, how do you see the global evolution of service
I see the next level as political. I think we are coming back to the era of value discussion in design, how to change by design. I haven't had this discussion since the 1980s, when I finished my studies. It is interesting to see that in all these years in between, design has been considered as a non-political activity. Recently a young designer told me that service design is always a political act. Yes! Because it has an impact on people. We can't say that we are non-political designers and still do service design. You have a set of values beyond your decisions. I see young people starting movements by political design. Instead of waiting for the cities to implement something, they are doing it themselves. I don't want to emphasise that it should be political, but the world is nowadays more political than it used to be.
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Congratulations to the Service Design Award 2017 Finalists Out of over 100 agency, corporate and student submissions from around the world, 14 Finalists were selected by an international jury of service design experts due to
project | location
project | location
Mahi-Mahi Project (Spain) company
Redefining the TELUS Renewals Experience (Canada)
contribution their projects
Apitropik
company
have made towards
client
Bridgeable
Askora Plus S.L.
client
progressing the field of
category
TELUS
service design.
Professional, Commercial
category
the exceptional standard of their work and the
Four ‘Professional, Commercial’ projects, one ‘Commercial-student collaborative’ project, four ‘Nonprofit / public sector’ and five ‘Student’ projects have been shortlisted, setting new benchmarks for world class service design. For the 2017 Award we have seen an increase in the quantity and standard of the student work in particular, with 34% of entries by students compared to 26% in 2016. The SDN, as host of the Service Design Award, is delighted to showcase, promote and support the best new talent in this rapidly growing field. The Finalist work will be on show during the entire Service Design Global Conference in Madrid. On 2 November, the winners will be announced, and they will share their work in pecha-kucha style presentations the next day. 82 Touchpoint 9-2
Professional, Commercial How does a company move from serving food to designing experiences? This is what agency Apitropik set out to answer in 2016, when Spanish catering company Askora asked for help to improve their services for school canteens. One year later, a new concept started to take shape and the Mahi-Mahi experience was born. Apitropik decided to rethink the whole canteen experience, including before and after the meal itself. An important step was facilitating a co-creative process for all the people involved. The concept was tested with more than 900 children who continue to enjoy the new service to this day. Currently, new schools are starting the same journey, choosing to experience mealtimes in a different way.
In 2015 TELUS was facing a set of complex problems: more customers looking for new contracts, greater upfront costs of hardware subsidies, and increased customer reliance on highcost channels. Realising that mobile contract renewals are a critical moment of truth for customers, the service design team at TELUS engaged Bridgeable to transform the renewals process, creating a seamless, personalised experience for customers while reducing cost-toserve for the business. Bridgeable enlisted the help of a cross-functional team from across the TELUS organisation, bringing together stakeholders who had never before been in the same room to co-create solutions. This omnichannel service design approach led to wins for both the customer and the TELUS organisation.
inside sdn
project | location
project | location
project | location
Money Coaching at Capital One (US) company
Airport Experience - Commercial Journey Vision (The Netherlands)
Capital One
company
The Glasgow School of Art & The Royal Bank of Scotland: Future Bank 2025 (Scotland)
client
Essense - Service Design
team
Christian De Pace, Business Director, Capital One Cafés
client
Eloise Smith-Foster, Aleksandra Kozawska, Rosie Trudgen, Lizzie Abernethy, Will Brown, Josefine Leonhardt, Robyn Johnston, Amber Jones, Ottavia Pasta, Ole Thomas Tørresen, Josh Woolliscroft and Struan Wood
category
Schiphol Group (Amsterdam Schiphol Airport)
Professional, Commercial
category
Professional, Commercial Historically, banks have been viewed as trusted partners in safeguarding their customers’ finances, but trust in financial institutions has eroded over time. Nowadays, people often view their banks as simple utilities rather than trusted partners. That’s why Capital One is redesigning the banking experience — making things simple, straightforward, and a fitting banking experiences more naturally into people’s lives. Capital One created Money Coaching to help people feel more confident in their relationship with money and how they talk about it. The service takes place in Capital One’s Cafés, which aim to create a comfortable, stress-free environment in which customers get help with their finances. Money Coaching is a one-on-one, judgment-free and guided programme.
