volume 6 | no. 1 | 15,80 euro
April 2014
Transformation through Service Design Real-Time Service Design by Lydia Howland
Go Deep or Go Home by Joel Bailey
The New Seriousness of Design by Lee Sankey
Touchpoint
Proofreading
Volume 6 No. 1
Tim Danaher
April 2014 The Journal of Service Design ISSN 1868-6052 Publisher Service Design Network Chief Editor Birgit Mager
Printing Medienzentrum Süd Fonts Mercury G3 Whitney Pro Service Design Network gGmbH Mülheimer Freiheit 56
Editorial Board
D-51063 Köln
Alisan Atvur
Germany
Magnus Bergmark
www.service-design-network.org
Phil Goad Jesse Grimes Project Management & Art Direction Claire Allard
Contact & Advertising Sales Claire Allard journal@service-design-network.org Touchpoint Subscription For ordering or subscribing to
Cover Picture
Touchpoint, please visit
Polly Thomas
www.service-design-network.org/read/
Pictures Unless otherwise stated, the copyrights of all images used for illustration lie with the author(s) of the respective article
touchpoint
from the editors
Transformation through Service Design
One issue of Touchpoint each year is dedicated to the annual Service Design Global Conference, and this time we’re proud to take a look back on the successful days we spent together in Cardiff in late 2013. The numbers alone demonstrate that we succeeded in raising the bar yet again in terms of providing a stimulating and wide-ranging experience for the worldwide service design community. We had more participants than ever before (over 400), 64 speakers and presenters shared their thoughts, insight and experience from a wide range of disciplines and fields, and attendees were spoilt for choice with more than 50 sessions across the two days. The SDN Member’s Day ¬ traditionally held the day before the conference ¬ was also our biggest yet, and a host of new faces were present to discuss the future growth and activities of the SDN (stay tuned to our Insider newsletter and social media, to hear how new initiatives such as special interest groups will take shape in 2014). The conference was also the best documented yet, with professional videographers on hand to record every session. These were subsequently made available online ¬ for free ¬ to SDN members and non-members alike. If you attended the conference but missed a session, or if you didn’t manage to make it to Cardiff, everything can be found by following the links from our website: www.service-design-network.org/conferences. Whether or not you attended the conference, this issue gives you the chance to read more about the thinking and work behind a selection of conference events. Nick Leon (from London’s Royal College of Art) kicked off proceedings on Day One with an existential question for service design itself: “Is service design another specialisation within the design discipline, or is it somehow reshaping design itself, transforming both what we mean by design and the role and responsibilities of designers?” (see page 18). IDEO’s Lydia Howland also advocated “real time service design”, sharing experiences from an African project, where designers followed the motto “fake it until you make it” (see page 37). And Geke van Dijk and Marie de Vos, from STBY’s Amsterdam office, shared their work in improving Dutch rail travellers’ journeys with two new service innovation; a project which went on to win the the Public Prize in the 2013 Rotterdam Design Prize competition (see page 46). Those three articles and many more await you in the following pages. And if by the end of this issue you feel a pang of regret for missing our Cardiff gathering, we are pleased to announce that we have already confirmed the dates and location for the 7th Annual conference! Pencil them in your diary and watch for further announcements on registration and programming: We’ll be meeting in Stockholm on 7-8 October 2014 (with the SDN Member’s Day on 6 October). We look forward to seeing you there!
Jesse Grimes for the editorial Board
Birgit Mager is professor for service design at Köln International School of Design (KISD), Cologne, Germany. She is co-founder and president of Service Design Network and chief editor of Touchpoint. Jesse Grimes has thirteen years experience as an interaction designer and consultant, now specialising in service design. He has worked in London, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf and Sydney, and is now based in Amsterdam with Dutch agency Informaat. Alisan Atvur directs service design research and strategy at Propelland in Silicon Valley. Previously, he lead design strategy initiatives at frog, GE and InReality (a customer experience consultancy). Magnus Bergmark is Business Strategy director at Experience Design firm Doberman. Starting as a web entrepreneur in the nineties, Magnus is today a senior consultant in service design and digital design with experience from client work in a broad range of industries. Phil Goad leads Nile’s service design practice and is a founder and co-chair of SDN UK. He’s been consulting for over 10 years and has run teams at several leading agencies, where he’s worked on insight, brand and service design challenges for a wide range of global clients.
test
touchpoint 6-1
3
50 06 2 imprint 3 from the editors 6 news
kerry’s take 10 Service Design Will Help
You Survive — and Thrive Kerry Bodine
feature: transformation through service design
42 From Dashboards to Cockpits
18 The Service Design
46 Small Steps, Big Impact
Imperative
Mauro Rego, Marion Fröhlich
Geke van Dijk, Marie de Vos
Nick Leon
22 The New Seriousness of
Design
Lee Sandkey
26 The Three Ideas Driving
Organisational Change
50 Go Deep or Go Home Joel Bailey
54 The Underestimated
Business Impact of Service Design
Melvin Brand Flu
James Samperi
cross-discipline 12 Service Design for
Networked Business Models
Aldo de Jong
4
touchpoint 6-1
32 Shop → Eat → Live
60 Is the Future Omni-channel? Erdem Demir
Melanie Wendland
37 Real-Time Service Design Lydia Howland
64 The Manifestation of Change Kristina Carlander, Sebastian Backström
contents
70 tools and methods 70 Service Design Through
RIP+MIX
84
Mike Press, Hazel White
74 Exploring the Intersection of
Design, Agile and Lean
Simon Gough, Phillippa Rose
sdnc13 impressions 78 Transformation through
Service Design
Sarah Ronald, Paul Thurston
82 The Conference in Numbers 83 The Conference in Pictures
profiles 84 Interview: Érico Fileno
inside sdn 88 SDN San Francisco Chapter
Activities
89 The First Service Design
Competition Ever Held... in Finland touchpoint 6-1
5
Insider
save the date: service design global conference 2014!
capital of Sweden on 7-8 October. The conference itself is truly Nordic, with service designers from the region collaborating to create the best possible event. We are putting together a fantastic line-up of speakers and content from a wide range of sectors and international brands to provide insights and outstanding examples of service design work from all over the globe. The conference will be participatory, practical, and highly interactive. You will learn new tools to apply on your projects, gain new insights that will empower you to create change and value, and reconnect or make new friends with a wonderful service design community. Join us in Stockholm for SDGC14. Receive updates and secure earlybird ticket at www.service-designnetwork.org. Together, we will change life as we know it, creating value and quality for all through design.
Presentations: If you want to look more into detail at the presentations and take your time to study all the slides, we invite you to have a look at SDN Slideshare’s page. No fewer than 37 of the presentations are available!
Pictures: At the end of this issue, you’ll find some pictures giving a general impression of the conference. To see all the pictures taken during the conference and members day, visit our flickr photo albums!
http://www.slideshare.net/sdnetwork
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ sdnetwork/sets/
Photo: Ola Ericson/imagebank.sweden.se
The theme for this year’s Service Design Global Conference is ‘Creating Value for Quality of Life’, which stems from the power of service design to create value for
both people and business. With our tools, methods, and ways of thinking, we can develop solutions that increase quality of life for customers, employees, business, and society. This year’s conference welcomes you to Stockholm, the beautiful
sdnc13 online Videos: On SDN’s Youtube channel, you’ll have the opportunity to discover not only the videos of the presentations outlined in this issue, but of all the speeches that took place at the Service Design Global Conference 2013, including the PechaKuchas! http://www.youtube.com/user/ servicedesignnetwork 6
touchpoint 6-1
Touchpoint
articles database kerry’s take
Kerry Bodine has caught the entrepreneurial bug. She left her role as Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research in January 2014 in order to discover — and design — what comes next in her professional life. Since then, she’s joined the board of directors for EISE, a service innovation school and startup accelerator in São Paolo; partnered with the Stockholm-based service design firm Doberman to help them grow their US business; enlisted as a lecturer with the global education and innovation firm Hyper Island; and signed on as an advocate with Design Authority, a global forum for design evangelism and integrity. She also plans to put her service design skills to the test on several digital service projects that she’s recently dreamed up. Kerry will continue to contribute a regular column to Touchpoint journal, drawing on her ongoing research and work in the customer experience and service design fields to bring Touchpoint readers her perspectives on industry trends and best practices. To keep up with Kerry’s whereabouts and activities, please visit kerrybodine.com.
Touchpoint, the Journal of Service Design, was launched in May 2009 and is the first journal on service design worldwide. Each issue focuses on one topic and features news and trends, interviews, insightful discussions and case studies. The articles published in Touchpoint since its first publication are all available online! The formatted Pdfs of single articles are downloadable at no cost for SDN member and can be purchased by non-members. You will have the opportunity to search articles by volume and issue, by keywords or by author. Don't wait! Visit SDN new website and rediscover hundreds of gripping articles!
free acces s f o r ds of t sdn members e r d n ! Hu s abou e l n artic e design i servic database! sdn www.service-design-network.org
Insider
dmi: making change by design The Design Management Europe 18 organised by DMI will be hold in London on 11-12 June 2014. ‘Making Change by Design’ calls for a new ‘empathetic approach’ to business leadership, governments, brands and culture. For two days, the conference will focus on inspirational examples and new ways to reshape organisations and drive social and economic value. The pace of change continues to be among the greatest challenges to face business and design in recent years, as the proliferation of technology, channels and connection points with customers multiplies. Connecting physical products and environments with digital and service experiences is essential for success. Many of us are building design and innovation
making change by design london, 11-12 june 2014
groups that are often connecting parts of companies that never spoke before and even changing entire organisations. Join to discuss how innovators and design leaders reframe today’s challenges by learning from each other to recreate tomorrow and to address some important questions: • Making Change vs. Managing Status Quo: How is the role of design & design thinking changing? • Making Organisational Change: How is service design breaking down silos in business?
core77 design award Recognising excellence in all areas of design enterprise, the Core77 Design Awards celebrate the richness of the design profession and its practitioners as a unique opportunity to communicate the intent, rigour and passion behind their efforts. From client work to self-initiated projects, entrepreneurial to pro-bono engagements, we embrace a wide diversity of enterprise: commercial, cultural, social, environmental and discursive. 8
touchpoint 6-1
dmi: design management Europe 18
• Thinkers, Makers & Doers: How do design entrepreneurs disrupt markets? • Making Designers of the Future: How do we educate the next generation of innovators? SDN Members can enjoy a 20% discount on the ticket price! Send a mail to media@servicedesign-network.org to receive your promotional code. More information on: www.dmi.org/london
service design agency overview The jury captain for the service design category is Tennyson Pinheiro, designer, founder and CEO of Livework (Brazil). The jury teams will reconvene in mid-June to announce their decisions live to the world. Announcements take place in their home city and in their local time zone. The live announcement schedule will be released in the upcoming months. Keep updated to discover the winners! www.core77designawards.com
Service design agencies can help companies to improve their customer experience, but how can company choose which agency is right for them? Forrester gathered details about 103 service design agencies around the world. Their analysis includes self-reported data about agency size, industry expertise, capabilities, locations and target clients. For more information go to http://bit.ly/forrester-report
sdn & dmi partnership
touchpoint collection
This year the Service Design Network and Design Management Institute are becoming partners, giving both parties plenty of benefits specifically for their members! Discounts on membership and events will be part of the collaboration! SDN believes that building a service design culture requires cooperation among disciplines and different parties, in order to address all the hard and the soft aspects of design in its broad spectrum. Stay tuned on SDN and DMI social media to get the latest information!
SDN offers you the opportunity to purchase the full collection of Touchpoint for a reduced price! Fill your bookcase with five years of in-depth articles relevant to service design, written by many different authors from the field! Visit our website and check the shop in the ‘read’ section!
Service Design Will Help You Survive — and Thrive
The field of customer experience made headlines when Bloomberg Businessweek published its recent article, “Proof That It Pays to Be America’s Most-Hated Companies,” which highlighted an analysis of the 2013 stock market returns for 146 publicly traded companies ranked on the 2013 American Customer Satisfaction Index® (ACSI).1 “You won’t be happy with the result,” Bloomberg Businessweek reported. “Basically, the customer-service scores have no relevance to stock market returns.” And, in fact, regression analysis found a slight downward trend, “suggesting that the most-hated companies perform better than their beloved peers.” The article concluded, “Your contempt really, truly doesn’t matter to these companies, with no influence on the bottom line. If anything, it might hurt company profits to spend money making customers happy.” The numbers were so troubling that they even got airtime on The Colbert Report, a popular American satirical late night news program. And while some might argue that any publicity is good publicity for the field of customer experience, the reported data are downright 10
touchpoint 6-1
Kerry Bodine
damaging to the discipline. What’s worse is that they’re misleading. It’s true that the worst companies in the ACSI outperformed the best in 2013. But the folks at ASCI argue that this is due to strange market conditions in 2013. “This anomaly is due to the fact that investors have favored low-priced stocks (which have performed poorly in the past) over high-quality stocks (which are, appropriately, priced higher). In that sense, what we have is a junk rally.”2 In fact, the ACSI portfolio has significantly beaten the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 stock market index over the past 13 years. One hundred dollars invested in the ACSI portfolio in April 2000 would have been worth a whopping $580 in 2013 — and would have grown to just $121 on the S&P 500 in that same timeframe.
This trend isn’t limited to the United States; companies who do well on the National Customer Satisfaction Index-UK also outperform their competitors and local market indices. The role that service design plays in driving customer satisfaction, and therefore in contributing to business gains such as these, should be obvious. But recent analysis from the Design Management Institute — which plotted the financial performance of design-driven companies like Apple, Herman-Miller, Intuit, Nike, Procter & Gamble, Target, and Whirlpool — proves it.3 And again, the results were eye-popping. During a 10-year period ending December 2013, the Design Index outperformed the S&P 500 by 228%. Designing products, services, and experiences that your customers love will help your business thrive. But today, companies need to worry about more than just thriving. They need to worry about basic survival. Recent analysis from global strategy and innovation consulting firm Innosight revealed that the lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 has dropped significantly over the past five decades.4 Average tenure was 61 years in 1958, 25 years in 1980,
kerry’s take
DESIGN INDEX $39,922
$40,000 $35,000 $30,000
+228%
$20,000
© 2014 The Design Management Institute and Motiv Strategies3
$25,000 S&P $17,522
$15,000
and just 18 years in 2012. Innosight’s 2012 report warns, “At current churn rate, 75% of the S&P 500 will be replaced by 2027.” Companies like Kodak, HewlettPackard, The New York Times, and Bank of America have watched innovative companies like Amazon, Google, Netflix, and Nike take their places as stock market stars. And of course, some giants — like the American video store Blockbuster and the Swedish electronics chain ONOFF — once seemed secure, but have gone the way of the dinosaur. Whether large or small, private or public, companies in established industries need to stave off extinction in the wake of upstarts that are causing massive disruption by taking the (seemingly radical) approach of focusing on customers’ needs. Service design powers disrupters like Airbnb and the New York state health insurer Oscar. But it can also help established companies reinvent their stagnant business strategies and refocus their resources on delivering experiences that are useful, easy, and emotionally gratifying for customers.
Jun 13
Dec 13
Jun 12
Dec 12
Dec 11
Jun 11
Dec 10
Jun 10
Dec 09
Jun 09
Dec 08
Jun 08
Dec 07
Jun 07
Jun 06
Dec 06
Jun 05
Dec 05
Jun 04
Dec 04
Jun 03
$5,000
Dec 03
$10,000
This is not a one-and-done type of investment. In order to stay competitive in a landscape of widely accessible venture capital and rapidly shifting consumer behavior, companies need to continually reassess their relevance to target customers — and then, taking a cue from today’s successful startups, pivot appropriately. Service design provides a broad range of tools and methodologies that can help companies do just that, building a foundation on which they can survive and thrive.
•
References 1 http://buswk.co/JLA6g1 2 http://bit.ly/1bCAMdq 3 Criteria for inclusion on the Design Index comprise design leadership presence at senior or division levels, growth of internal design investments, and design as an integrated function For the full list of inclusion criteria for the Design Index, visit http://bit.ly/1dzOALh 4 http://bit.ly/NqsJfa
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.
touchpoint 6-1
11
Service Design for Networked Business Models
Aldo de Jong helps corporations and startups to navigate disruptive shifts. He is a co-founder at Claro Partners, where he provides business innovation and service design in the context of disruptive shifts in society and business, such as the personal data economy, internet of things (IoT), the rise of microbusiness, new models of ownership and value exchange networks. Claro Partners is a Barcelona-based innovation consultancy focused on understanding disruptive shifts to deliver service design and business innovation.
12
touchpoint 6-1
In societies saturated by hyper-consumption, the joy of acquisition — of holding a new object in your hands and knowing with satisfaction that it’s yours — is familiar. Equally recognisable, though, is that creeping anxiety when the sheen starts to fade and the product’s value becomes outweighed by concerns of maintenance, optimisation of use and finding a place to keep your once-loved product, at which point ownership becomes a burden. The burden of ownership is challenging the traditional model of the consumption economy. Rather than buying and owning a product, consumers are increasingly seeking alternative models to get access to products when they need them. The access economy is rising. Despite the infinite diversity of the human race, we’re actually quite similar in the kind of things we want to achieve on a day-to-day basis, and collectively we’re beginning to realise that there’s little reason not to share the resources necessary to achieve these goals. If a user owns a drill that they use for only 10 minutes during its lifetime, maybe they shouldn’t own a drill but should borrow it from a neighbour or rent it from somebody else. Aldo de Jong
The burden of ownership gives rise to the access economy, where the trust between strangers is the new currency. This new economy leads to strategic transformation of businesses into lean organisations that aren’t just delivering value to customers: more broadly, they are enabling value creation throughout their network of consumers, partners and vendors. These networked business models are disrupting the traditional way of doing business. Giffgaff, which is a virtual network operator, has only 34 employees and an average response time to customer problems of under 90 seconds. Giffgaff is able to achieve this because it’s their members who respond to each other’s problems. Similar examples are emerging across industries, such as RelayRides that is challenging traditional car rental
iss
ion tc h & i sup ns pl ur y/ an de ce ma n
mm
ma
co
car owner
nd
car user
a em /d ply ce up an h s ur tc & ins
rental fee
car use
payment
car
consumer
ma
d
cross-discipline
car use rental fee
car user
The access economy drives new business models: PSNs are networked business models.
models, or Zopa that is challenging traditional banking models as a P2P lending and saving service. At Claro, we call these new business ecosystems Participatory Service Networks (PSN): systems where value is co-created and exchanged in a distributed way by a network of participants. PSNs drive new business models. In a traditional car-ownership model, the consumer makes a payment to acquire permanent ownership of a car. In the access-based model, a rental company such as Zipcar maintains ownership and the consumer pays for the temporary use of the car. PSNs take it one step further by utilising their consumer base as a resource within their business model. For example, RelayRides enables consumers to rent cars from car owners. Relay rides provides value by managing insurance offerings, commissions, and other operational needs of similar rental services. The service-provider no longer has to own the cars: it just needs to match supply and demand and provide structure to the agreement, which in the case of RelayRides is insurance.
