All posts about
Service design

Cross-platform service user experience: A field study and an initial framework (.pdf)

Added on 23 April 2014 Peter Bogaards

Complexity goes exponential with the IoT design challenge.

“Many web-based services utilize both desktop and mobile terminals in delivering content and functionality to their users. In terms of user experience, the overall chain of interactions, including mobile and non-mobile settings, becomes a central design target. The aim of this study was to investigate, what are the key elements of user experience associated with these, cross- platform interactions. This paper presents the findings from a four week long field study with three web-based cross-platform services. During the study, participants used the services on both their PCs and mobile devices. Diaries and interviews were used for gathering users’ experiences with the services. Based on our findings and reflection with related work, we argue that central elements of cross-platform service UX include fit for cross- contextual activities, flow of interactions and content, and perceived service coherence. We propose an initial conceptual framework of cross-platform user experience. The framework can be used to guide the design of cross-platform web services, as it draws attention to elements of user experience that are essentially influenced by the characteristics of cross-platform settings.”

(Authors: Minna Wäljas, Katarina Segerstah, Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, Harri Oinas-Kukkonen)

When Service Design meets the divided company

Added on 9 April 2014 Peter Bogaards

A focus of service design on the service experience makes it the brother or sister of UX and CX in the Experience Design family.

“What happens when a service design project meets a hierarchical, divided company? You can design an amazing service, and yet at the end of the day, the organizations still has to deliver. A service design project that ignores organizational readiness is doomed to fail. How to move service projects forward in the face of such constraints? Service design usually means a change initiative. More than half of change initiatives fail to achieve their objectives. Most of these initiatives fail because they don’t adequately understand the organization’s culture and potential for resisting the change.”

(Dave Gray a.k.a. @davegray ~ Adaptive Path’s The Service Experience Conference 2013)

Mapping user journeys using visual languages

Added on 8 April 2014 Peter Bogaards

Great to see InfoDesign entering the territory of Service Design. We had to wait a while, but there it is.

“The use of wayfinding systems does not focus on aesthetics, but on the best ways of communicating key flows, barriers, and necessary improvements to stakeholders and clients, as well as to show opportunities to streamline experiences. Using the common framework of boxes and arrows just does’t do justice to the value that you can obtain from journey maps.”

(Shean Malik ~ UXmatters)

Orchestrating touchpoints

Added on 8 April 2014 Peter Bogaards

Cross-channels, omni-channels and trans-channels, all working in harmony to deliver great services.

“As services become more interconnected across channels and devices – and more importantly across time and space – it’s becoming increasingly important to find ways to gain insight about customers’ interactions with your product or service. Whether it’s an expanding digital product ecosystem, a cross-channel retail experience, or a complex, intangible service experience — how do we design experiences that unfold over time and through changing contexts?”

(Chris Risdon a.k.a. @chrisrisdon ~ From business to buttons 2014 videos)

Systemic design principles for complex social systems

Added on 3 April 2014 Peter Bogaards

Economic, technological and social trends force designers to do some deep reflective thinking on what they’re working on.

“Systemic design is not a design discipline (e.g. graphic or industrial design) but an orientation, a next-generation practice developed by necessity to advance design practices in systemic problems. As a strong practice of design, the ultimate aim is to co-design better policies, programs and service systems. The methods and principles enabling systemic design are drawn from many schools of thought, in both systems and design thinking. The objective of the systemic design project is to affirmatively integrate systems thinking and systems methods to guide human-centered design for complex, multi-system and multi-stakeholder services and programs.”

(Peter Jones a.k.a. @redesign)

Service blueprinting: Transforming the student experience

Added on 2 April 2014 Peter Bogaards

Our current educational system at large requires outside-in thinking. Service design and its deliverables is a little step. A different mindset is needed.

“In this article (…), we explore the transformative power of viewing higher education and the student experience through a service lens and explain and provide an example of how service blueprinting, a simple but powerful service design technique, can be used to transform student experiences in higher education. Throughout, the strategic role of technology in transforming student experiences is emphasized.”

(Mary Jo Bitner, Amy Ostrom, and Kevin Burkhard ~ EDUCAUSE)

Writing user stories: How to write a useful user story

Added on 24 March 2014 Peter Bogaards

This used to be called use cases, user requirements or task flows. With Agile, everything that has been done before need new labels. The semantics stays the same.

“User stories are an essential part of the agile toolkit. They’re a way of organizing your work into manageable chunks that create tangible value, and can be discussed and prioritized independently.”

(Government Service Design Manual)

The great convergence

Added on 4 March 2014 Peter Bogaards
Galaxies and Copernicus, doesn’t that ring a bell.

“So with three different starting points – UX from product development, service design from service delivery, and customer experience from marketing and customer support – we’ve all arrived at the same place: the realization that by consciously crafting the experiences people have with those products, services, or organizations, we can help those people be more successful and find more satisfaction. Oh yeah, and it’s good for business too.”

(Jesse James Garrett a.k.a. @jjg ~ Adaptive Path)

Living service worlds

Added on 30 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
Design for open systems is a major wicked problem.

“The living nature of digital services means that designers can’t design a service experience. They can only design the resources for people to bring the experience to life for themselves. Designers create affordances that help people know where to start, what to do and when to do it. Services come to life through people: how they read the resources, their personal history and their context. Shelley Evenson and Tom Schneider see two trends placing new demands on designing for service. The first is what they call living services—the meteoric rise of mobile, embedded sensors and more natural interfaces. The second, just starting to appear as a broader global trend, is described in the book The Intention Economy – the shift from sellers finding buyers to buyers finding sellers. In this video, Evenson and Schneider describe how they think these trends will influence designing for living services.”