Essense worked closely with the Consumer Marketing team at Schiphol Group (Amsterdam Airport) to develop a customer experience vision for commercial touchpoints in the entire passenger journey, across multiple channels. Using existing research and new learnings, insights and challenges were mapped on a customer journey to gain a holistic overview, build shared ownership and identify commercial opportunities. These informed relevant commercial scenarios through co-creation with both passengers and Schiphol client staff. Based on that work, Essense defined a CX vision structured around three CX pillars: ‘Guide Me’, ‘Relieve Me’ and ‘Excite Me’. Balancing these CX pillars and business targets shaped the marketing roadmap, which currently ensures team-wide focus and guides Agile implementation teams.
client
The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) category
Professional, Commercial-student collaboration The student and new graduate GSA team partnered with the Royal Bank of Scotland to develop the company’s emerging user-centred design process and integrate a future forecasting methodology in 201516. They conducted user research into Generation Y, designed service concepts, future-oriented ‘tribes’ and a ‘future world context’ – outcomes that continue to impact the design approach of RBS. The success of the project resulted in an innovative, industry-academic educational model being adopted by the GSA Design Department. Touchpoint 9-2 83
project | location
project | location
project | location
Design In Schools Australia - A Design and Education Collaboration (Australia)
Delivering Easy, Effective, and Emotionally Satisfying Experiences for Veterans (US)
¤217 Million Worth of Mobility Services Developed Based on Personas (The Netherlands)
company
company
netherlands based company
Design Managers Australia (DMA)
Muzus
client
Doblin Deloitte and The US Department of Veterans Affairs
Macquarie Primary School
client
The Municipality of Rotterdam
category
The US Department of Veterans Affairs
category
Non-profit / public sector
client
Non-profit / public sector
category
In 2015, Design Managers Australia (DMA) was approached by Macquarie Primary School in Canberra, Australia, to tackle a ‘dangerous’ school car park. An immediate partnership was formed between two disciplines (education and service design), and between two organisations (the school and DMA). The resulting programme, ‘Design In Schools’, established 18 eleven-year olds as a formal service design team. The process was built around the creation of six structured design modules with a launch of the rebuilt car park in October 2016. The project had real design outcomes (an improved car park experience), methodology outcomes (the development of a re-useable methodology) and a lasting impact on both teachers in the school and designers from DMA, who have evolved their own practice. 84 Touchpoint 9-2
Non-profit / public sector The United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is the second largest department within the US government. With more than 20 million Veterans, providing excellent service to those who served their country is of paramount importance for VA. In 2015, in the midst of increased public scrutiny, a loss in Veteran confidence, and a lack of employee engagement, VA took enterprise-level action to address barriers in serving Veterans and their families. As a team, Doblin Deloitte, the Veterans Experience Office, and VA collaborators engaged Veterans, employees, and stakeholders in a human centred, design led approach to help improve Veterans’ experiences with service delivery at VA.
The municipality of Rotterdam faced the challenge of issuing a tender for transport services for elderly and disabled residents. This is a complex service, consisting of up to 17,000 transport movements per day in the dense city of Rotterdam. It has a budget of €31 million per year and was to be tendered for a period of seven years. The municipality took a daring, fresh approach: they put the user in the centre of the offer of the carrier. Agency Muzus mapped the user needs of Rotterdam citizens and translated the insights into a framework and tools that offered better transportation concepts. This insight framework now forms the beating heart of the future transport concept.
inside sdn
project | location
project | location
project | location
NSB Train Replacement Services (Norway)
Servizz Design (UK/ Malta)
company
Reducing Patient Anxiety and Uncertainty Throughout Their Care in a Hospital for the Elderly (Brazil)
Uniform Strategisk Design AS
team
university
client
Carolina Pizatto Girardi
The Royal College of Art
NSB (Norwegian State Railways)
university
client | external stakeholder
category
Universidade Federal do Paraná
The Government of Malta
Non-profit / public sector
client | external stakeholder
category
Hospital do Idoso Zilda Arns
Student
In 2014, more than 20 percent of the approximately 68.5 million Norwegian train passengers were affected by train problems due to rail traffic stopping fully or partly. Customer experiences in the exception situations was revealed as the major challenge in a customer satisfaction survey. The Norwegian Minister of Transport and Communications demanded immediate initiatives and long-term plans to improve the situation. The key strategic deliverable from the project was redefining a purely logistical challenge into a seamless and holistic customer service. Strategic responsibility for customer experience was defined in top management. The holistic service was developed, renamed, and a new visual identity was created. Part of the new service was launched in 2015, and evaluated and further developed in 2016.
team
Ella Walding
category
Student The Elderly Hospital of Curitiba, in Brazil, had a series of issues that were negatively affecting their patient’s satisfaction yet were unknown by the hospital directors. To support decision-making, this project identified and mapped all of the service’s weaknesses, and delivered co-created solutions to guide the hospital in improving patients’ experience. Besides the ideal service journey, an action plan including 42 challenges and their solutions (organised by short, medium or long term) was also delivered. This brought user centred guidance, and once implemented, will positively affect the 4,500 patients that typically attend the hospital each year.