Through PSNs, we see the emergence of a new type of company: one that requires a whole new approach to service design. In conventional models of service design, designers focus on the customer to shape the design and delivery of a service. In a PSN, designing services is about uncovering opportunities within a network of participants, enabling exchange of knowledge, skills and resources to deliver the service and identifying the roles in the ecosystem. This article is an examination of how these three principles make PSNs different and of how each would affect our approach to service design. 1. Uncovering opportunities in a network:
With conventional service design methods, the designer identifies what users need and develop a service for them. In contrast, when designing for a networked business model, the designer also identifies what the users have and what they could be exchanging. Effectively, the service designer identifies what value the users can provide to each other so that the company can be a facilitator of its exchange. In PSNs, there are four main values that are being exchanged: connections, knowledge, skills and resources. Airbnb is an example of a network that enables the exchange of resources between the customers who own those resources (for Airbnb, that resource is a lodging space). Wikipedia is about sharing knowledge, while LinkedIn is about sharing connections. Livemocha, which allows participants to help each other learn languages, is about sharing skills. touchpoint 6-1
13
design the service journey
design participatory services
SINGLE USER EXPERIENCE
NETWORKED EXPERIENCE
2. Enabling exchanges to deliver a service:
In conventional service design, we focus on designing the service journey — a single user experience defined by touchpoints that are controlled by the company delivering the service. In a PSN, it’s not a company that delivers the complete experience in a controlled way, but other participants in the network. Each of these participants has their own interactions and little experience journey. In the conventional approach to service design, a user journey would follow the customer and the service provider at different touchpoints. Service designers would think about how they are matching the business processes in parallel with the experience of the user. In networked experiences, the operating model is more complex as there are more parties in the equation. Designers are not only designing for one end user: 14
touchpoint 6-1
they need to take into account different roles and dynamics within the network and optimise the experience for each of those. In the P2P lending platform Zopa, the designers integrate the journeys of the lender and the borrower with the mechanics of the platform. A successful design enables positive relationships and value exchanges between all of them. PSN business models are based on exchanges. Accordingly, for a PSN to be sustainable and relevant, its participants need to regularly contribute value to the ecosystem. To do this, they need to be motivated to contribute: networks won’t work in the long term without value transactions that are mutually beneficial. For a company to create a network that users want to join and then actively participate in, different types of motivations (both functional and emotional) need to be understood and then designed into the system.
cross-discipline
emerge seed
PSN adapt
nurture weed How to start and grow the network? 3. Identify the roles in the ecosystem:
Conventional service design is about building a relationship between the brand and the user. Most touchpoints are branded and highly controlled by the company delivering the service. This is quite different in the case of a PSN, where other participants in the network may deliver the service without rigid brand standards that control all interactions. In this case, the brand’s role is to start and then facilitate the growth of the network and the relationships within the ecosystem. PSNs are like a community garden that grows organically but still needs tending. The first thing a gardener has to do when creating a garden is to let it emerge by setting the right conditions. Similarly in a PSN, designers need to create the right conditions for exchange. The second step in creating a community garden is to plant the seeds. PSN designers need to start the network with the right actors and the right conditions
to grow. Facebook and LinkedIn seeded their platforms very differently: Facebook’s first seeds were university students whereas LinkedIn started with the business community in the San Francisco Bay Area as its first users. These different seeds resulted in networks of very different user experiences and motivations. Once a network has its initial users, then designers have to think about nurturing the network, encouraging participation and helping the network to flourish. They also have to weed – to discourage and filter out the negativity that could reduce users’ participation in the network. Finally, they have to allow the network to adapt to participants’ changing needs: enable it to fragment or specialise as it evolves. In the end, participants aren’t there through obligation, but their own free will, so keeping them motivated to contribute is the key to designing a successful PSN.
•
touchpoint 6-1 15
Feature
Transformation through Service Design
The Service Design Imperative
Nick Leon is head of service design at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. Nick began his career as an industrial designer at IBM, moving from designing products then services, through to developing entire new businesses in his role as business development director for IBM’s Global Services division in Europe.
18
touchpoint 6-1
Is service design another specialisation within the design discipline, or is it somehow reshaping design itself, transforming both what we mean by design and the role and responsibilities of designers? Applying design practice to the other 80% of the economy, especially public services, which represent around half of that, is likely to stretch the boundaries of the discipline. But is design going further than that? In this essay I will explore a greater context for service design, driven by unprecedented social, environmental and economic imperatives, the opportunities for service transformation that digital technologies present and the implications for redefining design itself. We face unprecedented challenges at this time: stresses on the environment, shrinking resources for a growing and increasingly urbanised and ageing population, rising inequality and outdated financial systems. Our planet will not redesign itself: it will take the ingenuity of designers — blending design for people with technological innovation — to address these issues. Similarly, we are experiencing a unique combination of digital technology innovations, which in the last ten years have collectively surpassed all the innovations in information technology Nick Leon
in the previous four decades, from six billion mobile phone accounts globally to the rise of social media, the realisation of the internet of things and the exploitation of big data. We have tools to transform existing services and to innovate new ones, and the imperative for these innovations in the public realm, driven by need, and in the private sector, driven by global competition, are more intense than ever. However, governments are struggling to address these challenges, focusing their efforts on managing today’s public services and the public purse rather than tackling the big social and environmental issues. The most innovative technology firms, as well as big mobile operators, financial services and global energy providers are shaping the way we live and interact, our culture and society and our environment, both positively and negatively, far more
transformation through service design
than our politicians. These firms need innovation to survive, and the designer is crucial to their capacity to innovate. Never has design had such a powerful role to play, but seizing the opportunity comes with responsibility.
pride ourselves on being the ones most connected to society and contemporary culture, so it is a special responsibility that falls on us. Customer experience — consequence or intention
A values-based framework
Designers cannot be agnostic with regards to these opportunities, as well as to the issues that are facing us. While our discipline has always focused on creating new levels of value for our clients and their customers, we also have to reflect on our values. Are our interventions adding to the challenges we face, or helping address them? Service design means engaging at a systems level, not just a component level. To make a meaningful impact requires designers with deeper and broader skills. It needs designers with the capacity to shape strategy, not just the form of products or the physical manifestations of a service touch point, or workflows. The choices that designers make need to be value-based, not only about value creation. Designers must recognise the social and environmental impact of their design decisions, as well as seeking out opportunities to actively engage with these issues. As designers, we must combine the creation of value within an explicit framework of values. We
Designers are taught to start by exploring a problem area at a systemic level, identifying opportunities for design intervention and framing the specific problem that they will address. We learn to start by designing the experience before figuring out the characteristics of the solution that resolve the problem. This experience-led design model is even more important in a world where services are the dominant form of consumption, the dominant sector for employment and the greatest contributor to our economy. With a few notable exceptions, until now designers have mostly played a subsidiary role in the design of services. Designers are often involved in the design of the touchpoints of a service, individual products (and the interaction with them), communications and marketing materials, and interior, environmental and retail design. The user or customer experience has been a consequence of the design of the products, the processes and programming, the places and the skills of the people. This experience itself was not explicitly designed, rather it resulted touchpoint 6-1 19
from the choices made in other design and technical disciplines. In other words, it was consequential not intentional. The opportunity for service designers is to turn this around, making the service experience intentional, and specify the systems, processes and organisation to fulfil it. As designers, it means we have to extend our service design skills and build expertise in systems design, organisational behaviour, strategy and change management. Designing for four different categories of value
When we design services we need to understand not only users and the context in which they live their lives, but all the other people who have a stake in the solution or who interact with users, especially those who deliver the service. Services can only be delivered successfully if those who deliver them • Are able to contribute value of their own to the service, enriching the service proposition and the recipient’s experience • Believe in the intrinsic value of the service for the user or society so that they are fully invested in the relevance and meaning of the service • Feel valued by their organisation and its management to enhance their personal motivation and self-esteem • Can align their personal values with the organisation’s values If any one of those four expressions of value is missing, the service experience will ultimately fail, and it is the designer’s role to ensure all four expressions of value are present. Because the people delivering the service need the capacity to convey value, as well as to create value for the recipient, personally, the service experience cannot be defined in a wholly deterministic way or by the blueprint alone. This requires designers to have expertise in organisational behaviour and management to ensure this is explicitly designed into the service proposition. People-centred design is not just about designing for 20
touchpoint 6-1
the recipients of the service. Designing for those who deliver the service can be equally important, as argued by Rosenbluth and Peters in their influential book, The Customer Comes Second, (Harper Collins, 1992). New and complementary skills
Service designers need to enrich their core discipline with complementary skills: • Systems design to enable designers to deconstruct the current service and user experience and reconfigure, refresh or even replace it entirely with one that fits with the lifestyle of users or the operating environment of the organisation • An understanding of organisations and organisational behaviour, so that designers can innovate the processes, practices and resulting organisations that will be responsible for the delivery of the total user experience • Business-model Innovation: recognising that the propositions cannot be independent of the business model associated with the provision and delivery of the service • Design management: because each touchpoint may involve different products, visual communications, the design of multiple interactions with physical and digital media, as well as the spaces, places and processes people will use to deliver the service, the service designer also has to be an expert design manager, focusing on the total user experience and coordinating all the other disciplines to achieve this goal.
transformation through service design
Trans-disciplinary teams
Designing product/service systems and the business models that enable them means crossing boundaries between design disciplines, business and engineering. It means changes to the processes and practices, not just of designers, but rather how firms innovate and organise themselves. This has implicit challenges as we share different working practices and cultures, but it is crucial that designers create bridges to those disciplines, especially if they are to lead the innovation. A final reflection
We are living in extraordinary times. The challenges of environmental and climate change, an ageing demographic, pressure on resources, rapid urbanisation and issues of social and economic exclusion require action. Our world is not going to get better on its own. Designers have the biggest-ever design job, as well as a responsibility to design a better world and the way we live on it. Every design choice is an opportunity to make design truly meaningful and to resonate with people’s lives, as well as helping to transform our world. This requires designers to argue the case for change cogently, with compelling evidence and expertise on these complex issues, and to demonstrate both thought, as well as organisational leadership.
•
touchpoint 6-1 21
The New Seriousness of Design
Lee Sankey is a group design director at Barclays, where he is helping build and lead an interdisciplinary team responsible for creating new services and reshaping what a bank is and does. Prior to Barclays, Lee was managing director of Voxygen, a design and technology agency. He has worked with Skype, Vodafone, Puma and studied Car Design at Coventry University.
22
touchpoint 6-1
It’s a wonderful time for design. Its appreciation by and relevance to consumers, organisations and society has been transformed over the last few years. But what are the implications for design’s new-found relevance and role? Are designers, particularly service designers, ready to fulfil design’s potential, or are we too in love with our Post-it notes and workshops? For some context, it’s worth pausing briefly to consider why design has become so relevant. There are obviously many reasons. For me, three in particular stand out: disruption, expectations and complexity. Treating these in turn, we live in a period of incredible, accelerating disruption and change, driven by interconnected forces such as advancing technology. The effects are profound and transformational. From the physics of whole business sectors being rewritten, to the way we live radically shifting. And we are only just getting started. Design is a way of seeing, thinking and of making choices and sense of things and, thus, a way of navigating through — and also causing — positive disruption. Secondly, people’s expectations have radically changed through using well-designed products and services in their everyday lives, whether it be iPhones, Kindles, Google Maps, Amazon and so on. We all now expect things to be easy to use, wellLee Sandkey
thought-through and engaging. People know good design even if they don’t always frame it in those terms. Thirdly, rising product and service complexity. Value is distributed and accessed in a variety of ways, and we engage with brands in a more temporal way. For example, Nike is no longer simply about shoes. Design, particularly service design, provides a way of managing complexity, delivering value and creating coherent brand experiences for a digitally connected and evolving world. Now design is more than just a source of competitive edge. It’s fundamental. As a result, we see designers founding companies, agencies launching their own products and becoming part of the boardroom and we see design becoming part of the literacy of business. Yes, it’s a wonderful time. In fact, I believe we are in a new era for design. One in which there is an unprecedented opportunity for design to fulfil its
transformation through service design
brand
design’s role
strategy
experience
operations
Diagram 1: Design’s role expanding.
t
buil
d
tes
and diagrams: all the good stuff associated with service potential and cement its position as a design. We are brilliant at communicating the journey. In driving force in business and society. Design can now make or break a business, other words, the emphasis is on the ‘how’. I also often find this in service design conversations. Yet often things create new realities and play a key role in helping tackle profound global challenges such as ‘what was the problem or opportunity?’, ‘what was the idea?’ and ‘what was the impact?’, are missing. As such as climate change. uncomfortable a question as this might be, are we, service Serious opportunity, serious designers, more in love with process than outcomes? Are responsibility. This is The New we like a musician who’s more in love with their instrument Seriousness of Design. So what are the than actually making music? implications of this new significance, one There also seems to be an ongoing sense of, even where we have a seat at the table? What anxiety about, the need to define service design. It was a does it mean for in-house teams, agencies topic of conversation during the members’ day at the Service and design education? At a community ux ui interaction visual research Design Global Conference 2013. I’m not sure why. Aren’t we and individual level, are we (designers) already designing services? Does this ‘quest’ in fact distract ready? Is service design ready? the community and hinder the discipline? Personally the Try doing a Google search for service design images. I don't know about answer to the question, “what is service design?” is simple. It’s the design of services. Yes, there may be multiple touch you, but the results somehow echo my points, there may be something owned or maybe not, there experience and perception of service may a digital element or not, or physical product or not, or design. What do I mean? In reviewing the presence of a call centre or not, and so on. There are so portfolios, agency pitches and projects, many variations and things are evolving all the time. you tend to see lots of personas, photos of Is it helpful or realistic to try and define something where ideation workshops and walls of Post-it change is the new normal and boundaries are melting? notes accompanied by various blueprints
UI
design Interaction process
touchpoint 6-1 23
mak
ux
ui
interaction
buil
design Interaction process learn
While service designers can apply their expertise as a discipline, service design is also an approach or mindset that is increasingly adopted by other design disciplines be it Interaction, Experience, Product, UI, Visual and so on, as increasingly solutions involve distributed value that utilises multiple technologies across multiple contexts and touchpoints. In this context, all of design benefits and it’s the ‘doing’ that counts. Given design’s unprecedented opportunity, are we really focused on what matters, better outcomes? In my view, that’s what design is ultimately about. Yes, we need to understand, evolve and love the craft and so forth but, ultimately, it’s the impact that design creates that counts. Do we want to be defined by our process or outcomes? Going further, perhaps design’s general tendency to frame, position and sell itself around process rather than outcomes is one of the reasons why, historically, it has not always been valued as much as business consultancy or advertising. The new found relevance and adoption is changing design itself. It is being reshaped by opposing forces of expansion and contraction. On the 24
touchpoint 6-1
make
t
UI
Diagram 2: Design process collapsing.
visual
tes
d
research
one hand, design’s role is expanding across the 4 dimensions of strategy, experience, brand and operations. (See diagram 1). To the left, helping influence or drive business strategy. So rather than designers responding to briefs, design-driven organisations are using design to determine what to do. To the right, we are helping deliver and iterate ongoing customer experiences. We are designing relationships. Along the vertical axis, design is playing an increasing role in branding. There is an increasing awareness that, for most organisations, your brand emerges from the reality of using your product or service. Putting it another way, service design converts brand intention into reality. Service-, interaction- and experience design are, in a very real sense, designing the brand. Along the other dimension, design is helping to shape how organisations operationalise a service or experience.
transformation through service design
products
services
products
services
distributed value physical
digital
physical
digital
Diagram 3: From contained to distributed value.
(See diagram 2) At the same time, the process of design is, in a sense, collapsing in on itself. The act of making and prototyping are happening earlier: indeed, early prototypes in lean approaches are the product. We see roles blurring. Visual designers coding, business analysts wire-framing, researchers making, and so on. There’s wider participation: customers and stakeholders are designing. All this in the context of a generally more iterative, agile ‘build, test and learn’ approach, whilst the boundary between products, services, physical and digital are all melting away (see diagram 3). All these forces are, I believe, creating fundamentally new conditions for design. In these conditions, some old adages start to melt, while others are accentuated. I’m still working these through in my mind and there isn’t space to discuss them here, but four I’m kicking about are:
• The devil is no longer in the details: it’s in disruption and the ‘differences’ • Being design focused is not enough: you need to design the right thing, not just get the design right • It’s about what we add, rather than take away: in the drive for simplicity, are we stripping out friction and characteristics that create personality and character? • Transcend how the service works to what the service means: is it enough, especially in commoditised, competitive markets, to design things that are easy to use and functional? There’s a need to design for meaning and empathy. To sum up, I believe we are in a new era for design, with new conditions that are changing the discipline itself. Service design needs a new mindset to match. One where we are more than the glue, a facilitator. We need to bridge the reality gap, get more into making, into delivery and to get our hands dirty. Or, as Joel Bailey puts it, “get into the grit”. Apologies, for posing more questions than answers here. Ultimately, I hope this is thought provoking and helps, in some way, to stimulate debate. But, most of all, I would like to suggest that we need to be more in love with outcomes than process. That’s where people feel the magic.
•
touchpoint 6-1 25
The Three Ideas Driving Organisational Change How changes in organisations mean changes for service design
James Samperi is a director at Engine, leading the evolution of the practice to be at the heart of developing new service strategies and business change. He has led major, landmark projects for Mercedes-Benz, Samsung, E.ON and The Portuguese Airport Authority. He regularly speaks and runs training workshops on service design and its impact on business.