(Shelley Evenson and Tom Schneider ~ Videos from the 2013 AIGA Design Conference)

Connecting the customer experience

Added on 28 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
Unfortunately, no design or Design mentioned whatsoever.

“Enabling great customer experiences and optimizing them across all touchpoints in a consistent and human, customer-centric way leads to marketing success. And it increasingly revolves around personal, personalized and at the same time connected and integrated approaches.”

(J-P De Clerck a.k.a. @conversionation ~ i-Scoop)

How to improve UX with service design tools

Added on 8 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
Always thought service design and UX design were close cousins.

“We hear plenty of talk about the power of design. It is a very pragmatic discipline. Look around you, nearly everything you touch has been designed. For this particular scenario, design attempts to ask (and answer) questions such as: what should the customer experience be like? What should the employee experience be like? How does a company maintain a consistent brand essence and stay relevant to its customers? How might we take the principles of design and stretch them to examine the intangibles?”

(C. Todd Lombardo a.k.a. @iamctodd ~ jaxenter)

The Service Design imperative

Added on 16 December 2013 Peter Bogaards
Great collection of content when you haven’t attend the event in Cardiff.

“Service Design is the application of design practice to the other 80% of the economy. It demands new skills, tools and techniques, perhaps even a rethinking of what we mean by design itself. Designing product service systems and the business models that enable them, means crossing boundaries between design disciplines, business and technology. It means changing the processes and practices not only of designers but how firms innovate and organize themselves. This isn’t easy as we share different working practices and cultures, but, it’s essential, for service designers, if we are to collaborate or even lead innovation. Innovative service systems can create rich and integrated customer experiences — delivering real social and economic value, opportunities for self-expression, and bring meaning to peoples’ lives, as well as to the world we share.”

(Service Design Network 2013 conference videos and presentations)

Service principles guide customer experience

Added on 5 December 2013 Peter Bogaards
Principles in general and design principles in particular are great beacons.

“When people in an organisation have different interpretations of what really matters to customers, the customer experience falls apart. The difficulty is to align business units and individuals to do the right things – and do them consistently. Strong principles are a powerful way to unite teams to deliver better customer experiences.”

(Anne Meijer and John Holager ~ live|work)

Un-sucking the touchpoint

Added on 3 December 2013 Peter Bogaards
Touchpoint as device, product or channel is not specific enough. Conversations build from stories, dialogues and interactions might be.

“The touchpoint has been around for a long while, particularly in thinking about brand marketing and service design. But as design disciplines and approaches collide – from customer experience, to service design, to experience design – and we start horse trading terms, methods, and outputs, some of these concepts are given new life. For me, the touchpoint has become a central way to view designing moments across increasingly complex journeys. Whether it’s an expanding digital product ecosystem, a cross-channel retail experience, or a complex, intangible service experience.”

(Chris Risdon a.k.a. @chrisrisdon ~ Adaptive Path)

The changing nature of service and experience design

Added on 21 November 2013 Peter Bogaards
There is no field that’s stable. High levels of dynamics require repositioning and reframing all the time.

“Designing service experiences is a multidisciplinary affair. You need people with business management, psychology, and social sciences experience alongside designers and developers of all flavors. A key skill that trained designers bring is the ability to make ideas tangible in some form, through diagrams, sketches, and prototypes. That takes the business idea out of the spreadsheet, which is a poor vehicle for understanding human experiences, and turns it into something that people can look at and interact with. Then they can make informed decisions about the concepts.”

(live|work)

Cross-channel usability: Creating a consistent user experience

Added on 28 October 2013 Peter Bogaards
Experience happens between the channels.

“A consistent user experience, regardless of channel, is one of the 4 key elements of a usable cross-channel experience. Consistency across channels helps build trust with customers. (…) As companies and organizations design for the larger user experience, it’s important to consider consistency across all channels. Consistent experiences help users build trust with the organization. Each interaction is part of the overall user experience with a company. If the user experience isn’t consistent across channels, users will question the organization’s credibility.”

(Janelle Estes ~ NNGroup)

Service design: The most important design discipline you’ve never heard of

Added on 1 October 2013 Peter Bogaards
So, business wake up!

“There’s a growing number of professionals who are dedicated to making great customer experiences – and today is a day to celebrate their work. Today I’d also like to celebrate the role of design in helping CX pros create those experiences. Not graphic design or interior design or industrial design – but the lesser known field of service design. You may not have heard of service design yet, but I’d argue that it’s the most important design sub-specialty in the business world today.”

(Kerry Bodine a.k.a. @kerrybodine ~ Forrester)

Introducing dialogues: A technique for delivering better government services

Added on 17 September 2013 Peter Bogaards
An three-part article we wrote for the Touchpoint 5.2 issue from the Service Design Network.

Disclosure: I work at Informaat (The Netherlands) ~ “This three-part article is about a new technique in design projects for citizen-centred government services: the ‘dialogue’. We will introduce dialogues to the service design community and share our lessons learned in using this technique. We also want to explore how dialogues create a shared understanding and commitment among designers and internal stakeholders.”

(Mark A. Fonds a.k.a. @markafonds & Peter J. Bogaards a.k.a. @bogiezero ~ Informaat βiRDS on a W!RE)