Servizz Design is a set of service design tools aimed to create change in the Government of Malta, and which has the potential to create change in any organisation. These tools have been implemented in Servizz.gov, a one-stop shop in Malta that citizens can use as a single point of contact for all public services. What started as a service optimisation project has evolved into a service for change and set of deliverables that can empower service users. This project has demonstrated that it is possible to use service design to create both process change and culture change to deliver enhanced outcomes both for those delivering and receiving services.
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project | location
project | location
project | location
Smart Black Taxi Service: Flo (UK)
Communi.Care (Colombia)
team
team
Factory NextGen: Connect to Sustain (UK/ Taiwan)
Hyunyim Park, Jaehyun Park and Culainn Boland-Shanahan
Lina Antolínez, Diana Sánchez, María Andrea Luque and María Ordóñez
team
university
university
university
The Royal College of Art
Universidad de Los Andes
The Royal College of Art
client | external stakeholder
client | external stakeholder
client | external stakeholder
Hannah Kops - Transport For London Project Coordinator, Nick de Leon - RCA Service Design Head of Program and Nicolás Rebolledo RCA Project Coordinator
Healthcare staff at FSFB Hospital, Student Advisors Juan Manuel Gonzalez and Christiaan Job Nieman
SME manufacturers in Taiwan
Air pollution in London is estimated to cost the economy around £3.7 billion every year, due to the health impact. The Flo project aims to help tackle the air pollution challenge by influencing the behaviour of black cab drivers. The service tailors and delivers real-time, open data to help black cab drivers make informed decisions about where to find passengers, so they can reduce the amount of time “drifting” without passengers, thereby reducing pollution. By using the Flo service, black cab drivers can save an estimated £4,093 per year, which translates to a saving of £81,860,000 for the 20,000 black cab drivers in London. 86 Touchpoint 9-2
category
Student
category
Student
category
Student
Szu-Ying Chen
Nurses and support teams play a fundamental role in healthcare organisations. Communi.care is a set of tangible interventions within the internal patient transportation service at FSFB Hospital in Colombia. Using existing tacit codes between actors, it facilitates communication and makes clear the shared responsibilities amongst nurses and the support team, so they can take care not only of patients, but also of co-workers. This will also help FSFB to deliver a low-cost, more efficient and caring patient internal transportation to positively impact patients’ experience by improving the perception of being vulnerable and unprotected and reducing the amount of time waiting to be transported by 37.5%.
Due to an ageing workforce and a lack of succession planning, the manufacturing industry in Taiwan is facing a severe skills shortage. The problem is made worse by a significant decline in sales. More than 35,000 SME manufacturers in Taiwan are projected to survive for only the next five to ten years. Factory NextGen seeks to address this issue by building bridges between the young and old workforces. It provides a platform for senior factory technicians and the younger generation, including working professionals and students, to exchange skills, ideas and resources to develop innovative, sustainable solutions in SME manufacturing.
r u b ri k
This publication is valuable for a broad readership. It is a source of insight and inspiration for both those operating in the health sector, as well as the policy-makers and politicians that surround it. Service design practitioners can get up-to-speed with the state of the art in how their discipline is being applied to healthcare challenges, and academics and students will benefit from the best practices contained herein.