Service design captures imaginations beyond the design sector because it packages a set of ideas that are well suited for change-oriented organisations. Even with solid management practices focused on quality and efficiency, organisations still work hard to win, keep and delight customers. The need for transformation is very real, and service design is well placed to make a difference, as long as it is able to adapt. More organisations are recognising the limitations of traditional management practices when it comes to re-imagining how they can become more customer centred. This need to envision an alternative future is beginning to see service design
practitioners being given a greater permission to work deeper within organisations to design across channels and touchpoints. But with greater permission comes greater responsibility for service designers to build upon their skills and deliver results.
Impact of aftersales Service developed for Mercedes-Benz developed by Engine, 2011 figures.
26
touchpoint 6-1
James Samperi
transformation through service design C4 and Engine building the system view of the recommendation service.
For service design to reach it’s potential of being a truly transformative practice it is important to acknowledge how the practice needs to adapt and grow in light of three broader transformations within the organisations for which we work. Transformation no. 1: shifting from business centricity to customer experience
Service design is gaining particular traction within service businesses who see customer experience management as a core competence. This set of methodologies for identifying and measuring the performance of key customer interactions and touchpoints creates a mandate for change. It supports organisations in quantifying performance and in articulating the value of improvement for the benefit of customers and the business. However, crafting great consumer experiences is complex, involving strategy, integration of technologies, orchestrating business models, design management and leadership from the top. As such, organisations soon find management of the customer experience limiting and have turned to service design to make a step change.
Service design compliments customer experience practice As part of customer experience improvement, service designers are being asked to bring freedom and imagination to conceive of something better and to combine it with a deep understanding of the constraints of the current operations. Service designers must craft both the experiential and operational / system level of the service. It’s no longer enough to simply reimagine a service without engaging with the constraints and commercial realities of the business. Like all great design, the best service design happens in the friction between available resources and an optimistic view of the future. This requires a depth to the design work and broadening skill set that fuses design skills with business acumen. This aptitude for understanding business hasn’t always been a strength of those from the D-School, but needs to become part of the design armoury as service design is more widely applied. A recent Engine project with the UK’s Channel 4 was to design a multi-platform personalised recommendation service for TV content. Much of the design work focused on how the back-end ‘recommendation engine’ would work to enable multiple experiences and drive C4’s commercial objectives: service design’s version of ‘form follows function’. So as customer experience creates the case for service design within service organisations, there is an increasing demand from non-service companies that throws up the biggest challenges for a maturing service design practice. touchpoint 6-1 27
The 9 components for service design. SERVICE ROLE The defining role(s) we play in customer’s lives
PRINCIPLES
PROPOSITIONS
SERVICE MODEL
How we direct design decisions
The big idea that makes a difference
How a service operates & creates value
PLATFORM REQUIREMENTS
Source: Engine, service design
Elements needed to deliver the service
PROCESSES
PRODUCTS
PEOPLE
How a service is enacted & maintained
What people interact with & buy
Beliefs & behaviour of users & providers
JOURNEYS & EXPERIENCES
The desirable set of experiences & interactions
Transformation No. 2: shift from product to services development
As manufacturers continue to combat the commoditisation of their product offerings, they are increasingly exploring ways to add value to their products through services, the most radical of which are looking to exploit their current competences by designing and developing completely new, service-only businesses. Such a transformation is seeing an increasing number of organisations commission service design to support the design of new service businesses. A central theme of this work is to find ways to shift organisations from selling units to building relationships based on utility and reciprocity. For most it requires defining what it means to be a partner and not just a vendor. Designing a new service business Faced with the challenge of designing a business, the role of a service designer is much broader: the design of a new service business comes with the need to show strong market potential and have clear commercial and operational rationale. This expanding remit asks a lot of designers, as it requires a much deeper understanding of how services work and how value is created for both customers and the business. At Engine, large-scale service design challenges are tackled by addressing nine different elements of a service. 28
touchpoint 6-1
Building new capability for delivering services is complex. To reach fruition, this process requires high levels of investment in terms of time, finance and resources. Engine’s current work on developing the services for new Chinese car brand, Qoros, began in 2009 and the first dealership opened in December 2013 . Large-scale service development programmes have challenged us to work in new ways as we are asked to play key roles in leading detailed design across channels and support detailed development. Moving from projects to programmes and partnerships As it is often service designers who have the most holistic view of the service being developed, organisations will expect service designers to retain a place within an ongoing programme of development to ensure the integrity of the final solution. As our clients continue to move from a product to a service-centred world, service designers need to become more comfortable working at the centre of a range of implementation partners
transformation through service design
Concepts and prototyping the concepts with customers and staff in Shanghai.
involved with operations, enterprise architecture, digital development, training, etc. This will increasingly require service designers to combine an understanding of service management, marketing and operations with the ability to roll-up their sleeves and craft delight into the details of the service. Transformation No. 3: shift from solely analytical to imaginative thinking
Services need constant management and refinement with the customer experience regularly improved. As such organisations have begun to build the necessary capabilities to more proactively manage their own services development long after the first wave of design and implementation. This requires service design projects to leave a legacy of capabilities within the organisations they work with. Service design is a practical application of design thinking to organisations
Imaginative thinking is slowly becoming a core competence, with many seeing service design as an integrated
management practice that can support their ambition to be best-in-class. As such, service designers are finding themselves working with clients to build internal capabilities: designing the business function that allows organisations to lead their transformation. This change is happening in forward thinking, customer-centred organisations, such as Virgin Atlantic, where Engine has supported the development of an internal design team. Similarly, slower moving industries, such as E.ON Energy now have a 14-strong service design team in the UK. This newly formed team at E.ON works on projects ranging from designing the rollout of smart meters to UK homes and businesses, to the more immediate challenge of designing the experience of finalising the account of a customer who has died. In these instances, imaginative and empathic thinking is being adopted by those without backgrounds in design and influencing all aspects of the business. Service design as a transformational practice
It’s evident that service design can play a major role in supporting organisations to transform the ways in which they do business and keep their customers engaged. The challenge for the discipline is to build upon an already broad set of skills that allow designers to take more of an active role in helping organisations bring new services to fruition: touchpoint 6-1 29
OUTSIDE IN
Business view of the customer experience
Customer view of the customer experience
business process improvement
customer experience improvement
focus on efficiency
focus on value creation
the model and the process is the subject
the customer and their life is the subject
the business identifies the problem
the customer identifies the problem
respond to customer feedback
responds to latent & anticipated customer needs
design with business teams
design with customers
design with operating principles
design service principles
define benchmarks and metrics
determine what customers truly value
define, measure, analyse, improve, control & replicate
discover, define, develop & deliver
Imaginative thinking completes the picture for organisations.
Source: Engine, service design
INSIDE OUT
Knowing how services and service
Knowing what great service is and how
businesses work
to craft its delivery
As organisations look to adopt service design, its value will ultimately be substantiated by the outcomes that can be experienced and whose impact can measured. This means: • Having confidence to engage with the detail of operational systems and the constraints of established business models, teams and organisations. • Understanding the business model and commercial drivers that define the project and current services. • Spotting and articulating tensions between the business model and the customer experience. • Knowing how to get the most from existing resources to improve the design of an experience.
Design is about finding the perfect balance between delight and practicality, about finding the most elegant solution, often with the least material cost. Designtrained people inherently understand the difference between good and great form and function • Identifying the aspects of a service that are critical to the quality of the experience and knowing how to craft these for customers. • Anticipating how new solutions will create customer and business value, and how this could be delivered and measured. • Able to create synergies between the customer experience and the systems for delivery. • Designing experiences that work cohesively across channels and touchpoints.
•
30
touchpoint 6-1
ADVERTISEMENT
Shop → Eat → Live
From supermarkets to super service markets
Melanie Wendland recently joined M4ID as director of Service Design and Innovation. M4ID is a social enterprise providing new communication technology services for the health and development sector. Melanie will be leading the service design and implementation of social change projects in low resource settings. Previously Melanie worked as design lead at Fjord’s Service Design Academy, a strategic unit focused on creative collaboration, service design thought-leadership and employee and client training. This article was written during her employment at Fjord.
32
touchpoint 6-1
‘We are what we eat’ is an old saying. Our current food consumption has become adapted to fit our busy lives and is promoted by a food industry that tries to maximise profit. But there is an increasing number of value-driven customers demanding more focus on health and environmental aspects in groceries. Can grocery providers address their needs by shifting from offering just products to delivering services? Can digital technologies enable supermarkets to deliver transforming service experiences to their customers? Last year, Alexander and Hanna Gullichsen published a new cookbook in Finland, called Safkaa. In it, was a recipe for Avocado pasta. Alexander had made the pasta for his bride-to-be and she found it so good that she almost started to cry. Someone mentioned the avocado pasta to a friend in a café, another one recommended it on Facebook, someone posted in on Tumblr and, suddenly, Finland was eating avocado pasta. The recipe got featured in newspapers and before they knew it, supermarkets could not deliver anything like enough avocados to their customers. A year later, you can see the markets full of ‘ready-to-eat’ avocados every day. What does this story tell us about transformation, and what could supermarkets learn from this? Melanie Wendland
Let’s look at the history of supermarkets, which is fairly simple. Grocery-chain retailing had its beginnings towards the end of 1850, when the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company started to sell dry goods. Self-service shopping arrived at the beginning of 1916, leading to the chainstore explosion in the 1920s. In the 1930s, chain supermarkets peaked, increasing in size and in product choice. The 1950s and 60s marked an era when supermarkets moved to the suburbs and shopping centres until, in the 1970s, the first discounters appeared on the market. Only during the past 10 to 15 years has there been an increase in organic supermarkets popping up, reversing the trend towards greater size and product choice, focusing instead on quality and provenance.
transformation through service design Evolution of supermarkets. PETE’s
1850
PETE’s
1920 PETE’s
SHOP
1940 A-MARKET INC.
We are all aware that the way a supermarket is laid out is based on 1950 maximising sales volume: the cheapest SHOPPING CENTRE products at the bottom, most expensive at eye level or above. Furthermore, products try to convince us that they are great for us by using adjectives such as ‘all natural’, product names such as ‘Farmers Delight’ BIOBIO and images of fields and meadows with 1970 happy cows in logos and packaging. But these products usually are far from being 2000natural or healthy for us as Robert Kenner‘s documentary Food Inc. points out. The average supermarket stocks Supermarkets are one of the most important actors between 20,000 products (Scandinavia) in our food chain. But with all the health problems in and 45,000 products (USA). In order to modern society, shouldn’t they play a more responsible have a balanced diet, do we need all this HEALTH role in what we eat? But why should supermarkets care, choice? In a TED talk, Sheena Iyengar EATING revealed that her research had shown that when sales is all that drives their business? One reason to care should be seen in the fact that too much choice actually limits us from HOME DELIVERY customers are starting to bypass supermarkets by using buying more. It confuses us, overwhelms digital services to connect directly to suppliers and us. According to Iyengar, with less choice, producers of organic products. Another reason is that we are more likely to buy more. We like GROCERIES people are starting to care about the transparency of a to have choice, but we are bad at choosing PREPARING product’s origin so much that it has a measurable impact when faced with too many options. on sales. For example, in Sweden, a tracking system With so much choice and overSUPERMARKETS for fish that allows consumers to see the origin of their hyped products and sales-optimised purchase drove up sales from a few kilos per week to over stores, who enjoys shopping? Based on 150kg (Hufvudstadsbladet, 30.10.2013). survey research and cultural probes with 150 people in 5 households in the Helsinki metropolitan area, I found out that the GUIDE INSPIRE Digital services help consumers 1920 reason that people dislike going shopping find alternative sources PETE’s is because of the constant rush, standing in 1940 for groceries. queues, carrying groceries, being around SHOP A-MARKET INC. SHOP too many other people and searching for SPEED products. The most pleasant aspects of REWARD UP shopping, however, were related good 1950 service, finding new products, getting ideas for meals and finding everything one needs. Interestingly, the unpleasant aspects relate to the supermarket itself, the pleasant aspects to the service provided. DISCOUNTER
SHOP
SHOP
PETE’s PETE’s
SHOPPING CENTRE
BIOBIO
touchpoint 6-1 33
R
1970 DISCOUNTER
2000SHOP
REFLECTION SHOP
HEALTH
SHOP
PLANNING
EATING HOME DELIVERY
SHOP
SHOP
GROCERIES
Supermarkets adding value in the food buying and preparation cycle. SUPERMARKETS In the long run, supermarkets have an interest in considering the lifetime value of their customers and recognise that customers facing lifelong health GUIDE INSPIRE issues such as diabetes or coronary heart diseases will not be a source of revenue for as long as healthy customers. SHOPdo customers want So what SPEED REWARD from supermarkets? My research UP in the Helsinki area revealedPETE’s that a1920 large 1850 proportion of supermarket customers PETE’s PETE’s SHOP aged 28-45 actually do want very different things from what the supermarket is offering today: organic products, more fresh produce, fewer artificial1950 ingredients SHOPPING CENTRE and more transparency about the products. They want to have inspiration for healthy foods, recipes and help in getting the food on the table. This sounds quite obvious, but isn’t the reality for most 1970 supermarkets. DISCOUNTER
Future supermarkets: From Products to Services to Transformations. HEALTH HOME DELIVERY
Supermarkets need to step up in the Maslow pyramid and deliver not only groceries and services connected to them — such as home delivery and online shopping — but also services that help customers choose a healthy diet. In the case of the avocado pasta story, only one supermarket came up with the idea of grouping the products needed for the recipe and selling them as a package with the recipe. None of them tried to build on that idea and use it as a service-led sales strategy. Looking at the avocado pasta story, there are a few ingredients that made this such a success: a compelling story, an1940 easy recipe, affordability and a healthy vegetable SHOP A-MARKET INC. as a main ingredient, all shared by people through digital technology. In order for supermarkets to become super services, rather than simply being super markets, they should offer relevant solutions that help customers throughout all phases of the food-buying and preparation cycle: reflection, planning, shopping, preparation and eating. BIOBIO These solutions not only require a shift from product to service thinking, but also a shift in the business model from2000product-centric to service-centric. Though mostly product-centric, German organic supermarket LPG has started using a subscription model to attract REFLECTION customers with lower prices for organic products, at the same time securing sales and improving stock management and product demand. InPLANNING the digital age, EATING customers are used to paying for subscription services. Applying the ingredients of the avocado pasta example to the design of a supermarket service that might enable people to live healthier life, there are many other SHOPPING PREPARING potential ideas that engage customers with groceries in a different way. SHOP
SHOP
SHOP
GROCERIES
SUPERMARKETS 34
touchpoint 6-1
SHOPPING
PREPARING
SHOP
SHOP
PREPARIN
transformation through service design SUPERMARKETS Design drivers. GUIDE
INSPIRE
SHOP
REWARD
Here are a few: • Use crowdsourcing mediated via social media as a way to engage with customers. Drive demand and offer of groceries in local stores by making people share and vote for their favourite foods and recipes • Drive awareness of healthy meals by offering ready-togo meal bags with recipes and fresh ingredients. People want to cook fresh, but lack inspiration and time. • Use purchasing behaviour and preferences to inform customers about healthy and smart choices regarding nutrition through data visualisation, recommendations, inspiration and discounts for loyal customers. • Speed up shopping through automated check out, mobile payments, dynamic shopping lists and instore navigation to free up customer’s time for meal preparation and to reduce stress • Engage customers in service experiences within the store through storytelling and themed ingredient- or recipe journeys by offering story cards or interactive apps to discover new ingredients or recipes. • Sportstracker for supermarkets. Offer round-theclock services that help plan meals, help customers to eat regularly, that assist in cooking, that encourage online ordering and that let the customer analyse their behavioural patterns. In summary, there are four design drivers that supermarkets could leverage: 1. Guide customers towards a healthier diet 2. Inspire customers to cook their own food and to seek out new recipes 3. Reward customers with valuable information, offers and discounts 4. Speed up grocery shopping and meal preparation to fit customers’ busy lives.
SPEED UP
There are already case studies that suggest a move towards a healthfocused grocery trade may be on Its way: Kochhaus, a German walk-in recipe store groups ingredients based on recipes on a table with ‘per person’ pricing. Kochzauber, another German start-up, for a week delivers healthy boxes with recipes and healthy food to people’s homes. And, oddly enough, McDonalds is launching apps in a few countries, through which customers can trace the ingredients of their burgers. And even their brand identity is switching to the colour green and to green practices. When customers demand, supermarkets and food providers need to listen. After all, people don’t have a need to shop, per se. Rather, they need to eat, want to enjoy what they eat and increasingly have a desire to do this in a way that will help them live long and healthy lives.
•
The research and service concept related to this article can be read in detail at https://www.academia.edu/3574005/
touchpoint 6-1 35
36
touchpoint 6-1
transformation through service design
Real-Time Service Design Strategies for moving from ‘we think’ to ‘we know’
In a world of crowd-funding websites like Kickstarter, pop-up shops and startups that live permanently in beta, how might service designers develop their own live prototypes? By taking the practice of service design out of the studio and onto the street, our work can become both more agile and more rigorous. Real-time service design allows us to develop services as live prototypes, creating a realistic experience for users that allows us to distinguish between what people say and what they actually do. Service design — no longer the new kid on the block?
The consensus at last year’s Service Design Global Conference in Cardiff was that service design has come of age. No longer an immature discipline, design processes and methodologies for creating and improving services are being employed everywhere, from education and healthcare through to airlines and telecommunications. This is great news for service designers, but it makes it all the more incumbent upon us to ensure that our toolkit keeps pace with developments happening outside our discipline. If your experience as a service designer is anything like mine, your professional life probably involves a good deal of interviews, contextual observations, ethnographies, and
co-creation sessions. You might also augment these activities with some quantitative research, all of which is then synthesised to produce insights, opportunity areas, design principles, personas, user journeys, scenarios and prototypes. This human-centred approach to service design has proven fantastic at unearthing the subtle differences that make a huge impact on the way users experience a service, and the companies that invest in this approach are often the ones with the edge over their competitors. However, just as service design has become a recognised and respected practice, there’s been a huge swell in the number of companies, startups and even consumers themselves who are rapidly developing products and services and who
Lydia Howland is a design and portfolio director at IDEO. Having first joined as a design researcher, she is still primarily interested in how insights into what people say, do, think and feel can shape the development of new services but, these days, she applies most of her energy towards innovation in the financial and hospitality sectors.
