Designing for Love

Digital services, such as Google Maps and Foursquare, are a fast-growing part of our daily lives. These services can be beneficial and much loved, like Amazon Prime, but poorly designed services can create bad feeling, causing customers to terminate brand relationships.

DESIGNING LIVING ENTITIES

So what is service design all about? At Fjord, we practice service design to shape delightful experiences wherever people meet the products they use. Service design is about creating living entities that evolve and change over time. This is fundamentally different from other forms of design that generally aim for permanency. Successful service design changes in three ways:

• In response to people’s evolving needs and expectations

• According to feedback loops from users and related service systems

• Adapting to natural growth and added functionality over time

It’s not that the design of services is inherently better or more important than other forms of design, but it is different. It’s more multidimensional, and it requires different skills and a different approach, because digital services are living entities, not static or one-off things.

Instead of getting stuck in industry jargon, we like to compare services to human relationships. After all, people’s relationships with services mirror their relationships with people. Users go through different stages of service engagement and, when service design is great, they have a longlasting relationship of trust – they might even fall in love. It’s been proven through many studies that users’ relationships to their mobile phones (and the digital services that they use) can be as powerful as their relationships with people. They feel incomplete or cut off without their gadgets and services.

At Fjord, we aim to design services that people fall in love with. When you design for love, you have to design for the heart, for an emotional connection, rather than merely for the mind. When you appeal to the heart, you can usually create more value.

Just like love in real life, falling in love with a service is something that happens gradually. Yes, love at first sight does exist, but it’s an exception, not the norm. Usually there are three stages of engagement with the service:

1. MATCHMAKING

The matchmaking stage is about people discovering and understanding the service in the first place. Services must be designed so that they are easily discovered and understood. They have to feel real and relevant, by way of meeting real human needs. Importantly, there should be a strong ‘hook’ or strong point of differentiation – the thing that people will mention to their friends. If you’ve done a good job designing for this first stage of engagement, you can hope for a user reaction like ‘Aha!’ This type of reaction indicates that they understand it and could see how the service could be useful for them.

2. DATING

The dating stage is the first trial of the service, and it’s really important to reduce all barriers to usage in order to make it as easy as possible to get going. It’s also very important to appeal to the heart and make people really engage with the service. Gaming dynamics, social service components, and beauty can be very powerful at this stage. Great content, humor, and a winning personality are key. A successful design for the dating stage often results in the famous ‘wow!’ reaction from the user.

3. TRUE LOVE

The third and most powerful stage is true love. If you’ve designed a service that adds value and is meaningful over a long period, users will stay loyal and let the service become a life companion. Consistency and trust will be essential during this stage. Just like with a human companion, you want to be able to always rely on the service. As you trust the service with more of your content and more of your secrets over time, you should never have doubts about privacy or the true intentions of the service provider. An ability to fluidly use the service across platforms and locations will be important. But with multiple touchpoints and interactions, complexity is a real issue, both for the people using the services, as well as for the companies that provide them. In digital design, there’s a tendency for complexity to take root and grow like weeds in a garden. For service designers, the trick is to make complex systems simple and elegant. When users fall in love with a service, a typical reaction is ‘Of course!’: an indication that the interaction feels intuitive and natural.

Just like any great romance, getting to that ‘Of course!’ reaction is never easy. But as anyone who has ever fallen in love can attest, when it happens, it’s magic. The companies that design seductive digital services will ultimately be the ones that create the most successful and long-lasting bonds with their customers.

Ji-Hye Park is a service design lead at Fjord, an international service design consultancy that creates useful, effective, and desirable digital services that people love. She manages a multi-disciplinary team to deliver service across different industries. She is an expert in designing for multiple platforms, with a wide range of experience from ethnographic research and concepting to delivering design solutions.