Download or order your printed copy from November 15th
Touchpoint 9-2 87
Applying Service Design to the SDN Chapter Foundation Process After a successful Chapter revival at the end of 2016, the German SDN Chapter has applied service design methods during the building phase to identify its key audiences and tailor the focus of activities and events to their preferences. In the summer of 2016, several members of the SDN in Germany expressed their interest to build up a local service design community. When the headquarters invited us for a German SDN Chapter ‘revival’ meeting in fall 2016, we were excited about this opportunity. However, as riveting as it was to indulge in discussions and idea generation, it was crucial to channel this energy and turn it into concrete activities towards building up a new Chapter. Creation of a founding team The first challenge – assembling a core team that was eager and dedicated to bringing the Chapter to life – was achieved within one month. But how could you ensure working in the right direction from the very beginning? Well, we didn’t have to look too far for the answer: Why not apply service design methods to the Chapter-building process? It hadn’t been done before and SDN 88 Touchpoint 9-2
president Professor Birgit Mager, who supported our initiatives, encouraged us to identify a role model Chapter structure for future foundations. Stakeholder analysis and interview script The first crucial task was to identify our key audiences and determine their expectations towards our Chapter. Firstly, we conducted a stakeholder analysis revealing three groups: Full SDN members from different — fields (e.g. agencies, start-ups) The ‘Community’ (students, — academics and others from service design-related fields) ‘Potentially-interested’ people who — might not be aware of the fact that they are already applying service design In a second step, we collected an array of questions that were structured into an interview script
in order to elicit the most valuable insights about each group’s mindset and requirements for associated Chapter activities. When we would interview SDN members and professionals familiar with the concept of service design (the first two groups), our questions would be focussed on their engagement with service designrelated topics and their particular expectations of a German Chapter. When interviewing people who were unfamiliar with service design (the third group), we chose another approach. We would let them speak and phrase their concerns and ideas as freely as possible by posing more general questions such as “What challenges do you face in your daily work?”, or “How do you assess your company’s potential for innovation?”. In this way, we would gain more insights out of the interviews with all groups. Interviews and persona development Armed with this approach, we took a month to scour our personal business network as well as the accessible professional service design network for suitable interview candidates. What we learned from many
inside sdn
Illustration of our rebuilding process – From specifying our stakeholder groups, gaining insights by conducting interviews and creating personas to identifying their needs and translate them into concrete Chapter offers and activities
interviewees was that the biggest challenge is reaching a point where service design is widely accepted as a valid consulting method. This requires the willingness of companies to embark on this ‘venture’, and this insight further encouraged us about the relevance of our approach. After compiling the results and insights of almost 20 interviews, we started clustering to identify positive and negative general key findings, basic needs and wants regarding the Chapter’s way of working, and the first propositions regarding concrete activities. Distilling all those initial findings helped us to identify seven overall needs the majority of stakeholders seemed to have in common; from “I’d like to learn more about service design methods” or “I’d like to be able to better communicate service design concepts”, to “I’d like to foster peer-to-peer exchange”. Based on these findings, a persona for each of the seven needs was created. Needs map and ideation phase After each persona had come to life, we positioned them in a needs chart, and moved on to the ideation phase by defining concrete challenges. Formulating and transforming them
into actual tasks was the next step to be able to start the design process for attractive services and formats. Ideas and prototypes Well-designed tasks are worth nothing if they are not actionable. So we translated the tasks into concrete actions that would have the potential to cater to our audiences’ needs based on the characteristics we had identified. We’re currently fully immersed in this iterative ideation and conceptualisation process. Our ideas include a “dating” app for service designers, organised lunches with fellow practitioners from different areas, and presenting service design methods and their impacts in comic book form to potential buyers of service design. We are happy to share more details of our process upon request. If you are interested please contact us at germany@service-design-network.org.
Tobias Gerhardt is service manager and start-up founder. With the combination of an academic background and vast practical experience in the field, he consults companies to help optimise their service offers, process management and user experience. Juliane Amlacher is a systemic consultant, service designer and business coach at FEUERKOPF. She guides political and non-profit organisations through strategy, change and innovation processes. She is co-founder and representative of the SDN German Chapter. Thomas Weltner supports innovation and change as a freelance service designer, interviewer and impulse giver with background from digital transformation, branding, arts and mindfulness. He is a co-founder and representative of the SDN German Chapter.
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Service Design Within US: The first SDN National Conference in the U.S. Over 200 participants gathered this summer for the first national SDN conference held in the USA, hosted by the Institute of Design in Chicago. Attendees from over 80 organisations poured in from all over the country, eager to mingle, collaborate, and learn at the 20+ talks and workshops lead by 30+ presenters and facilitators. It was a proud moment for the conference organisers, who consisted of leaders from the Chicago, Washington D.C., and San Francisco SDN Chapters. It was a momentous occasion to gather in person after months of planning via late night conference calls. The morning kick-off was a reunion of sorts; Birgit Mager took to the stage with opening remarks to introduce Shelley Evenson for the first keynote. Birgit and Shelley had worked together ten years ago to organise the Emergence Conference at Carnegie Mellon, marking the first service design event in America and an important tipping point in the history of the field. Talks continued throughout the day, addressing topics such as ‘Myth of Omnichannel’, ‘Designing with Data’, and ‘Innovation in Government’. Between talks, 90 Touchpoint 9-2
the hallways were buzzing with passionate conversations amongst practitioners, students and leaders. They shared inspirations and swapped stories of how they are scaling service design within their organisations, collaborating with others and communicating the value it brings. Some of the themes that emerged at the conference were: service design growing as an in-house capability across all sectors, the innovation agenda sparking a movement within government institutions, and the evolving intersections of service design with adjacent disciplines. Other highlights included four interactive workshops with a service safari and business model prototyping session, as well as a service design bazaar. There were also two galleries: the Student Challenge exhibit and posters of interviews carried out with thought leaders. In the post-conference survey, attendees expressed an overwhelmingly positive sentiment about the programme line-up and depth of topic discussions, with
© Sean Su Photography
comments such as “What I really like about the conference is that we are all peers so everyone is talking about relevant issues and ideas,” and “this was the best service design event I've attended in a long time.” Everyone also really enjoyed the smaller scale of the conference and appreciated the ability to meet with leaders and speak in an intimate community setting, despite the national scale. In conclusion, it is safe to say that the bar has been set pretty high for the next U.S. national conference!