Lydia Howland
touchpoint 6-1 37
1.
are prepared to immediately put these out into the real world to see what happens. You only have to look at the ideas on Kickstarter to see that whole businesses are being built without any design research. They are not doing big user studies to refine their value proposition or putting out pilots to prototype their service experience: they’re taking their inspiration from the Lean Startup movement and learning by doing. And so, for the last few years at IDEO, we’ve been asking ourselves: ‘How do we augment the humancentred nuance that comes from detailed design research with all that can be learned from experiments in realtime, real-life context?’ Throughout IDEO, we’ve been exploring what happens when you combine a more traditional service design approach to research with a startup mentality towards testing assumptions and hypotheses. So what is ‘real-time service design’ and why does it even matter?
As we know, one of the biggest challenges with any research with people is that, as soon as participants are aware they are participating in a study, it invariably influences their behaviour. As such, research can teach us a lot about what people say (and, to some extent, what they might think and feel), but it remains an imperfect way of predicting what they will actually do in a given situation. For service designers, we may occasionally feel reluctant to ‘put stuff out there’ until it’s 100% right and ready, but today’s entrepreneurs don’t necessarily share these hang-ups. A designer’s instinct is to ‘build to learn’, whereas entrepreneurs ‘launch to learn’ and aren’t afraid to ‘fake it until they make it’. Enter real-time service design, an approach that allows designers to: • Understand actual reactions, responses and behaviours in a real-life context 38
touchpoint 6-1
2.
3.
• Release ideas into the world in limited ways in order to observe and measure how users respond to them • Pull apart the difference between what people say, think and feel and what they actually do At IDEO, we feel taking such an approach is increasingly critical to the success of our work, because when we come up with a new idea for a service, it’s inevitably based on a lot of assumptions from our user-centred design research. If we can surface these assumptions, test them in a real-world context and design around what we learn, we can reduce the risk in the innovation process and move away from a position of ‘we believe’ and towards a position of ‘we know’ more quickly. A case study: Designing a scalable bottled water business in Kenya
In 2012, ideo.org partnered with Unilever, Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), Aqua for All, and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) to design a scalable business in Kenya selling water alongside hygiene and nutrition products. The challenge, however, was that nobody knew whether it made sense to position this business around hygiene and germ prevention, or around nutrition and wellbeing, given that clean water is necessary for both. The people working on the project were also unsure of the best service model for this venture, although they had three versions of it that they wanted to test: a shop kiosk, a mobile cart and a door-to-door subscription service. One way to answer these questions would have been to conduct traditional design research (i.e. user ethnographies and observations, expert interviews, etc.), but the team decided to build a prototype of the business and to answer these questions through a series of live experiments.
transformation through service design
4.
5.
6.
7.
Photos: Courtesy of IDEO.org
Of course, they needed to look credible in order for anyone to trust them. While they weren’t fronting a real business just yet, they needed people to believe the venture was real in order to get their unbiased responses to it and test hypotheses. Once people had shared their initial thoughts, the team would disclose this was an experiment and ask people to help them refine and improve their ideas further. However, getting that first ‘gut reaction’ when people thought the business was real was absolutely critical. So, the team created a new brand, ‘SmartLife’. Just before, in preparation for the launch, they ironed heat transfers onto T-shirts, stuck logos on empty jerry cans, placed a large selection of local and foreign products into branded bags and drafted scripts and price lists for their (locally recruited) staff. Ambitiously, the team chose to launch all three versions of the service on the same day and in the same neighbourhood. Over the following fortnight, by running two fully functioning retail kiosks, a mobile cart and a door-to-door delivery service, the team was able to speak to over 50 people and sold 520 litres of clean drinking water along the way. By the end of those two weeks, the team was able to say with confidence that this venture needed to be a hightouch subscription service for clean water combining hygiene and nutrition products, with a female-friendly brand. In just a fortnight, real-time service design had enabled them to move from a position of ‘we believe’ to one of ‘we know’. Not only had the experiment helped define the value proposition and the service experience, but running a beta version of the offer had given them valuable insight into the business model and the organisational capabilities required to deliver it too. To quote the project leader: “Our experiment in real-time service design has helped us define the overall offer in ways that we couldn’t have predicted or achieved from just interviews alone.”
1. IDEO.org designed a social enterprise providing safe drinking water, hygiene, and wellness products. Designing this solution required looking at both the micro and macro elements of the entire ecosystem. We explored every aspect of the business including the customer experience, the business model, the financial breakdown, and the brand expression. 2. The social enterprise, SmartLife, combines a system of door-to-door sales with reliable delivery and an in-store, self-service water center. With a selection of subscription options, including drinking water, hygiene, and personal care products, SmartLife provides both the everyday essentials and advanced wellness options. 3. One of the two piloted SmartLife water centers can be seen here, launched in February 2013 in a neighborhood of Nairobi called Ongata Rongai. 4. To design SmartLife, IDEO.org ran an eight-week project using the human-centered design approach. Human-centered design is a process that creates a deep empathy between the designer and the individual or community they are designing for. By hearing the needs, aspirations, fears, and desires of the community throughout the research and prototyping phases, we are better able to create innovative and impactful solutions. 5. During the design process, IDEO.org headed to Nairobi and set up a number of prototypes to better understand what it would mean to create a successful combined water, hygiene, and nutrition business. By testing assumptions about consumer preferences, brand possibilities, sales strategies, and product mixes, we gained great insight about the components we were designing. 6. Combined with our earlier research and ideas, we were able to identify three strong prototypes that we wanted to test: 1) a water kiosk that also sold health and nutrition products, 2) a mkokoteni (mobile cart) selling health and nutrition products alongside water, and 3) a door-to-door subscription service selling water along with health and nutrition products. 7. To make our prototypes seem as real as possible, we ironed heat transfers of the SmartLife logo onto t-shirts, placed logo stickers onto empty jerry cans, placed a selection of local and foreign products into bags, and drafted scripts and pricing lists for our prototype staff. The SmartLife prototype brand was ready to launch! 8. (See page 41) The interaction with our customers during our prototypes demonstrated that instead of one touch point, it was important to have a combination of door-to-door, retail location, and delivery services to solidify people and confidence. By putting people at the heart of our research and design process, we were able to develop a strong and holistic design solution.
touchpoint 6-1 39
The SmartLife logo is simple, crisp and geometric to make it recognizable in a variety of branded materials, including staff t-shirts, jerry cans, and printed brochures. This system map describes the subscription model of door-to-door sign up to week deliveries.
1. Find out if your idea has the power to convene an audience In 2009, when IDEO wanted to launch an open innovation platform, we weren’t sure our brand had the permission to convene conversations on topics beyond traditional design, like healthcare and education. So, we created the ‘Big Conversations and Small Talk’ page on Facebook, in which we raised these issues. The result was that several thousand people liked the page and several hundred left comments, giving us the confidence to move OpenIDEO forward to the next stage of development.
2. Gauge responses to your concepts from future customers An IDEO team recently worked with a health and wellbeing client to develop a new range of products. Traditionally, they would have sketched up the concepts and run evaluative sessions with a range of carefully profiled users to gather feedback, but they decided to augment that approach with an experiment on Pinterest. The team produced high-fidelity visualisations of the concepts and worked with a specialist agency to identify influential pinners who were willing to repin these images to their boards. The feedback was almost immediate and extremely valuable. The comments and number of repins were good proxies for purchase intent. Also the ideas were exposed to a far larger group of people than face-to-face sessions traditionally allow, none of whom were being targeted as research participants but rather active participants in a preexisting online community.
Suggestion: Use Facebook and other social networks to test out whether your idea or brand has the power to convene an audience. Create a page, publicise it and see how many ‘likes’ and what kinds of comments it attracts in order to clarify whether you’re onto something or not.
Suggestion: If your idea involves a product of some kind, use Pinterest to solicit feedback on your designs. Put up your sketches or renderings and see who repins them and what kinds of comments they attract.
Three strategies to start designing in real time
There are many low-cost, low-risk ways to experiment with real-time service design, largely made possible by the wealth of digital and social media platforms that designers can use for rapid results. Below are three examples of how IDEO teams have tapped into these social and digital channels, with evidence of the value this has added to recent projects.
40
touchpoint 6-1
transformation through service design
3. Go to market early, gather data and iterate based on feedback, right from the outset For Swiss Life, Europe’s leading provide of life insurance, IDEO developed One100, an evolving digital platform (desktop and mobile) that helps young customers save money towards items on their wish list, be it a new bike or a trip around the world. A microsite under the name of ‘HOI’ was launched (after just four weeks of initial development) with the goal of learning from users in real time. Their feedback on HOI led to a very different user experience design for One100, and new features and functionality are still being added to this day. Our live research not only informed the overall user experience, but also shaped the offer for IDEO’s client right from the start, because it soon became clear what incentives were needed for people to start saving. The site visualises personal progress, ‘cheering users on’ as they work towards their financial goals and inspiring those in their social network to get on board and start saving for the future. Suggestion: Using tools like WordPress, and for the cost of a URL and a few Google Adwords, you can easily build a microsite, start driving traffic to it and learn from users in real time.
video! e h t h c wat o.com/ e m i v / / : https 45725 777
Summary
In conclusion, IDEO isn’t advocating real-time service design as an alternative to more traditional qual and quant design research, but rather as a complement to it. These kinds of experiments don’t always unearth the same level of nuance as interviews, observations and ethnographies, nor can they provide robust, statistically relevant data to the extent that quant can provide. But where real-time service design comes into its own is when it’s critical to unpick the difference between what people say and what they actually do. This approach aims to mitigate the difference by prompting people to respond to ideas as if they were real, in order to gain actual (and not simply hypothetical) reactions and responses. Putting ideas into the public domain before they’re even real can make people nervous. Potential users are exposed to concepts in a way that initially presents them as real, before they’ve even been launched, which can feel like a significant risk to some of our clients. The reward, therefore, lies in the responses. Unbiased, honest feedback is the Holy Grail of service design, but hard to glean from research activities carried out in an unrealistic context. Real-time service design, helps remove a degree of risk from the innovation process because, as has long been a mantra at IDEO, ‘failing early means succeeding sooner’.
•
touchpoint 6-1 41
From Dashboards to Cockpits Core ingredients to impact the design of the back office services
Mauro Rego is a strategic design consultant at the Design & Co-Innovation Center — SAP, where he promotes empathy and engagement in co-creation experiences of new digital products and services for business. He has experience in designing games, services, films, events and digital products in the fields of education and healthcare.
Marion Fröhlich is a strategic design consultant at the Design & Co-Innovation Center — SAP, where she transforms business operations and services into more delightful experiences. She created and directed the design for digital-product development and customer-experience strategies in the field of e-commerce, entertainment and telecommunications.
42
touchpoint 6-1
Computers and technology have become ubiquitous and are not exclusive to industry anymore. Everyday, we use digital products to manage our daily lives: from social media to the Internet of Things. These digital interactions exponentially fuel the growth of data in a world where the amount of data is constantly growing. Analysing large data sets is now essential for business success, regardless of the industry. How can we enable transactions, analysis and action on massive volumes of data instantly? How would it transform the way business is done? Management dashboards are commonly distributed interfaces that display such data. They give a realtime snapshot of the current status of a business (or an area of it) and enable its users to gain insights on their business and to take actions based on this information. At SAP Design and Co-Innovation Center, we discovered that the needs of big data analysts need more than visual and monitoringonly tools: they now need more interactive, personal and serviceoriented solutions. We have developed different tools and methodologies for how to make big data more useful and impactful on service delivery. Mauro Rego, Marion Fröhlich
The consumerisation of business software
Back in the time when computers were a tool used almost exclusively in the business world, the demands and expectations for user experience focused on function and features that were limited by technological possibilities. Today, digital experiences are more sophisticated and the customer’s expectations of enterprise software have matured due to the quality of digital consumer products. Personal software experiences setting the new standard for professional enterprise software experiences. The role as a designer in companies that develop B2B software is to create products and services that are effective
transformation through service design Sketching dashboard during a design workshop.
and efficient for the business and, at the same time, easy to use and delightful for the customers in the back-office. In simple words, the back-office operations are any activities that need to be performed to keep the service running. Several interconnected transactions are necessary to provide a successful touchpoint. This varies depending on the nature of the business: contacting suppliers, managing warehouses, paying employees, trading, etc. Business software possesses a complexity of processes and massive transactions that extend past the classic office tools to manage emails, meetings, etc. Within different areas of industry, from building services for an oil plant to creating software for the healthcare industry, we are constantly seeking new solutions that streamline and simplify complex processes. Better back office experience not only provides more enjoyable lives to the employees, but enables them to make better, faster, more-accurate decisions in a complex and changing business world. Back office experience designers usually claim efficiency as their main goal, but they are often compelled to make the software look professional, all the while providing the impression of complexity. The software and the processes should look and feel like a tool for experts: otherwise, the user cannot claim to be a professional operator (or ‘the only one who can deal with that’). An entire market related to professional training and certifications underlines this direction. Human-centred designers must consider the roles that users have to perform before designing for those users. It is important to focus on the user’s tasks
and needs instead of observing the needs of the process itself. This shift preserves the importance of professionalisation and, as a result, we have software that is operated by knowledge (or role) specialists and not only by software specialists. Sizing big data
Digital data has grown over the years due to our digital interactions (such as recorded location signals, text messages, photos, tweets, heartbeats, temperature, etc.). New technologies allows us to track, record and store this data and to use it for further actions. However, it is still a challenge to retrieve, process and analyse this massive amount of data at a satisfying rate of speed. The information deluge is often the consequence of this data collection. In the context of business, more information does not necessarily mean more efficiency. Indeed, it is important to define triggers and filters that allow the user to know what is necessary at the right time. When it comes to designing systems that have to deal with massive data and in-time actions, there are several user scenarios specific for each project. At the SAP Design and Co-Innovation Center, we have identified three basic common scenarios dealing with big data in the back office operations: control, query and action. a. Control (Something running / <trigger> Problem / <action> Solution / <goal> Go back to status Quo) The user observes the fluctuation of data and the status of a certain environment. When one or more parameters go out of line, the user has to take an action to restore the default situation. Security back-office usually operates on this scenario. They check the conditions of the facilities and when there is a leak, they have to follow procedures. touchpoint 6-1 43
b. Query (Getting a request / Search and Monitor / <trigger> Ideal parameter setting / <action> Make an action in a certain time frame / <goal> Get a more favorable condition or profit) The second scenario is about retrieving certain information from the database. The user searches for a certain piece of data using specific filtering, analyses the data and makes a decision according to the results. Google is maybe the most well-known scenario for this. For example, the Patient Data Explorer1: the researchers receive a new study and they have to search for a specific patient profile. That search will change over time: the actions of the patients will interfere in the future results, meaning they will make decisions that will change their presence in the database. c. Action (Something is running /<trigger> Specific condition appear/ <action> Make an action in a certain time frame / <goal> Get a more favorable condition or profit) In this scenario, the user observes a certain environment. When a certain temporary condition appears, they take an action that changes the data setting. It is quite common for auction or day-trading environments. A certain market opportunity shows up and, if the user takes no action, the user will lose the deal. These scenarios occur at the same time in the back office of a service. The same role may have to face the different scenarios depending on her context. From dashboards to cockpits
A management dashboard displays business data (KPIs, or key performance indicators) to give an overview on the current status of a business, transactions, etc. The information displayed on a management dashboard should be as up-to-date as possible. This is similar to reacting to the speedometer on a car dashboard in real-time: the time to view, process, analyse and to react on information about a business can be crucial. Furthermore, the information should be relevant and 44
touchpoint 6-1
meaningful to the user. It should allow them to follow behaviours, patterns and fluctuations of business data under certain filters and to help them to make the right decisions. Such management dashboards are monitoring tools that passively — like an observer — let its end-users consume information and gain insights about their businesses. If users want to act on and respond to a gained insight or a change in the business, they have to modify the context and use a different system in order to engage with other colleagues or to transfer and analyse the data eventually. Here we have identified a shift from passive monitoring ‘dashboards’ towards interactive management ‘cockpits’ in the business industry. These cockpits provide the functionality to actively analyse, filter and process data in real-time, to get automated suggestions to act upon insights and to take actions within the cockpit to further engage with others. Several consumer products already operate as a cockpit. Products like GoogleNow, Nike+, and apps for financial control give the user private information that they can act upon. By making these decisions, the software gives its users feedback and enables them to follow and understand the implications. Although this is already standard in consumer products, it is still new for business products due to technological limitations: the quantity of data that an oil plant has to process is way larger than a private bank account. The technological challenge is to not only read the data, but to produce an insight from it that enables users to react. There are already several technologies that can help to make these data points useful. As an example, SAP has designed HANA, an in-memory appliance that is capable of retrieving data from different databases and running the analytics inside of the database. This process enables a huge amount of data to be computed almost in real time. It also enables the analysis and the use of data for in-time processes such as running a sailing marathon. Therefore the challenge for designers lies in defining the quality of the data consumption and finding the right moment to allow the action of the user.
transformation through service design
USER LOOP ACTION
TRIGGER
USER ACTION
GOAL
system running
monitoring
problem
fix problem
return to initial condition
CONTROL
INITIAL CONDITION
The user observes the fluctuation of data and the status of a certain environment. When one (or more than one) parameter get out of a certain pattern, the user has to take an action to make it go back to the initial condition. e.g.: Facility Management
monitoring
problem
search
return to initial condition
QUERY
system running
The user searches for a certain piece of data under specific filter ing, analyses the data and takes a decision out what was found out. e.g.: Patient Data Explorer
monitoring
problem
ACTION
system running
The challenges for designers
In this article, we discussed three aspects that designers should consider when creating services: The importance of the back-office experience, the shift towards the consumerisation of business software and its high-quality user experience and the considerations for helping businesses profit from the use of data. Back-office operations, which are seldom prominent and mainly invisible to classic customers, are still a major contributor to a business and hence the products and services they deliver. And, as much as it is important to design a great product and service experience for the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s customers, it is equally valuable to design it for its employees and for the company itself, i.e. with the user and service experience in mind. The shift from designing passive dashboards to designing interactive cockpits demands a different approach from designers. Cockpits are a tool for professional experts. It is a context with a lower reframing possibility. The roles and tasks that the
search
return to initial condition
The user observes a certain environment. When a certain temporary condition appears, he takes an action that changes the data setting. e.g.: Ebay auction
concept has to support are specialised at such a level that the user-research tools and methods may have to be redesigned and adapted. The scope of use is more restricted than the consumer products (fewer scenarios). On the other hand, the UX standards are as competitive as the consumer applications. The user journey reaches another dimension of complexity: the data, information, triggers, filters and possible actions change not only due to the role and task, but also the context (time and space) in which the user is inserted. The idea of only delivering an application with fully customisable items cannot be taken for granted anymore. Designers, developers and users must partner in order to conceive solutions that fit to the variable conditions without giving to the user the whole responsibility of their own experience
â&#x20AC;˘
References 1 http://www.sap-innovationcenter.com/2013/09/19/medical-explorer/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yghB9CscO0U
touchpoint 6-1 45
Small Steps, Big Impact Designing better services for train travellers
Dr. Geke van Dijk is co-founder and strategy director of STBY in London and Amsterdam. She is also the initiator and chair of the Service Design Netwerk Netherlands, and co-founder of the Reach Network for Global Design Research. Geke has a background in ethnographic research, user-centred design, and services marketing & innovation and holds a PhD. in computer sciences from the Open University in the UK.
