The Future of Design: Designing for Service

[Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]

[Designing for Service presented by Shelley Evenson of Carnegie Mellon]

Recently she has been exploring the idea of designing for service.

Why service? Because that's where the economy is going. If you look at US GDP you see the extreme dominance of services in the economy.

Three kind of jobs:

1. transformational - making stuff
2. transactional - process stuff
3. tacit - creative stuff

The data is good but the names are weak. Uday Karmarkar wrote a paper called Will Your Survive The Services Revolution where he looks at services splitting into four poles.

Knowledge based services have been growing in importance in the US and other economies but how has service been defined? IBM has attempted to define this but this list doesn't seem to clarify this issue.

Services are activities that form a product through an interaction with representatives of the service organization, the customer, and any mediating technology. Services are also performances as choreographed interactions manufactures at the point of delivery that form a process and co-product value, satisfaction, and delight in response to human needs. When Beni Hana (sp.?) started the performance was very important because Americans weren't comfortable with foreign food. Think about the height of a table as the kind of thing that gets taken for granted in this interaction.

So what do we mean by design? We mean the process of identifying and agreeing on goals and then conceiving planning and sometimes iteratively constructing a framework.

Service design is all about understanding people through research and using that research to make interface and evidence (physical objects in the world).

In service design we create the resources to choreograph interactions that result in a compelling experience for the participants.

Imagine that its winter and you are taking someone you really care about to go get a colonoscopy. You have to them because they won't be able to drive so you go with. You go in and your spouse checks in. You look around the room and there's no place for your coat. You brought work and there's no place to do that. There are those magazines that are always in those environments but they're old. The Today Show is on the TV. You're sitting there and you work. People are coming and going. A long time passes and you notice that everyone you came in with is gone. That seems a little odd. Then the physician walks out from behind a door and now there's this doctor person for the first time. That person walks over to you and asks them to go with you. You think should you bring stuff so you do. You follow the physician to a dark room because the environments been set up to keep the lights off but when you walk in the lights turn on very brightly. You are asked to sit down and tells you that your partner has cancer. You lean across the big table and ask what? The doctor tells you that your partner is groggy so you need to help explain this to your partner. And you have to do this now. What do you with this? What resources are in that space to help deal with that situation. There's not much there. There's not much.

This service stuff is all about restaurants but its also about these important interactions. And its not just about face to face interactions.

At Carnegie Mellon they have an experience called Student Health Center. In her course Designing for Experience her students looked at the Student Health Center. The patient walks in, fills out a form, and puts the form in a slot on a door. After a period of time someone comes out and tell you whether or not you have an appointment because they are triaging. This sets the stage for the interaction.

Ok, everyone talks about the iPod so here goes. It has a compelling experience. It is a different kind of product but its different because it enables users to participate. Apple goes beyond. They sell songs for ninety-nine cents and let you manage it all in iTunes and this makes the experience. Steve Jobs was able to do the deal that let's people buy individual songs instead of albums and now this system exists to support a carefully controlled experience. It's through the design of the system that the iPod has been embedded in people's lives. The design of a system that reduces friction.

Analysts are now predicting that Apple will do the same thing with mobile telephony.

Look at Rearden Commerce. They aggregate service suppliers in a marketplace enabling employees to purchase personalized travel, entertainment, meeting services, etc. Employers gain control with embedded rule-based purchase options. This enables employers to manage their expenses while allowing employees to book their own flights in the way they want through the corporate site.

Do these new kinds of product/ service systems that we're creating really deliver? How do we understand how to design for this knowledge based environment without losing our human centered stance?

First look at context. Then look at setting, the servicescape of resources in the environment and how they mediate the interaction. Then on one side you have people or machines and on the other side you have touch points. Groups of touchpoints can be called the Service System Interface. If we're really trying to understand the complexity we need to define what we are talking about.

So service system interactions:

• person to person
• person to machine
• machine to machine

So what's a touchpoint? Sets or collections or resources. The service system interface connects touchpoints so they can sense, respond, and reinforce one another. The interface framework must reflect the expectations that people bring to the experience.

The cycle of experience is a model for understanding the customer's journey.

Connect & Attract > Orient > Interact > Extend & Retain > Advocate

I have to see something, know what to do with it, be able to do it, know how to evaluate the experience so I can use it again, and then can tell other people that the interaction is easy to figure out.

The Starbucks journey is a great example of this.

Another cycle is:

Awareness > Investigation > Evaluation > Trial > Repeated Use > Commitment

In this model, trial is the most important phase. If someone tries something you are halfway to getting them to try it again.

Think about designing resources across all components so they reinforce each other.

One way that is important to do that is through the conscious creation of a design language.

So what's a design language? In creating the resources we can't design experiences. What we can create are the resources for people to have experiences. We are creating explicit language elements to design for interaction that we write and the people on the other side read.