Aza Damood is a part of Booz Allen Hamilton’s Strategic Innovation Group, leading their Service Design and Customer Experience capability. She has 15 years of expertise using strategy, technology and design to solve complex business challenges. Aza is the co-founder of Service Design DC and leads the SDN Washington DC Chapter. Thomas Brandenburg is an independent consultant, and his service design toolkit helps retailers and brands think through their omni-channels strategies. In addition he teaches undergraduates at the Illinois Institute of Technology and is co-chair of the SDN Chicago Chapter.
inside sdn
Reflecting on the First SDN U.S. National Conference’s Student Competition The first SDN U.S. National Conference featured a student show and competition highlighting the wonderful service design work happening in U.S. schools. Sixty students from ten schools submitted 22 projects for consideration. An independent panel of judges, which included Jess Poole (Level Studios), Natalie Foley (Peer Insight), Craig LaRosa (frog), and Tim Irvine (Fjord), selected six projects to be showcased at the conference and ultimately the three finalists featured below.
1st place: Steps to Citizenship
Valentina Branada, Alix Gerber, and Chengcheng Teng; The New School: Parsons School of Design The NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs challenged the Transdisciplinary Design studio at Parsons to imagine ways to connect existing financial empowerment services with the citizenship process. The central element of the winning team’s solution is the ‘Steps to Citizenship Cards’, which advisors introduce during one-on-one sessions to help patrons navigate the path to citizenship. The cards simplify the application into concrete steps, highlighting financial learning opportunities along the way as a motivation for people to connect with financial advisors. In the words of Jess Poole, “Steps to citizenship balanced customer and stakeholder needs with a deft hand. The students tested the assumptions of the city about the needs of people in the process of attaining citizenship through qualitative research and pushed back when the assumptions did not match the real needs of people.” Citizenship applicants use the Steps to Citizenship cards with legal and financial advisors to plan specific steps forward, incorporating financial skills into the citizenship application process in a way that works for each person's unique needs.
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2nd place: Fresh Lit
3rd place: Reimagining Civic Education
Daniel Quon, Marcie Chin, Phumelele Mthimunye, and Rebecca Luoh; California College of the Arts
Katherine Fisher and Valentina Branada; The New School: Parsons School of Design
In the United States, 54 percent of children under the age of nine live in multicultural households, yet only 11 percent of children's' books feature characters of color. ‘Fresh Lit’ supports the creation of high quality, culturally inclusive children’s literature. Using a sourcing and certification process, Fresh Lit hand-selects and delivers quarterly children’s book boxes that reflect the lives of each family. According to Natalie Foley, “The Fresh Lit team anchored their concept in a user need that was tested and validated in multiple rounds of research. In addition, they designed a creative business model that captures the value created.”
The current activity in the U.S. political landscape reflects the need for different members of society to be heard. The team proposed a way to reduce the youth civic engagement gap in U.S. public schools through a year-long programme for students ages 14 to 20. The solution is an environment where youth may explore and discuss relevant civic topics, investigate diverse perspectives, and create media artifacts that challenge the status quo of ownership in narratives while generating a shared sense of purpose.
Based on the idea that children need books
The Reimagining Civic Education program
that are both windows and mirrors to the
uses frameworks and tools for public high
world, Fresh Lit exists to help children of
school students to reflect on their interest
color have more books as mirrors in order
and passions in relation to civic themes, and
to cultivate confidence and empowerment.
explore new perspectives and forms of civic
Fresh Lit acts as a new kind of bookseller
participation.
that selects, delivers, and leverages families' feedback of quarterly children's book boxes.
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Andrea Fineman is a service designer at Adaptive Path, where she works on diverse projects across all of Capital One's lines of business. She also programs events ranging from speaker series to the 2017 SDN U.S. Conference and the 2017 Adaptive Path Service Experience Conference. Ruben Ocampo is the founder of Conic, a Chicago-based innovation consulting firm. For more than 15 years he has applied design methods to solve challenges facing public and private organisations in the U.S., Australia, Europe and Latin America.
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