In early 2013, two new innovative services for train travellers were introduced in The Netherlands and tested in a live setting for 4 months. This new service was the result of a 2-year service design process with the Dutch national train company NS, the rail infrastructure company Prorail, and two agencies, STBY and Edenspiekermann. The overall process of customer-centred exploration, co-creation, prototyping and implementation triggered several substantial transformations on the client side. In this article, we share our insights into how these transformations took place. Giving travellers more control by providing them with real-time information
Marie de Vos is a design researcher at STBY and co-organiser of the Service Design Workouts in The Netherlands. She has a BSc. in Psychology and a MSc. in Media Technology. Experienced with both quantitative and qualitative research and analysis methods, she enjoys combining both in her projects to come to deep and meaningful insights.
46
touchpoint 6-1
A lot happens when a train arrives at a platform: travellers wanting to board are looking for the entrance to their required carriage (2nd class, 1st class, wheelchair access, or bike storage), and they are trying to get towards these doors quickly in order to have a place to sit. At the same time, other travellers are stepping out of the train. These conflicting journeys create a mĂŞlĂŠe of people walking on the platform, causing frustration among travellers. In this project, two new services were developed to improve this critical moment. By providing travellers with Geke van Dijk, Marie de Vos
real-time information about their train, they gain control and can better position themselves on the platform before arrival of the train. The first service, a 200m LED display on the train platform, gives travellers access to up-to-date information about the train that is arriving: where will the train stop in relation to the platform? Where will the doors be? What is the composition of the train (where are the 2nd, 1st and bike carriages)? And how busy is it at this moment in the different train carriages? The other service, a plugin to the regular train-planning app, also provides travellers with information about the composition of the train and the availability of seats in the different carriages.
transformation through service design
The two services that were developed, the app and the 200-metre long LED display, provide travellers with real-time information about the composition of the train and the level of occupancy of the different carriages. A 4-month live test period to research the use and
How it all began: exploring problem areas
viability of the services
and honing in on solutions
From January to April 2013, these two services were tested in a live setting on a train line throughout the Netherlands (between Zwolle and Roosendaal). During the pilot, 11 trains on that line were equipped with infrared sensors that measured the level of occupancy of the train carriages. Travellers could have access to this information by downloading the app on their smartphones and by consulting the LED display which was installed on the platform of one of the Netherlandsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; main stations, sâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Hertogenbosch. During the pilot, STBY used a mix of quantitative and qualitative research methods to evaluate the use and satisfaction of travellers with the new app and the LED display. Over 700 train travellers shared regular feedback through online questionnaires. This data allowed us to analyse the use of the new services and the effect on travellerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s satisfaction. This was needed in order to build a business case for a future roll-out of the services. Illustrating this data with the personaluse stories from the qualitative research made it possible to enrich the results of the quantitative data and allowed for an engaging way to communicate them. The pilot was a success. The travellers clearly adopted and embraced the new services. Moreover, the service providers also experienced great benefits from the new services, as the accumulated data can be used to more efficiently plan the deployment of train equipment. NS is currently using the results of the pilot study to investigate possibilities for a national roll-out, providing a happy end to the 2-year long service design process.
Initially, ProRail asked STBY and Edenspiekermann to look into the distribution and congestion of people on train platforms, as they were concerned about issues concerning safety and comfort. Using a combination of observations and shadowing, we first explored what was actually happening on the train platforms: how do people move about? Where do they go? Where do they stand still? This gave us initial insights into the behaviour of travellers and their patterns of movement.
Exploring movement patterns of travellers on the train platform with the client team.
touchpoint 6-1 47
In a series of interviews with train travellers, we subsequently explored the key motivations driving these behaviours. We found that travellerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s movements and motivations are largely dependent on their experience with a particular trip and identified two recurring customer journeys: the frequent trip and the incidental trip. In each of these customer journeys, we identified several problem areas and opportunities for improvement. Discussing the initial results with the client team early on in the project was important to engage them in the service design approach and to further scope out which issues we should look at more in-depth. We jointly decided to hone in on a critical moment in the journey: the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;scrambleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; moment when the train arrives at the platform. We agreed on the aim to make this process faster, safer and more comfortable.
Evaluating and prioritising the 12 concepts with the clients
48
touchpoint 6-1
Shifting roles: from research to inspiration for concepts
The research had already sparked some initial ideas for our design partner Edenspiekermann, but, in order to inspire them even more, we videotaped a series of show-and-tell interviews with travellers on the train platform. This rich material illustrated key aspects of the problem and could be used very well as a base for which to design solutions. Furthermore, we organised a co-creation workshop where travellers, designers and the client teams explored ideas for potential solutions together. Edenspiekermann used this as additional input to develop and finalise their concepts. A total of 12 new service concepts were then visualised and shared with the multidisciplinary client team. These concepts were jointly evaluated and prioritised, and very valuable feedback was given by the different experts on the client side on what was feasible or had already been tried. Make it happen: bringing new stakeholders in along the way
Initially, three stakeholders were involved in the project: ProRail, Edenspiekermann and STBY. However, as the problem area became more clearly defined around getting in and out of the train on the platform, we realised it was important to also involve the national train company, NS, as they are responsible for services in trains and most of the communication with travellers. A lot of effort was put into including this new stakeholder in the project and we later realised that this investment had been crucial. NS connected us to a project team that was already developing a new app that would give travellers real-time information on seat availability. For this information to be available, trains needed to be equipped with sensors to measure the level of occupancy of the different carriages. As the information from these sensors would also feed into some of the concepts Edenspiekermann had developed, it made sense to join forces. This made it possible to quickly go from concepts to full scale prototypes. The new app and the LED display were developed and tested, and proved to be a great success, as mentioned at the start of this article.
transformation through service design
what moves travelers on the train platform? customer journey of the occasional trip An occasional trip is often well prepared, information is consulted online and stored for future reference. When arriving on the station, the information displays are actively used. On the platform, travelers look for a ’safe’ place to wait, not too far from other passengers or information boards.
information need in case of failure In case of serious delays or train cancellation, the information need for all passengers grows dramatically. There is no distinction anymore between the type of trip one is undertaking.
customer journey of the frequent trip The frequent trip is barely prepared as the travelers know the train times and platforms by heart. Also, at the station, travelers do not actively search for the information displays, at most these are quickly checked when encountered. On the platform, many travelers have a ’preferred’ place to wait, one that ensures a quick way out at the arrival station.
The biggest change happens over time
This project shows how subsequent stages in the projects built up to a more systemic transformation of the service providers and an innovative final result for the train travellers. During the two-year project, there have been periods of high speed catalysis, for instance during the exploratory research, the concept development and the pilot test, but also extended quiet periods. These quiet periods happened when the client teams had to internally convince other stakeholders to get involved in the process. The overall process can be characterised as small steps, big impact, which is a dynamic we also recognise from other service design projects. Based on this experience, we have come to perceive ourselves as service designers
to be comparable to tug boats that engaged in a complex dynamic of helping the tankers of client organisations gradually change their course. Service design projects do not tend to magically transform the service offering and way of working of client organisations in one big push. Rather, the process often involves a long trajectory of small steps that contribute to a substantial transformation. In this project, we learned again that one of the biggest values we as service design agencies can offer is to be committed to these challenging long-term transformation projects, and to support our clients during their journeys of gradual change. For this journey, we need to be as empathic with the organisation of the service provider as we are with the end users of the services.
•
touchpoint 6-1 49
Go Deep or Go Home The emerging role for service design
Joel Bailey is an experienced service design leader, with 15 years experience helping clients such as Capita, O2, BBC and BIS transition to customer-centered, designled approaches that drive profitability. Joel is passionate about the business case for service design and deeply frustrated at how many designers are still designing chairs when we have a collapsing adult social care system that desperately needs their creative skills.
Service design has matured over the past few years, to the point where it has reached the top table of organisations. In my own role, leading service design at Capita, a UK FTSE 50 company and one of the world’s largest outsourcers, I have seen service design move from a niche and cosmetic activity, to a core competency enhancing our service transformation offer. Getting a seat at the top table is making some new demands of service design. It’s a great opportunity, but until we step up to meet those new demands, we risk losing the opportunity. This was brought into stark focus for me late one evening, when a senior and very experienced colleague, whom I respect hugely, commented to me that: “service design fizzles out”. Relatively speaking, we’re a young discipline, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we have the luxury of time to grow up. There are some big social and organisational challenges out there, and people are asking for our urgent help. This is great, but we need to significantly up our game or we’ll miss the moment. Get outside the bubble
Service design has developed a compelling and novel method for invigorating change in an organisation, and lots of people are working hard to continually refine and enhance the tools of our trade. This is all 50
touchpoint 6-1
Joel Bailey
essential work. But I’d also like to suggest we need to spend time outside this bubble of improving what we do, to spend a good deal of time improving how we do it, with and for others. I’ve grouped this shift into three areas where I feel the ‘how’ challenge resides. Get closer to the operation
Our story is relentlessly horizontal, because we recognise that customers are relentlessly horizontal. And success has always entailed engaging with the different operational verticals: HR, Marketing, IT, etc. However, to fully realise the promise of our design work, we now need to move to deeper collaboration with these verticals. Service design has had a longterm fascination with strategy, as this is often how we have been used: by senior leadership teams intent on setting a new course. However, we have moved beyond that point and now need to move
transformation through service design
Working on the ground to change hearts and minds.
beyond strategy, and tackle the barriers to strategy, namely culture. Everyone knows the adage ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’, and it remains true of the good aspirations of service design, which all too often succumb to daily organisational habits. Strategy is rooted in the idea that organisations are rational, when we know they are anything but. Taking a cultural perspective enables service designers to grapple with the longer-term, day-to-day challenge of realising strategy. Finally, I’d argue that service design teams need to reframe their deliverables, from products to change itself. All too often we become known for personas, customer journeys and beautiful lifecycle diagrams, rather than real outcomes. The former is process and method and often allows organisations to feel like they are progressing, but progress doesn’t happen until the change itself happens. In too many client-side conversations, I hear criticisms that we are idealistic, removed
and abstracted from the situation at the coalface, that we’re not grounded in the reality of change. To overcome this challenge we need to go deeper, to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty. Understand the staff incentive schemes that drive behaviour, empathise with the cashstrapped IT team, gain insight into the management KPIs used to measure success. All make up the culture of an organisation. All are open to change through service design and, viewed correctly, all provide good constraints for the design work itself. Service design teams need to empathise with the challenges of operational teams and to meet them in the middle to negotiate change, but without losing sight of our critical customer-centred perspective. Success in this terrain comes from a combination of grit and compromise: a determination to succeed balanced with a pragmatic approach to the complexity of change. This can be hard for many service design teams, who are often either not embedded into the organisation fully enough or are brought in for piecemeal work. However, as evidenced by presentations and conversations at this year’s Global Conference in Cardiff, teams are finding more and more opportunities to make the case to go deeper and to tackle operational realities. touchpoint 6-1 51
Working to tackle the large amounts of failure demand in our services.
Closer to the numbers
As well as improving our relationship to operational change, we also need to improve our relationship to the numbers, by which I mean connecting our target customer experience to the commercial model that underpins it. Service design creates the conditions for profitable customer behaviours. We make it easy for customers to do things that are valuable to the organisation. However, we often weaken our pitch by describing our capability in purely visual and subjective terms. We should instead seek to be squarely objective and quantifiable about our behaviour change promises. We need to reference our personas to populations of customers. We need to know the cost to serve for each channel. We need to know what tasks are driving large volumes of demand. These things should dictate our priorities. A chief marketing officer can look at our visualisations and see the good sense in them, but if we can display the impact in numbers, we will make an advocate of the chief financial officer, which would be a considerable development. 52
touchpoint 6-1
Spreadsheets often instil fear into designers. So this might be a pledge for greater collaboration between business designers and service designers. A new language to relate commercial models to experience models is being developed in these conversations that is moving us forward. Closer to the client pain
So let’s assume we’re able to get closer to the operation and develop a better commercial language to describe our work. Both are significant, but I’d argue that there’s a third component to securing greater success, and that is ensuring that we focus squarely on the client’s pain. By ‘client’ here I mean the individual or group who commissions your work. Service design has gained a reputation for a certain type of innovation. Step change, radical rethinking that shifts paradigms. This is exciting and often necessary for many organisations. However, it is also the most terrifying form of change. There is an old unattributed quote from a CEO which says “There are three guaranteed ways to lose money: gambling, divorce and innovation.” Arguably this describes a misperception of innovation, but perception counts for a lot. We risk being pigeon-holed as an innovation toolkit. My experience is that playing for the innovation ground is tough, and that we’d gain more ground by shifting our perspective towards what I term ‘radical service improvement’. Using design to tackle essential failures in the organisation in a way that the organisation can handle.
transformation through service design
It’s become common knowledge that anything between 25% and 75% of customer contact into an organisation results from failures initiated by the organisation. So the customer is asked to do something, or tries to do something, which fails and, therefore, drives downstream contact. This has become enormously costly for organisations, at the same time as customers are waking up to the benefits of self-service through digital channels. These two drivers — organisational desire to cut costs, and customer desire to self-serve — provide service design teams with a golden opportunity. Our approach connects both ambitions by taking friction and failure out of high volume customer tasks. Our participative approach helps operational teams knit together their independent step in the customer’s wider journey.
This type of change is, of course, highly innovative from an operational point of view — new ways of internal working are core to a drive for innovation — but it doesn’t have to be hampered by the label of ‘innovation’. Empathy, but in new ways
What’s great about all these three challenges is that they play to our core strength: the ability to empathise with others. The skill we apply readily to end customers, we now need to apply to clients and those we collaborate with. We need to spend more time standing in the shoes of the finance guy, the IT guy, the HR guy. Their perspectives will strengthen our discipline. Service design teams who adopt that position and take on these three challenges will go deeper into their service organisations and achieve more sustained results.
•
touchpoint 6-1 53
The Underestimated Business Impact of Service Design How service design can help organisations reach goals
Melvin Brand Flu is partner of strategy and business design at Livework. He is a business and strategy consultant with over 20 years’ experience working for companies across continents. He advises executives and businesses on the cutting edge of business innovation in industries ranging from telecommunications and financial services, to the public sector and entertainment.
As service design becomes more mainstream, it faces questions about its promise and impact. While service design and its deliverables are appreciated for their overall value and contributions, this value is often hard to assess at the time of delivery. Closer examination of projects sometime after completion shows service design projects can have a significant impact — but perhaps not in the way designers might envision. This article is based on four years of conversations with service designers, service design companies, consultants, clients and people who were recently exposed to service design. Some of the projects and initiatives in question go back ten years, in sectors ranging from insurance and telecoms to manufacturing and public transport. The value that service design can bring to organisations
While service design has impact on teams and organisations, it requires business and organisational skills and input to fully unleash its potential. Knowing how organisations think, act and behave adds the crucial elements that makes service design truly effective. Interestingly, the work of service designers complements that of business, IT and strategy consultants who understand the internal 54
touchpoint 6-1
Melvin Brand Flu
and functional aspects of a business but who struggle to connect their concepts to real customers and users. Build proof, not the business case ‘What is the business case for this?’ While this is a valid question in most business settings, it is not necessarily the most important one to answer first. Financial indicators and measurements only capture part of the story and can kill an idea or concept by focusing on these too early. Other indicators, such as customer satisfaction and adoption by staff, though harder to capture, provide more relevant input into the decision to develop a concept. Indicators such as extended reach, lower defection, lower incidents and higher uptake are often better measurements to predict, monitor and analyse the effects of a service concept on customers and the business. What is
transformation through service design
customer experience pilot 1: Prevent incidents Educate Customer
NPS
Personalised Information
Satisfaction
process time
Satisfaction
Adoption
Prevention
customer feedback net promoter score
# post sales sessions
# of post sales incidents
Satisfaction
process time
Acceptance
employee feedback
Satisfaction
# emails/prints per category
# click troughs
Adoption
NPS
Introduce/Move online
net promoter score
employee feedback
Satisfaction
# emails/prints per category
NPS
Use online tools in PoS Follow-up online
net promoter score
Acceptance
# click troughs
Satisfaction
customer feedback
Cycle time
Prevention/Resolution
N/A
# of post visit interactions
Conversions Cycle time
Satisfaction Adoption
customer feedback
pilot 4:
N/A
# sales & continuations
Acceptance
# click troughs
technology concerns
Cycle time
employee feedback
customer feedback
pilot 3:
business process
net promoter score
NPS
pilot 2:
employee experience
process time
Prevention/Resolution
N/A
# of post visit interactions # online sessions
Conversions
# sales & continuations
Satisfaction
employee feedback
Adoption
# sessions via tool # emails/prints per category
Cycle time
process time # 2nd calls from pos → cc
N/A
Prevention
# of post visit interactions # online sessions
A proof model was created for a mobile service provider to capture the effects of a series crosschannel pilots on customer experience, employee experience, internal processes and systems. The measurements were built in pilot processes and systems and combined soft measures (i.e. customer satisfaction) and hard measures (i.e. number of sessions by retail staff using pilot tools). needed is a model that takes into account hard and soft measurements for impact on customers, staff, existing systems and processes. Such a proof model provides tangible input in a financial case but should not replace it.
context to design and implement the service. Investing in a joint approach with business, system and change professionals early in the process prevents the many pitfalls and objections that surface later. Understanding the business context also engages the organisation better and helps the buyer of service design to sell the concepts and ideas internally.