We need a process for developing languages to produce service system interfaces that both choreograph and encourage participation.

Think about Michael's logo this morning. He made a mark that people took and made their own. They could type it in any font and use it. They could own it.

Traditional new service development breaks the process up between Front End Planning and Implementation. Will this approach deliver service choreography?

If you think that requirements drive prototypes instead of the other way around the traditional process will work. If we don't then we need something else.

It seems that the Europeans are way ahead on this. See the European Service Design Network (I think I wrote that down wrong)

An alternative process:

Exploratory > Generative > Evaluative

People get the sense that you just do research at the beginning and evaluation at the end. Instead you go out in the world in the beginning to do direct observation. Bring in artifacts, look at parallel situations and then work in a generative phase with user participatory design techniques. Some people think these should be reversed. Then do evaluation all the way through as you make prototypes.

So what's different about this from the textbook operational model? Instead of starting by defining a strategy you start with exploratory research. Even in interaction design classes you start with a problem statement and then go out in the world to see what's actually going on with real people. These analogous situations can be instructive. If you are working on an MRI machine look at processes around other medical equipment. f you are designing a car look at the extremes of car design like the pimp my car people.

So here's an example from her course: Parking Pleasure Project.

Goal: Design the most efficient and effective way for CMU parking to handle normal customers of the East Campus Parking Garage and the overflow customers that need spaces for special events. Meet or exceed the expectations of all constituents.

So people drive up and see a full sign. They drive up anyway and see all these reserved spaces near the entrance. They have to back up but other people are behind them and its a mess.

In the discovery phase the students described the environment. What are the touchpoints in the physical world? What is the web interface like for getting a permit? What do you need to do to get a guest pass? Etc.

Lot's of stakeholders. From the center of the garage to people who live nearby with everyone in between.

Often the parking garage is the first physical instantiation of the University. It is the first brand touchpoint.

Once they gathered the discovery data and identified the stakeholders they mapped the process. See service blueprinting. Come up with user profiles/ customer typologies. Experience prototyping, look at real experiences (look at whole interactions, like integration testing in Rails)

Do more refined experience prototypes. Model new programs in real experiences. Add a cell phone component and new signage to your model and then prototype how it changes the experience.

There's lots of things you can do but what's the value relationship. Look for the highest user benefit for the lowest cost.

Ok.

Yeah its a garage but it reflect many of the things that were talked about earlier today. The ideas that the students came up with were fun but they also represent that they did the work to understand what the needs are.

It's an interesting issue because it is not a core function of the University. Its even something they are considering outsourcing. (Interesting and troubling that this initial brand experience could be written off. It reminds me of the stupitidy of companies who outsource customer service and then drive me to hate doing business with them through bad experiences.)

So back to the student health center. How do you find it? What do signs mean? What is the space communicating?

Define the ideal customer journey as clear steps.

The IRB is a challenging aspect to working in healthcare. You have to get permission to do any kinds of experiments with human subjects so they couldn't easily do research about the environment.

Map the stakeholders. Most of the SHS patients are international students and so the stakeholder map grows to include their families who care about the quality of service they are getting in America.

They used day-to-day journals to document the staff experience.

They then used these in collaborative worksessions with other artifacts to discover and discuss, sketch and comment, and present and reflect on the concepts.

Ultimately they did four week testing of signage and after two iterations made recommendations for resources within the University that SHS can work with to make this happen.

This process is much more inclusive. It engages end users and the people who actually work in and use the service. It is also an example of how important the service delivery experience is.

The mediation process is the key. The right resources must be presented at the right time and you can get people to engage.

So the future of design?

Addressing the challenges in designing for dynamic and more adaptive service systems.

When we design for dynamic instead of static experiences we need to build flexible platforms.

We write the design language, they read it, and they write. We design the resources for them to write for themselves. Good form encourages participation. Meaning is socially constructed.

So Web 2.0 from her perspective is about changing the web from a place to an activity. It demands active participation, you are doing stuff. It is shaped by everyone in the community. It improves through use.

Look at International Remix and zonetag.

We are going from "what it is will be up to us" to "what it will be is us."

Things to think about:

• It's about acting in the present to preempt the future
• Design the dynamic not the static
• Platform thinking should be at the center of every design decision
• Continuously extend the language we use to create new realms of experience
• The most important features are populated almost entirely by living structures

Q: People don't recognize the place that the web2.0 mindset has to influence service design. What have you seen bringing it into physical spaces? (merholz asked)

A: A homeless shelter in Cologne where the participants run a coffee shop to earn money to be able use the showers and other facilities. Originally it banned pets but lots of homeless people have dogs. So the place evolved and is now also a place for dogs.

They put the right things in place. They got a facility and then made a working running organization.