Business context makes a difference Service designers gravitate towards the (end) customer and their experience. Using customer insights to design a fantastic service shows the promise of putting the customer in the centre of a business. Designing a service that recognises the abilities and limitations of an organisation is more realistic and takes into account the systemic and organisational challenges of introducing a new/ improved service. Working with internal and external consultants to understand the organisational and business impact of a new concept provides the necessary
Tangible outcomes must come early The service design approach exposes many short- and longterm ideas that have high business relevance. Having the organisation invest in some ‘quick wins’ early in the process buys the (project) organisation credibility and leverage. While quick wins might buy some time and require buyin, they are important to make concepts tangible for the broader organisation. They need not always consist of functioning prototypes or detailed customer flows: highlevel storyboards or customer quotes can also influence what people understand about customers and their experience. Holding off sharing work with the organisation until there is a perfectly designed deliverable introduces a serious risk of failing stakeholders who are confronted with a finished product that they can only either accept or reject. touchpoint 6-1 55
This simple diagram has guided many strategic decisions within a large insurance firm in Norway. It was created in collaboration with the director of commercial clients to communicate in the transformation of their business to a customercentric organisation. The diagram shows the traditional approach of pushing customers to self-service (left of the pyramid) and the way customers will be introduced and guided towards self-service solutions with the help of expert advisors (right of the pyramid). The solutions are within the organisation When it is time to implement (parts of) the new service, many unforeseen issues surface that were not considered during the design. Ignoring these and pressing on is not the answer, neither is redesigning the service. Most organisations first seek system and IT solutions, ignoring the fact that (small) process and policy changes can yield better results. The strong design direction of finding solutions to challenges within existing organisational structures can bring innovative approaches that resolve issues without massive investment in new systems or interruptions in day-today operations. 56
touchpoint 6-1
Know and operate at the pace of the organisation Service designers like producing blueprints, customer journeys, design prototypes, etc. There is the temptation to produce many detailed deliverables and ignore the fact that they mean little to the wider organisation. A project can run too far ahead of the organisation, which means the organisation needs time to catch up and establish buy-in before entering the next phase of the project. It is far more effective to determine the organisationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s level of engagement, interest and ability to absorb new concepts and design the project to deliver according the organisationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pace. While this feels counter-intuitive, less is, indeed, sometimes more. How to have more impact on businesses
In reviewing many service design and business projects, certain general practices emerge regardless of the sector and type of organisation. Following some guidelines can help service designers achieve greater impact for their clients and the customers and users of services. While there are many best practices to consider, there are a few that are easy to incorporate into service design projects. Most of the practices do not change what service designers do, but how they approach the project or how they engage their clients. Make it simple for the internal organisation to understand a new concept Service designers are capable of making very complex situations more transparent and therefore easier to understand. However, the solutions might still be overly complex for the organisation to understand and execute. Seemingly basic concepts and visualisations can be extremely powerful tools to engage the wider organisation. Clean and simple concepts can anchor misaligned understanding and stakeholders and direct activities towards clear goals and objectives. Actively pursuing simple concepts is not the same as simplifying complex situations. In the latter case, the complexity is not eliminated, which means it will have to be dealt with sooner or later.
transformation through service design This intelligent hospital queuing system is a wellexecuted design solution based on input from patients and medical and administrative staff. However, all parties were surprised by patients' behaviour, which led to increased wait times. Further investigation was need to understand this behaviour and adjust the design.
Understand the situation before designing the solution Both service designers and their clients tend to be solution-oriented. They look for ways to explore and design the solution before fully understanding the situation, the organisation or underlying problems. Most of the revelations and real customer insights are not about the new service, but come about when truly understanding what is happening from a customer or staff member’s perspective. Rushing into solution design can actually destroy these valuable insights, whereas giving the organisation time to internalise them builds a foundation for a successful implementation or adoption. Pilot with real customers in real life situations and settings Designing and building prototypes that are tested with customers in a controlled environment is not the same as putting a working service prototype in a real business setting with actual customers. The key is to consider these pilots as learning opportunities, not proving grounds. This means that pilots are about iterating towards a solution that requires flexibility in the way systems and processes are run. The pilots should be designed to test the customer experience and to understand the gap with current processes, people and systems. The more ‘real’ the pilot environment, the clearer the do’s and don’ts become from a customer and business perspective.
Testing the ‘real’ experience of the service with people in the street to validate assertions made by a Vivo, a Brazilian telecom operator, about their customers’ needs and wants. The customer and staff responses held a couple of unforeseen surprises that were instrumental in developing the real service. touchpoint 6-1 57
The service design scope is limited (in orange) but informs a number of related projects and activities. The organisation needs this kind of visibility to plan for the funding, resource allocation and stakeholder involvement.
A moment of levity during a mapping session with a cross-function team. The participants felt involved and inspired during these sessions. 58
touchpoint 6-1
Provide the organisation a roadmap A well-designed service is not enough to make it real for the organisation and its customers. Often, these services need to be implemented in stages that require clear understanding of deliverables, their sequence and dependencies. Building an implementation roadmap with and for the wider organisation gives the clarity needed to make decisions and to allocate budgets and resources. The roadmap provides the overview that organisations need to understand and assess their commitments to developing a service. The roadmap can also show the interdependencies and priorities related to other initiatives.
transformation through service design
Give the organisation time to learn, adapt and adopt From a design perspective, the complete solution can be conceived and delivered in a matter of months. Organisations, however, need time to internalise ideas and to absorb changes and their wider impact. Pushing the next concept too soon can choke an initiative when the organisation is not ready to move on. Breaking down deliverables into bite-sized chunks helps to implement services into the organisation and prepare for the next chunk. In some cases it helps the organisation to seriously cut ambition and scope in favour of successful implementation. The service design should be focussed on delivering meaningful experiences for customers that organisations can commit to and deliver. All of this can result in an overall implementation timeline that spans years instead of a design timeline of months. Have fun with the client Given the do’s, don’ts, misalignments, conflicts and complexity involved in changing a business, it is easy to lose sight of one of the most important and attractive things of service design: it is fun. In general, service design is seen as very positive, due to its inclusive and creative nature. Staff look forward to sessions that give great new insights and are much more fun than tedious processmapping exercises. Recognising this in the design and facilitation of sessions and workshops can create a fun environment with positive outcomes for all involved. Even in circumstances where jobs are at stake, the collaborative spirit of the service design approach is perceived as a positive experience.
Redesigning the energy bill for Hafslund, a Norwegian energy provider, took two years. The organisation needed another couple of years to get ready to consider the next phase of this project. Business success using service design
Service designers’ skills, tools and approaches introduce a different way of looking at customer challenges and yield surprising insights. In order to have greater impact on clients, service designers should appreciate their unique skills and strengths such as being able to co-create, visualise and to structure ideas. However, service designers should also be aware of some the potential pitfalls, such as only focussing only on the customers and not understanding the business context well enough. Working with experts early in the process and pursuing simplicity instead of complexity gives the (service) design greater opportunity to be relevant to the internal organisation. Early design prototypes and pilots give stakeholders deliverables that they can discuss and share. Internal buy-in, easy-to-understand visual concepts and a step-by-step approach are the foundation upon which service design can deliver real, sustainable business impact.
•
touchpoint 6-1 59
Is the Future Omni-channel?
First, there were the bricks and mortar, then came online and, for a number of years, we’ve been surrounded by mobile service offerings. Currently, most successful businesses serve their customers across all of these channels. Erdem Demir is managing director at I-AM Insight and I-AM Digital. He has a PhD in Industrial Design from Delft University, Holland and is assistant professor at Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey.
60
touchpoint 6-1
Back in the multi-channel dark ages, interaction between these channels was limited, if not non-existent. For instance, customers had to complete a transaction using the same channel with which they had started the process — even if there had been a time-lag of hours, days or weeks between starting and completing a transaction. Similarly, if a customer experienced a problem halfway through a transaction using one channel, they would have to go back to step one when trying to correct that problem via another channel. For example, you could find yourself at the checkout in an online transaction only to realise you’d forgotten your password, and then would have to go back to the beginning via a call centre. In the new omni-channel era, channels are integrated into a one single meta-channel that allows a customer to start the service at one touchpoint, to continue it at another and to complete it at yet another. The omni-channel offer meets a very obvious user need, being able to Erdem Demir
make transactions in a fast-paced and mobile world. The Multi-Screen World Research Study by Google showed that that 90% of participants switch channels while making transactions during their daily lives, in cases where these transactions predominantly start using mobile devices. Customers who are used to getting omni-channel services are significant from a business perspective: on average, an omni-channel shopper spends 93% more per transaction than an online shopper and 208% more than a physicalstore shopper, according to a research conducted by Deloitte. It is often said that strong connections with brands are built through emotional bonds, and that emotional bonds only develop as a result of memorable experiences. The challenge now for the omni-channel era is for us to create these experiences within the totality of touch-points, instead of looking at them as individual channels. But bear in mind that the combined experience you offer your customers will only ever be considered to be as good as its weakest
transformation through service design
Source: http://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/multiscreenworld_final.pdf
90% USE MULTIPLE SCREENS SEQUENTIALLY TO ACCOMPLISH A TASK OVER TIME
According to research by Google, more and more people switch between digital platforms to complete a transaction on the web.
98% MOVE BETWEEN DEVICES THAT SAME DAY
component. After all, if an omni-channel customer cannot get what they want from a mobile app, it is of minor importance to them how remarkable the experience is at the physical stores or on the web. Trends
We have identified five main characteristics that some successful business cases have in common. 1. Creating complementary experiences The most important feature of good omni-channel services is that the different channels support each other. When a particular transaction cannot be completed in one channel, that channel should automatically lead to another, preparing the next channel for serving the customer. Digital and physical touchpoints in particular should be integrated in this way. Good examples are easy to spot in the retail sector. Stylr allows you to start your clothing shopping with a mobile app, and when you select an item, the app points you to the nearest physical shop where you can find the item in stock.
Hointer helps you to browse the items displayed in the shop with your mobile device and you can even select items to try on, and these items will be waiting for you at the fitting room. 2. Promoting consistency across channels Consistency among the digital interfaces is essential. The first issue is the content of functions and features available via these channels. The percentage of mobile-primary users — people who primarily, or solely, use their mobile phones when making online transactions — is on the rise (31% of all U.S. mobile surfers are mobile-primary users according to Pew Internet). In the best omni-channel examples, therefore, the content on the mobile platforms must be equal to that online. The second issue is structure: the best examples follow more or less the same information architecture across the different platforms. The same site structure could be displayed in both online and mobile touchpoints thanks to responsive design and coding. However, there are also good examples honouring device-specific needs. Fitbit provides a nice illustration. The amount of information conveyed at the welcome moment of the bracelet, the mobile app and the online portal shows differences regarding the detail of information provided. touchpoint 6-1 61
• browse recipes • add recipes to shopping list
• shop with list • scan barcodes for recipes
• cook away • browse recipes
ALLRECIPES
MATCH DEVICE WITH CONTEXT Allrecipes.com matches the functions and form of its digital platforms with the context that these platforms are used in.
3. Matching offer with context The context in which a device is used is a crucial aspect, determining the predominant functions or features in a digital platform. Allrecipes provides a good illustration: the web portal is positioned as the main stage for inspiration; browsing recipes and adding recipes to a shopping list. The mobile app is the channel referred to at the supermarket, as it displays the list of ingredients of the selected recipes. The tablet app is the main source of information when actually preparing the meal. The interface design of the tablet app also reflects the influences of the context as the buttons are designed to be large enough to press with the knuckles — very convenient for a working place where the fingertips are usually wet or dirty. 4. Use existing ecosystems There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Some businesses tap into other best-inclass tools to serve their customers. Simple Bank, for example, allows its customers 62
touchpoint 6-1
to store their transaction receipts, and other written banking documents, through a built-in Drop Box feature. Similarly, Dwolla Labs is aiming to make money transfers possible via Twitter, just by writing a hashtag of dwolla and mentioning the recipient and amount. 5. Humanising the digital Human contact is still a vital ingredient in a service offering, irrespective of how digitised the overall offer has become. In a research piece conducted by Ericson et al. (2012) from Cisco, bank customers were asked what they would do if their bank’s physical branches were replaced by all-virtual branches. More than 50% of participants responded negatively, with 22% stating that they would change their bank. The same research indicates that even the most tech-savvy customers pay three visits to a physical branch per month, mostly for getting advice or applying for complex financial products, such as loans. The knowledge of being able to talk to someone face-to-face reassures customers. And it’s this feeling that should be reinforced by allowing human contact through digital channels when practical. But how to make that happen? One example is the way in which Personal Capital, an online financial advisor, allows ‘in-person’ advice via Facetime, thereby reinforcing the feeling of being able to contact a human whenever necessary.
transformation through service design
FITBIT
HONOUR DEVICE-SPECIFIC NEEDS Fitbit provides different levels of detail for the displayed information at different digital platforms.
Tools & Methods
Conclusions
There are a number of research tools and methods that help identify the need for — and then how best to design — an effective omni-channel solution. Storyboarding the customer journey so that it is broken down into individual ‘key moments’ is a useful place to start. Recording and analysing what customers do at each of these key stages — or asking what they would prefer to do if they had a choice — also provides excellent data. The fundamental ambition for every service designer must be to gain critical insight into the customer’s perspective before the customer journey is designed. To this end, activities such as service safaris will always prove effective.
So, is the future omni-channel? The world is certainly heading in that direction. But one of the things that we have learnt since the dawn of the digital age is that many companies have often invested unnecessarily in the latest technology or retail ‘fad’, irrespective of whether it’s right for their business. As with all design, the first step must be to evaluate whether omni-channel is right for your circumstances. There are a number of obvious factors that will contribute to this decision. And if a positive decision has been reached, there are an equal number of ways to create a compelling solution that adds value to your business by giving your customers what they need/want. As a rule of thumb, if your overall interaction with your customers involves a digital transaction somewhere along the line, it would certainly make sense to consider an omni-channel solution. But if you are going to use more than one digital platform, you must make sure that each channel feels and acts the same way as the others.
•
touchpoint 6-1 63
The Manifestation of Change A unique collaboration behind the world’s first mental-health first-aid kit
Kristina Carlander is design director at the experience design firm Doberman. She has worked with clients such as Swedish national television SVT, consultancy firm PwC and national Swedish pharmacy chain Apoteket.
Sebastian Backström is a copywriter at the experience design firm Doberman, working with clients such as vacation rental marketplace Tripwell, property managers Locum, The Swedish Social Security Agency (Försäkringskassan) and e-commerce developer Spree.
64
touchpoint 6-1
Mental health issues are the most common cause of longterm sick leave in Sweden today, a fact that costs Swedish organisations more than 1,7 billion euros every year. This situation is not unique to Sweden, the UK has also established the same correlation between sick leave and mental health issues1 and it is probable that most developed nations are be affected by these issues in a similar way. So what can be done to change the behaviour and attitudes surrounding mental health in the workplace? To combat this growing concern, a broad array of Swedish companies and organisations, private as well as governmental, joined together with Stockholm-based experience design firm Doberman to create a mental-health firstaid kit. The common goal was to make it feel as natural to seek care for the mind as for the body. “Despite the fact that mental health issues account for so much sick leave, very few workplaces take this into account. To make it easer to act in the early stages and prevent mental health issues from resulting in sick leave was one of the main motivating factors in starting this project.” says Rickard Bracken, Project Manager for Sweden’s national anti stigma campaign concerning mental health, Hjärnkoll, which coordinated this project. Kristina Carlander, Sebastian Backström
Birth of the tool
The idea of a mental-health first-aid kit was born out of the cooperation between a group of undergraduate students in both design and behavioural science and the design firm Doberman, with the support of the Hjärnkoll campaign, run by The Swedish Agency for Disability Coordination: Handisam. Doberman then developed the idea further using a co-creation process that included governmental agencies, private business representatives, work environment experts, HR professionals, a psychologist and people that have experienced mental health issues themselves. Having all these stakeholders be a part of the creative process not only made sure that many different aspects of mental healthrelated issues in the workplace could be
transformation through service design
Creating quick, early prototypes to test was important to the success of the project.
addressed, but also that the entire project turned into a unique collaborative effort to combat something that affects all walks of society. “Together, we quickly established that erasing taboos around mental health issues in the workplace and demonstrating how colleagues, managers and whole organisations need to establish a constructive environment together, were key to preventing long-term sick leave due to mental issues,” explains Kristina Carlander, design director at Doberman. Three challenges
In collaboration with Handisam, Doberman set out to innovate and design a new health service eco-system for work places. One of the most important challenges the project faced was to shift focus from seeing this as a managerial problem to one that concerns all coworkers. The scope of the project lay squarely on changing the prevailing attitudes within organisations, rather than influencing or educating only the leaders. Another challenge was to go from ‘read more’ to ‘do more’. It was paramount that the finished solution should have clear and easy action paths, rather than just a wealth of passively presented information. And finally, a third important challenge that the project needed to address was that it needed to be
equally effective in an office as on a factory floor. This was the reason behind the decision to have the service provided in the form of a physical product that combines both mental and physical health care into one object. The product itself was also intended to act as the central touchpoint of the service, in order to inspire behavioural transformation at work places: once the kit became a natural part of the work environment, the taboo level would start to go down. Designing a healthy process
The process of designing the service and the object started out with several creative, collaborative workshops that included all stakeholders. Hypotheses around what contents to include, what tone to strike and where to place the mental-health first-aid kit for it to be most effective were formed, scrutinised, discarded and replaced. This led to the construction of a number of quick, rudimentary prototypes, which were subsequently tested in a varied assortment of workplaces over a number of weeks. Among the interesting findings to come out were how much of a taboo mental health issues really are in the workplace: it is usually not discussed openly, but rather kept private. Another conclusion was that using alarming statistics in illustrating the dangerous effects of mental health-related problems was deemed too harsh to be effective. touchpoint 6-1 65
In time, hopefully it will be considered just as normal to seek help for mental health related issues as for physical issues. Armed with this feedback, Doberman then went back to the drawing board for some further fine-tuning, before a single prototype emerged, featuring all the best bits of the rudimentary prototypes. Apart from the usual BandAids and bandages in first aid kits, this new kit also contains a prominent mental health self-evaluation gauge at the top. This is designed to prompt the person in front of the kit to reflect on his or her situation, rather than giving definitive answers. The intention is to help people notice the early signs of mental health issues that might otherwise simply be ignored. In addition, the kit also features 66
touchpoint 6-1
tips on how to help a colleague showing signs of mental ill health plus a small takeaway card containing all the vital information mentioned above. There is also a phone hotline number to a licensed therapist, offering quick help, as well as a QR-code linking to an informative site. The kits are to be placed in restrooms, printer rooms, coatrooms and other spaces that are communal but not overly public and exposed. While the new first-aid kit is, in itself, just a part of the serviceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s whole eco-system, it is, at the same time, its most tangible symbol and manifestation of change. Testing, testing, testingâ&#x20AC;Ś
The prototype kit has now been tested on a much larger scale, from September to December 2013, in various workplaces around Sweden where more than 1000 people have been exposed to it. These workplaces included bank offices, as well as the workplaces of a leading Swedish construction company, in order to give the test as wide and varied an audience as possible. Before the kits were mounted, a questionnaire with both quantitative and qualitative questions was distributed, which was followed, after the test period, by another questionnaire that measured changes in attitudes and usage. Also, a series of follow-up interviews gave more in-depth information. The results have
transformation through service design In addition to the mental health part, the kit also contains the more familiar first aid materials.
thus far been encouraging. Among other things, test subjects stated that “the kit shows that there is no difference between physical and mental health in this regard.” But they also stated that when it came to what mental health programs their companies offered, they simply didn’t know. The full analysis is currently being performed and will be published shortly. After that, hopefully, the kit will undergo a general launch, exposing it to the entire Swedish population. Our hope is that, in a few years, attitudes may have changed enough so that there will be much less of a stigma attached to seeking help for mental health related ailments than there is today, and that people will perceive mental health issues as something that effects ‘normal people’, in much the same way as physical injuries do. Show us the money
The entire project was co-funded by a constellation of private business parties and governmental agencies. “That was another thing that was really interesting about this project: it allowed the public and private sectors to cooperate in tackling a great societal challenge. And doing so by listening to the users. It has been very inspiring to see private business show a true commitment to developing methods to discover and act on mental
The sliders make up the self-evaluation part. In the white arrow, there is a suggestion for how to interpret the results of the self-evaluation and it points to the hotline number. Below this, there is a section with tips on how to approach a colleague who you think might be in trouble, a pocket for the takeaway cards plus the QR code linking to an information page. And underneath all of this, there is a drawer for Band-Aids, wet wipes and other frequently used physical aids, below which a classical first aid bag is located. health issues”, says Kristina Carlander, Design Director at Doberman. Finally, to put the whole matter into perspective, Doberman estimates that if this mental health first aid kit only prevents one single person from going on sick leave, it will still mean that the entire cost of the project has been recouped — that’s how much it can cost to have someone end up on long-term sick leave. So to the stakeholders of this project, this is a daily reminder that, in addition to the human values involved, the financial ramifications of long-term sick leave make it more than worth their while for companies and organisations to get involved in projects such as this.
•
1
See Daily Mail, June 27th 2013
touchpoint 6-1 67
Tools and Methods Service design techniques, activities and deliverables
Service Design Through RIP+MIX Exploring a new ideation method appropriate for both designers and non-designers
Mike Press is Professor of Design Policy at the University of Dundee, author of two books on design management and over 100 papers and articles. He has managed design research projects for the Design Council, the Crafts Council and UK government departments.
Hazel White is director of Open Change, a company working with public, private and not-for-profit organisations using creative tools to undertake organisational change. She is a Senior Lecturer and founder of the Design for Services masters programme at the University of Dundee.
70
touchpoint 6-1
RIP+MIX is a workshop method used to generate new ideas. Developed originally by ourselves in cooperation with T-Labs at Deutsche Telekom to engage multi-disciplinary teams involved in bringing products and services to market, the method has developed as an engaging ideation tool that has proven its worth in a variety of contexts. Most recently, it has been used to enable co-design in public services. Here we describe the method and evaluate its use at the Service Design Global Conference 2013 in Cardiff. Background
RIP+MIX was developed in partnership between Re.Design at the University of Dundee, Scotland and T-Labs, Deutsche Telekom, Berlin. The challenge was to develop a fast, effective and engaging design tool that helps encourage creativity and innovation in both designers and nondesigners. This method was a practical exploration and application of research into “case transfer” by Rosan Chow and Wolfgang Jonas. Their theoretical work suggested that the conventional design wisdom of ‘first user research, then design’ was useful when the design context was highly determined: in other words, when the problem was well defined and amenable to systematic analysis. However, when the context was undetermined then “a design project Mike Press, Hazel White
might begin with projecting new, possible alternatives instead of studying the users.”1 RIP+MIX emerged as a method allowing users to quickly pull out the knowledge embedded in products and services and reconfigure it in alternatives for new contexts. Tools were developed to apply this method for use by Deutsche Telekom, which we applied with design, engineering and management teams in the company, with the aim of developing new perspectives and approaches for new product development, and applied for a range of uses and applications. The simple analysis tools codify parts of the design process that are often left to intuition. A version of the method can be understood and synthesised to ideate innovative products or services in a two-hour
tools and methods RIP+MIX workshop, SDNC13 in Cardiff.
workshop. This empowers non-designers to engage meaningfully with the ideageneration phase of the design process and to demystify this part of the designer’s role. The term RIP+MIX arose from our experience of developing and refining the method over an initial six-month period. We realised that we had been acting as much as DJs as designers: ripping and sampling services, product concepts and contexts and remixing them in new ways. This method has resulted in creative processes, insights and outcomes that are effective, productive and culturally relevant, offering considerable scope for further development and application. Aims and method
The aim of RIP+MIX is to enable people to ideate quickly within a defined context. We have found it particularly useful when working with people and organisations that are seeking to innovate and are looking for a supportive framework to help them think creatively. The method has been used with businesses, public services and the third sector in workshops for between 5 and 140 people. The method involves ripping and mixing characteristics from an existing product or service to create a new product or service in a fast and intuitive way. Participants are given cards with a drawing of a pleasurable product or
service. These are quickly analysed using the RIP+MIX worksheet under the categories of Function, Stakeholders, Infrastructure/Resources, Physical Form or Components and Emotional Characteristics. The toolkit we used in the workshop has examples of 50 different pleasurable products/services from listening to the radio in the car to a cruise down the Norwegian fjords. Participants then brainstorm painful experiences that they have in their current organisation or that they have recently endured. These are analysed in turn using the RIP+MIX worksheet and categories. The final stage involves quickly and intuitively selecting components from the pleasurable and painful experiences to create new products or services. The Cardiff Workshop
The workshop at SDNC13 had 35 participants who worked around four tables (plus a fifth group working on the floor), in teams of two and three people. After an initial introduction, we went straight into using the method. In less than an hour, fifteen new services were developed and described. The following example demonstrates how the method works. Participants received the ‘designing in a restaurant’ pleasurable experience card. This was then analysed using the template: • function: socialise, sharing, eating, leisure, discovering new cultures • stakeholders: restaurant owner, chefs, waiters, clients, food suppliers • infrastructure/resources: the restaurant, kitchen, guestroom (cloakroom) • physical form/components: knowing about it, getting there, getting a table, the menu, ordering, eating, paying • emotional characteristics: satisfaction, pleasure, joy, surprise touchpoint 6-1
71
The Declaration Cafe, Virginie Gailing and Marc Garcia i Fortuny at the workshop. The painful experience was that of filing a tax return: • function: financing the state/ defining how much money to give the state • stakeholders: me, accountants, bank, tax officer, tax controllers, ministry of finance • infrastructure/resources: tax office, website, forms • physical form/components: forms, website, computer, tax office, accountant’s office, hotline • emotional characteristics: doubt, fear, idiot, angry, confused, struggled New service developed: Declaration Cafe - an engaging cafe which brings pleasure to putting together your end-of-year tax return; people get together in a convivial environment and are given advice from the accountant/ barista and choose from a tax menu where they’d like their taxes to be spent. 72
touchpoint 6-1
tools and methods
The following responses from participants demonstrate its value as an ideation tool:
“RIP+MIX was a fun process to generate ideas and I know that I’ll use it in the future with students. I’ll use it a few times a year when teams need to generate business ideas as this is more reliable than the previous process we’ve tried.” Bruce Sharlau, University of Aberdeen.
“I believe it’s good for ideation for entrepreneurs, especially to develop ideas for new products or services.” Mahmoud Abdelrahman, Senior Consultant, Service Innovation & Design, Araamis
“I’ll be running your workshop at IxDA, Sydney. The goal is to teach others another method they can use in their own practice.” Michael Kelly, UX / Service / Experience Designer, Curious Human
Conclusion
RIP+MIX brings everyone into the creative phase of service design, enabling designers and non-designers alike to develop new ideas. The method transforms non-design trained participants’ views of themselves as ‘not creative’ by enabling them to generate both implementable ‘quick win’ solutions as well as blue-sky, future scenarios. The visual aspects of the method enable conversations and idea generation to be shared in teams, and the method can also be used individually to help creative thinking. RIP+MIX can be used at different points in the innovation process: we have used it very successfully to introduce the idea of service design to a wide range of people from accountants to public sector employees, and to generate ideas following initial insight phases. We summarise the advantages of RIP+MIX as: • making existing knowledge of designed products and services visible and usable • highly productive in terms of generating ideas • counterpoints and complements user-centred design • offers scope for the involvement of non-designers, because the initial stages do not assume prior design knowledge • takes design away from the computer, emphasising physical recording, sketching and collaborative working All of the tools to deliver this workshop are available to download from the www.openchange.co.uk website under a creative commons licence.
•
Reference 1 Chow, R. & Jonas, W. (2010) ‘Case Transfer: A Design Approach by Artifacts and Projection’. Design Issues, 26 (4), 9-19
touchpoint 6-1 73
Exploring the Intersection of Design, Agile and Lean
Simon Gough founded Redfront almost fourteen years ago and specialises in collaborative design. He’s worked across the commercial, public and voluntary sectors, helping clients to build with and for users; and exploring new tools and techniques. He regularly speaks on new applications for design, most recently talking about Open Design at the launch of the Open Institute London.
Phillippa Rose joined Redfront five years ago, bringing together a background in programme design, research and marketing. Previously she had a senior role managing national programmes at NESTA, whilst at Redfront she specialises in stakeholder engagement, prototyping, and service innovation. Phillippa also sits on the RSA Fellowship Council.
74
touchpoint 6-1
MoDAL is an ongoing enquiry at the meeting point of service design thinking, Agile and Lean. It aims to promote discussion across the disciplines and share new ideas and approaches. The project began as a discussion between Redfront and Work Play Experience, which led to a one-day, collaborative event in Berlin on October 22nd 2013. Why does It matter?
The SDNC13 Workshop
Collaboration, value and iteration are key elements of service design, but they also underpin Agile and Lean approaches. Developing new services responsively with multistakeholder teams helps organisations realign themselves around user value, removing internal barriers and eliminating processes that don’t serve the user experience. There’s also real transformative potential in exploring organisational structure, working practices and collaboration through a multidisciplinary approach focused on value creation. For a quick introduction to Agile it’s worth taking a look at the Agile Manifesto.1 We should also clarify at this point that by ‘Lean’ we mean the common principles, as demonstrated in its particular applications, from Lean Manufacturing through to Lean Startup.
Following on from the initial Berlin event, Simon Gough and Phillippa Rose of Redfront ran a short workshop at SDNC13 with Thom Leggett of HP Cloud Services. Thom’s experience with Agile teams informed the development of a game, in part influenced by the XP Game2, but specifically intended to explore service design approaches within an Agile framework through the focus on self-organising teams, stakeholder collaboration, user value, business value and development estimates.
Simon Gough, Phillippa Rose
MoDAL game
The objective of the game was to explore the application of service design tools within an Agile framework. Through a focus on iterations and retrospectives we combined doing and discussion, stimulating participants to consider the roles of stakeholders and the relative importance of different activities.
tools and methods A team developing its first iteration of the train service.
The first service run-through. Game structure
We envisaged that teams would be made up of seven or eight people, but due to a higher number of participants than we anticipated, we ran the game with three teams of ten people each. The game was designed to take 70 minutes. Game materials
Each team was given the following materials: • four cups (numbered 1-4); • 18 coloured sweets for each iteration (3 x 6 of each colour); • some A4 paper; • pens; • pink, green and yellow post-it notes; and • The Plan (estimates and score card template). Gameplay
1. Team Formation (5 Minutes) Participants were asked to self-organise into three teams of ten people and choose team names. The person who came up with the team name was selected to play the role of the client, while the three workshop facilitators took on the three user roles, each allocated to a team.
2. First iteration (20 minutes) Each team was asked to devise a trainjourney service with four touchpoints. Teams were given freedom to ask questions of the clients and users to inform their thinking. Teams were also asked to ensure that the outputs of this iteration could be demonstrated to users in the next step. 3. First service run-through (5 minutes) Teams were asked to run-through their services with the Users, observe and record what took place. 4. Scoring (5 minutes) Each user had a total of six, samecoloured sweets to score the service touchpoints, according to their own criteria, by placing zero, one, two or three sweets in each of the numbered cups representing the four touchpoints. This process was repeated by the client in each team. touchpoint 6-1 75
The remainder of the team scored the touchpoints as a group according to their own criteria, so that three sets of scores were collected in the cups. The three different-coloured sets of scores highlighted different perspectives on each of the four service stages. 5. Retrospectives in teams (5 minutes) Everyone was given one minute to individually write up to three comments on separate Post-it notes, indicating how well they felt the team worked together on the process, as follows: • Stop (pink post-its) – what to remove next time • Start (green post-its) – what to add in next time • Keep (yellow post-its) – what to keep next time Each team was then given four minutes to group the Post-it notes around commonalities and discuss any key recommendations. 6. Second iteration (20 minutes) In the second iteration, teams were allocated ten minutes of planning time and ten minutes of implementation time. Each team was also given a copy of The Plan, a template we devised for planning and estimating the number of minutes that should be allocated to further develop each of the four service steps in the implementation phase. This was to be completed based upon the progress of the first iteration. The client was given a timekeeping role and asked to observe and mark The Plan with a tick or a cross on each of the four service touchpoints, indicating whether teams hit their time-keeping estimates as they went along. 7. Second service run-through (5 minutes) The second iteration of the service was run-through with the User and observed. 76
touchpoint 6-1
Touchpoints and scores on the table
more info
on
lpro www.moda
ject.com
8. Scoring (5 minutes) Service run-throughs were scored as in the previous iteration, with the user, client and the remainder of team each allocating zero, one, two or three sweets to each service touchpoint. We played the game in two iterations (a longer workshop would allow for three) providing progressively more guidance and information in each iteration and using the time in between for reflection and planning. The brief for the first iteration was deliberately open, with minimal guidance, while the second provided further information and constraints. We also incorporated various opportunities for data gathering on progress and performance to foster validated learning and to help with planning. We deliberately provided little information on suggested service design tools, and tried to focus more on the activities and roles. We were aware that the majority of attendees at the SDNC13 workshop would be from service design backgrounds so we deliberately chose to restrict front-end research and design, and instead move onto prototyping: to build, measure and learn by doing.
tools and methods
The plan
Team retrospective Group retrospective
MoDAL Development
After two iterations and the final service run-through, all three teams came together to reflect on the session as a whole and discuss some of the key learning points. A discussion followed around common behaviours and insights during the game play. We then discussed broader issues around the approaches used when working in cross-disciplinary teams. The discussions centred around: • people over process (process as emergent) • qualitative research within the rhythm of a development cycle (as opposed to upfront) • keeping a user focus when teams are getting stuck into development • developing more robust ways of tracking progress/ value in an ongoing project
We’ve published an updated version of the game on the MoDAL website, for anyone to use and adapt as necessary. In addition we are working with Lean, Agile and design practitioners to build on the learning and insights gathered over the last year. For more information, discussions, events and new content as it becomes available visit: www.modalproject.com
•
References 1 Agile Manifesto: http://agilemanifesto.org/ 2 XP Game: http://www.agilebelgium.be/xpgame/
touchpoint 6-1 77
Transformation through Service Design Looking back on the 6th Service Design Global Conference in Cardiff, we hope that the inspiration and aspiration on display continues to resonate as much with you as it has with us. Sarah Ronald is the managing director and founder of Nile and was conference chair at sdnc13.
Paul Thurston is the head of service design at PDR and was conference chair at sdnc13.
78
touchpoint 6-1
It was the biggest conference yet, attracting 484 participants from across the industry and around the world. They heard 64 speakers at over 50 sessions, delivering knowledge and stimulating debate. As part of the organisational team it was satisfying to see. But as attendees, we were also encouraged and inspired by what was being shared. From our first planning sessions, our goal was to create a conference that looked not just at where the industry is now, but also at what is ahead. Sarah Ronald, Paul Thurston
We wanted to explore how service design can influence and interact with all areas of an organisation to deliver radical transformation on the largest scale. To help do that, we invited business speakers such as Andy Jones (Xerox Europe), Rob Ballantine (Infosys) and Clive Grinyer (Cisco IBSG) to share their experiences. Four themes applied to the sessions: Making Big Data Useful, Complex Service Systems, Co-design & Co-creation, and Micro Services. We can look back on some standout talks from each theme:
sdnc13 impressions
• The challenge with Big Data — according to Kerry Bodine — is to identify what information is useful and then to create a design that can adapt to, and utilise, that data in real-time. The digital revolution is radically transforming business, and many of the old ways of doing things need overhauling to bring greater transparency and control to staff, to clients and to customers. • Complex Service Systems was tackled by Joel Bailey (Capita), Maria José Jorda Garcia (BBVA) and Erik Roscam Abbing (Zilver Innovation). They proposed that as designers we are generally comfortable with the theory of what a service should look like, but sometimes we are less confident about taking those complex designs from the drawing board and putting them into action. Joel Bailey urged the audience to break out of the “service design bubble”, saying: “We as service designers need to recognise that our clients are very profit focused, and we can help them to achieve that. And the by-product is that you get these great, happy customers”. • Extending the use of customer insights was central to the Co-Design and Co-Creation presentations by Andy Jones, Lydia Howland (IDEO) and James Samperi (Engine). If you didn’t get the chance to listen to Andy, we urge you to view his presentation: youtu. be/CzwYkh-aOSE • Finally, Lee Sankey (Barclays PLC), Nicola Piercy (E.ON Energy UK), Melvin Brand Flu (Livework) and Clive Grinyer shared their expertise on Micro Services. They explored their rise and the innovative new ways they are being delivered. Lee’s provoking presentation — the New Seriousness of Design — is also worth a view: youtu.be/C56bcqyoSOw
With our varied audience of practitioners, business leaders and academics we aimed to provide value and relevance for everyone. Hopefully, we did. But this is your network, so, of course, it is your feedback on the event that matters most, and all views offered will be considered for the 2014 event in Stockholm. Or better still, you can also volunteer your services to help bring a local or global conference to your home country or city. We can’t give enough praise to the following people who gifted their time and energy to make the conference a reality: Phil Goad, Chris Brooker, Christina Kinnear, Alistair Ruff, Kate Dowling and Gavin Cawood from the UK chapter. Their hard work ensured that SDNC13 was a great success. Thanks too to the venue, to the team of volunteers and the SDN team in Germany. And, a final last-but-not-least thank you to our 2013 Sponsors: Engine, Infosys, Nile, PDR, The Cardiff Government, Livework, Foolproof and Fjord. We hope the event was informative, inspiring, entertaining, and provided real takeaway value to be applied to your work in 2014 as we continue to develop our understanding, build capabilities and harness technology that leads to design-led service innovation. We look forward to seeing you all in Stockholm in October.
•
touchpoint 6-1 79
the conference in numbersâ&#x20AC;&#x201A; service design global conference 2013 in cardiff
registration 484
attendants
sdn members non-members students speakers guests/sponsors
142 conference team speakers guests / sponsors
124
110
62
339
registrations
attendees sdn members non-members speakers
australia austria belgium brazil canada denmark estonia finland france germany greece ireland italy japan korea luxembourg norway poland portugal spain south africa slovenia sweden switzerland the netherlands taiwan uk usa
05 02 04 05 03 06 03 12 04 24 01 02 07 38 10 01 06 02 02 31 01 04 18 02 06 04 228 15
norway
sweden
finland
canada
ireland denmark uk
estonia germany korea
the netherlands
touchpoint 6-1
usa
poland slovenia
belgium luxembourg france
switzerland
spain
italy
austria taiwan
greece brazil
portugal
80
japan
south africa
australia
52
sdnc13 impressions
Photos : Manuel Kniepe, Marihum Pernia, Claire Allard
members day impressionsâ&#x20AC;&#x201A;
touchpoint 6-1 81
conference impressions â&#x20AC;&#x201A;
service design global conference 2013 in cardiff
82
touchpoint 6-1
Photos : Polly Thomas, Manuel Kniepe, Marihum Pernia, Eva Hugenschmidt
sdnc13 impressions
touchpoint 6-1 83
Interview: Érico Fileno
Érico Fileno is strategic design director at Welab Design. He has been a pioneer in the field of interaction and service design in Brazil, serving as an evangelist and leading the way to promote the discipline as business relevant.
84
touchpoint 6-1
In this issue’s profile, Touchpoint editor Jesse Grimes speaks with Érico Fileno, a service design pioneer in Brazil, and learns about his work at Curitiba-based agency Welab, and his efforts to educate the next generation of design thinkers in his home country. With service design activities in Europe well-represented in Touchpoint, it made sense to look further afield for this issue. Can you share your observations on how established the practice is within Brazil, and what has been accomplished so far? The visibility of service design has been growing at a fast pace in Brazil and it’s currently incorporated at the top of the agenda in big companies established here, both national and international. Ten years ago, it was quite different. The year of 1999 was important for the establishment of service design in Brazil, when the Parana Design Center (now, the Brazil Design Center)
was created in Curitiba, aiming to promote a strategic design approach within Brazilian companies. I had the opportunity to be part of this team for three years, and I was involved in several projects. During this time we built an operational link with the Design Management Institute, the Design Council (UK) and some other big design consultancies in Europe and the USA, as we started to specify service design as a strategic ability. The main objective was to comprehensively learn about this new approach towards design. Another important milestone was in the early 2000s, when the Universidade Federal do Parana, in Curitiba, started
profiles
an academic partnership with the Köln International School of Design (KISD), making it possible for students and teachers to develop exchange programs between the two institutions. At this time, Parana Design Center was also promoting events for the public, under the banner “Design to Business”. In two different instances, the theme was Service Design; first in 2003 with Fran Samalionis (IDEO) and then in 2009 with James Samperi (Engine). At the same time, the term ‘design thinking’ was becoming more recognized within companies and design was becoming part of their agendas. The year 2010 was very important because Professor Birgit Mager came to Brazil for an event in São Paulo, an online network was created and some short courses about service design were offered in Curitiba and São Paulo. Some new consultancies were also established, and some of the existing ones decided to better market their service design abilities to clients. In addition, big projects started to be covered in the media, as a result of the investment in service design. For example, the biggest bank in Brazil set up an innovation team and started a process to redesign all their services, and one of the biggest international insurance companies simplified their approach to communication their services using design research. Last year, after a whole year of preparation, we established our own SDN National Chapter: Service Design Network Brazil. Following this, we’ve
already held some short events that were well-attended. As a result, we noticed more and more people are looking for more information about service design, and that some new courses are being established focusing on educating the service designers of tomorrow. With a significantly-sized economy (sixth globally, by GDP), and services compromising 67% of it, the potential for service design in Brazil seems immense. Has this translated to a wealth of opportunities for service design projects, or has the recognition of the field been more limited? In Brazil, we are now focused on providing better services, but this is a very recent development. Services here still struggle to reach an acceptable level of quality, although the last five years have seen big companies — especially in the areas of banking, telecommunications, and insurance — developing better services for their clients. It offers a big opportunity to professionals from service design, Brazilians or foreigners, to work here. The difference between national and international companies is that the latter aren’t able to cope with cultural differences — some of them realized this and looked for local partnerships. However, there is still a lot of opportunities and a lot to be done, especially for the most experienced professionals, who know how to connect service design to business strategy and user experience (through design research and interaction design). touchpoint 6-1 85
From your base in Curitiba, in the south of Brazil, whom do you see as the other players in the market? Are practitioners largely within agencies, or client-side, or both? I decided to establish my own consultancy in 2012 because I was missing certain professionalism at the market. As someone with a design degree, I wanted to go further than delivering a service design report; I wanted to deliver to my clients an operating service with designed and implemented touchpoints. A good example is the service we designed for the biggest Brazilian cosmetics company, in which we created an app for tablets that allows virtual experiences for make-up application. I had been working simultaneously for two years in the cities of Curitiba and SĂŁo Paulo, and for this reason I was able to meet companies from my consultancy established in Curitiba. But SĂŁo Paulo is the most important city for service design in Brazil, so we keep a branch office there. In this way I got to connect the historic importance of Curitiba for design to the biggest market 86
touchpoint 6-1
for service design in the country. Other important agencies practicing service design are in SĂŁo Paulo, as well as our main clients, but we also have clients in Curitiba, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and overseas, in Colombia and in the USA. I believe there are fewer than 20 companies working with service design in Brazil, which is a good number for an expanding market! On the other hand, companies requiring service design skills often have their own service designers (usually coming from consultancies), but their function is often to be a link between the company and consultancies. They are typically responsible for hiring professionals and managing design projects, and actually carry out little service design work within their companies. This company-consultancy partnership is the main reason for the growing market of service design in Brazil. One important thing we still miss here is the possibility to deliver a finished service to the clients, following the whole process of service design, and this is what we are performing at Welab.
profiles
The recognition of service design - and a sign of its healthy future - is shown by its presence in academia. Can you tell us more about your teaching roles at Universidade Positivo and Insper Instituto? Is service design being taught to students in Brazil, and at what levels of education? Since 2007, alongside my design consulting work, I’ve been working as a teacher and professor for training courses, and graduate and post-graduate courses. My courses cover the themes of interaction and service design, user experience, business strategy and design thinking. I was also involved in the foundation of the first institute of interaction design in Brazil with some other professionals, and started a pioneering post-graduate course related to the theme. In 2010, the experience gave me the chance to create a program of Human-Centered Design at Universidade Positivo in Curitiba, where we discuss the theory and the practice of design process towards the new market trends, without being restricted to the field of interaction design. Several themes, such as business strategy, service design, interaction design, user experience and ethnography are discussed over the course of three semesters. This course attracts students from several parts of the country, and we have had many successful instances of former students being hired for important positions, in Brazil and abroad. At Insper College in São Paulo, my work as a professor is focused on the connection of design to business and engineering. At this college, one of the most important business schools in Brazil, we are discussing service design with students from business administration and economics. This year we are going to introduce the theme to students from engineering — a brand new initiative in the country — in a course totally focusing on design, in partnership with Olin College (USA). For me, being a professor is a way to get in touch with new professionals, keep studying and stay updated on the fields that interest me.
“The visibility of service design has been growing at a fast pace in Brazil and it’s currently incorporated at the top of the agenda in big companies established here, both national and international.”
•
touchpoint 6-1 87
Susan Hosking is the chapter representative of SDN SF and lead interaction design at GE.
SDN San Francisco Chapter Activities
88
touchpoint 6-1
Global Jam SF 2013 Photos : Joao Pedro Rodriquez
Our inaugural event in November featured Patrick Quattlebaum from Adaptive Path who presented his talk ‘On Service Design’. Adaptive Path’s take on service design: “Service design examines the operations, culture, and structure of an organisation for impact on a service experience.” Using Uber on date night as a case study, Patrick peeled back the layers of customer, staff, and business to demonstrate Uber as an example of a great service experience. At our December event, Dave Gray gave us a special virtual appearance to kick-off our Culture Mapping Workshop. He talked about using service design to create shifts within organisations. More established companies want to know how to be more like Amazon and Google, to bring about successful systemic change. Cultural Mapping is a tool we can use to help these hierarchically structured companies evolve. To change culture, you don’t have to believe differently, just have a hypothesis and conduct an experiment. The first event of 2014, ‘Learning in the Digital Age’, was hosted by Fjord, the international service design consultancy. The programme focused on the shift in education and how people learn as education increasingly moves from the classroom to online and as students, from those in grade school to those in continuing education, have access to more offerings at a lower price than ever before. We talked about how service design can help improve the end-to-end learning experience.
Learning in the Digital Age Photos: Susan Hosking
With so much traction toward service design in the San Francisco Bay Area, the timing was natural for our chapter to form. The SDN SF Chapter became official in October 2013, founded by a multidisciplinary core team with strong ties to the local design community. As the new SDN SF chapter, we are excitedly working to sustain the momentum towards service design by hosting monthly service design events.
inside sdn Tarja Chydenius is the chapter representative of SDN Finland and senior lecturer at Laurea University of Applied Sciences.
The First Service Design Competition Ever Held... in Finland
Our chapter began with regular gatherings for service design Drinks in Helsinki, providing dozens of professionals interested in service design an opportunity to meet and discuss service design issues every month. Some of these events have been hosted by our members in their organisations, with some evenings beginning with an inspirational speech around current service design topics and just bringing together people to share their interests. An even bigger series of events, the Service Design Breakfasts , which presented five different service design cases during the autumn of 2013, reached its grand finale at Aalto Design Factory in January, when one of the cases was declared the Service Design Achievement of the Year. The winner was the Diagonal service design agency, with their project for a Finnish health care laboratory company. The jury applauded the case for clearly communicating the value of service design, successfully combining theory and practice, showing sensitivity to the customers, ambitious prototyping and for providing clear vision of how the case could be scaled up. This competition was one of a kind. As far as we know, it was the first global competition ever that focused solely on service design. The event also triggered worldwide interest, as the online case videos gathered hundreds of views from as far as India and South Korea. The promotion of service design will continue with an engaging seminar on June 5th. Our core team is full of inspired people and there is still room for more to take new innovative initiatives. Our ultimate goal is to enable and support the creation of great service experiences in all walks of life in Finland.
Photos : Wen Zhan
The Finnish chapter of the SDN was started almost two years ago, in the knowledge that there were already a lot of service design-related activities going on in our country. The main aim for us is to bring together some of these activities and to promote awareness of service design in Finland on a wider front.
touchpoint 6-1 89
buy touchpoint online! vol
ume
Touchpoint, the SDN Service Design Journal, was launched in May 2009 and is the first journal on service design worldwide. Each issue focuses on one topic and features news and trends, interviews, insightful discussions and case studies. Printed issues of Touchpoint can be purchased on the SDN website. www.service-design-network.org
no. 5 |
5,8 3 | 1
r 0 eu
o
014
ary 2
Janu
, ssity Nece Service d n o f Bey eauty o the B l in utifu e Bea ng th ssion’ re overi Disc e as Exp ic ‘Serv um Lee
e nd th on, a ocati Prov , ck s co c eti r Bea se Aesth Enterpri ong, Spence l W Socia ck, Elsa ip
by K
rri Blo
by Te
ty Beau True ul Neeley by J.
volume 5 | no. 1 | 15,80 euro
Pa
volume 5 | no. 2 | 15,80 euro
May 2013
September 2013
Deep Dive: Collecting Relevant Insights
Designing Citizen-Centred Public Services
The Service Design Promise
Social Innovation in Local Government: Sustaining Success
By Ben Reason
By Julie McManus and Emma Barrett
Purpose-Driven Research as Key to Successful Service Design
Public & Collaborative: Designing Services for Housing
By Stefan Moritz and Marcus Gabrielsson
By Chelsea Mauldina and Eduardo Staszowski
When Design and Market Researchers Join Forces
Are Free Public Libraries Still Needed?
By Remko van der Lugt and Gerrita van der Veen
By Mikko Mäkinen and Richard Stanley
volume 3 | no. 1 | 12,80 euro
volume 3 | no. 2 | 12,80 euro
volume 3 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro
volume 4 | no. 1 | 12,80 euro
volume 4 | no. 2 | 12,80 euro
May 2011
September 2011
January 2012
May 2012
September 2012
Organisational Change
Learning, Changing, Growing • Being Led or Finding the Way?
Eat, Sleep, Play
From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet
‘Monkeysphere’ Challenge
Jesse Grimes and Mark Alexander Fonds
• Better Services for the People
Service Design Creates Break through Cultural Change in the Brazilian Financial Industry
Francesca Dickson, Emily Friedman, Lorna Ross
• Service Transformation:
Hospitality Service as Science and Art
By Kipum Lee
Learning the Language of Finance Gives Your Ideas the Best Chance of Success
By Christopher Wright and Jennifer Young
Melvin Brand Flu
Boom! Wow. Wow! WOW! BOOOOM!!! By Markus Hormeß and Adam Lawrence
Reinventing Flight. Porter Airlines: a Case Study
By Jürgen Tanghe
Service Design on Steroids
A Performing Arts Perspective on Service Design By Raymond P. Fisk and Stephen J. Grove
an Environment Adverse to Change to Design University Services Jürgen Faust
By Michelle McCune
By Tennyson Pinheiro, Luis Alt and Jose Mello
• Innovating in Health Care –
Sylvia Harris and Chelsea Mauldin
• Using Service Design Education
Service Design on Stage
Design Principles for Eating Sustainably
• Overcoming the
Mary Cook and Joseph Harrington
Designing Human Rights
The Lost Pleasure of Randomness and Surprise By Fabio Di Liberto
By Zack Brisson and Panthea Lee
01 01
volume 1 | no. 1
April 2009
Touchpoint
First Issue
the journal of service design
volume 1 | no. 2 | 12,80 euro
October 2009
Touchpoint the journal of service design
volume 1 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro
the journal of service design
Health and Service Design
What is Service Design? Time for a New Definition
Joe Heapy
App?
Business Impact of Service Design • Service Design – The Bottom Line
Fergus Bisset and Dan Lockton
• Design and behaviour in complex
• Service Design 2020: What does
Fran Samalionis and James Moed
B2B service engagements
the future hold and (how) can we shape it?
• Revealing experiences Christine Janae-Leoniak
• Stuck in a Price War? Use Service
Ben Shaw and Melissa Cefkin
Bruce S. Tether and Ileana Stigliani
From Products to People
Design to Change the Game in B2B Relations.
• Charging Up: energy usage in
Lotte Christiansen, Rikke B E Knutzen, Søren Bolvig Poulsen
households around the world
• Great expectations: The healthcare
Geke van Dijk
journey Gianna Marzilli Ericson
service design network
to u c h p o i n t | th e jo u rn a l o f s e rv i c e d es i g n
1
service design network
to uc hpo int | t h e jo urna l o f s ervi ce d es i gn
Lavrans Løvlie and Ben Reason
• How Human Is Your Business? Steve Lee
Julia Schaeper, Lynne Maher and Helen Baxter
Lavrans Løvlie
Service Design and Behavioural Change • Designing motivation or motivating
Mark Jones
• Designing from within
• Service Design:
September 2010
design? Exploring Service Design, motivation and behavioural change
• Do you really need that iPhone
Marcel Zwiers
• Design’s Odd Couple
volume 2 | no. 2 | 12,80 euro
May 2010
the journal of Service Design
Beyond Basics
Lavrans Løvlie, Ben Reason, Mark Mugglestone and John-Arne Røttingen
volume 2 | no. 1 | 12,80 euro
Touchpoint
• Make yourself useful
• A healthy relationship • Dutch Design:
January 2010
Touchpoint
1
service design network
to u c hp o i n t | the jo u r na l o f s erv i c e des i g n
1
service design network
to u c hp o i n t | the jo u r na l o f s erv i c e des i g n
1
Order online at www.service-design-network.org/read/touchpoint-shop/
Buy the Touchpoint Collection and, in one fell swoop, get the whole back catalogue of Touchpoint ( from the Vol. 1, No. 2 to Vol. 5 No. 3) at an irresistible price!
download single articles volume 4 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro
January 2013
Cultural Change by Service Design Living Service Worlds ¬ How Will Services Know What You Intend? Shelley Evenson
Complete Small, Affordable and Successful Service Design Projects By Chris Brooker
A Time Machine for Service Designers By Julia Leihener and Dr. Henning Breuer
volume 2 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro
The articles published in Touchpoint since its first publication are available online! The formatted Pdfs of single articles are now downloadable at no cost for SDN members and can be purchased by non-members. You have the opportunity to search articles by volume and issue, by keywords or by author!
free acces s for sdn membe rs!
Connecting the Dots • Service Design as Business
Change Agent Mark Hartevelt and Hugo Raaijmakers
• MyPolice Lauren Currie and Sarah Drummond
• Service Design at a Crossroads Lucy Kimbell
http://www.service-design-network.org/read/online-articles/
Photo: Werner Nystrand/imagebank.sweden.se
About Service Design Network The Service Design Network is the global centre for recognising and promoting excellence in the field of service design. Through national and international events, online and print publications, and coordination with academic institutions, the network connects multiple disciplines within agencies, business, and government to strengthen the impact of service design both in the public and private sector. Service Design Network Office | Ubierring 40 | 50678 Cologne | Germany | www.service-design-network.org
