Archive for August, 2011

Service Design for the Internet of Things era

Published at August 23, 2011 in Uncategorized. 4 Comments

Last post we talked about what Service Design is. Emerging, user-centred, multi-disciplinary, multi-platform. It lives within ecosystems and strives for successful experiences. It’s pretty hard to pin down, but it’s increasingly important. So why does service design matter to businesses and brands now more than ever? Here’s four reasons:

1. Digitally-enabled services are becoming ubiquitous

We’ve all heard of the Internet of Things, or Ubiquitous Computing right? Both terms refer to the explosion of connectivity in our everyday devices. Everything we own is getting networked, from your TV to your car to your bathroom scale.   All that connectivity is cool, but it’s just the hardware — those digital features manifest as services, which require user interfaces and design.

2. Services and products need to exist in ecosystems, and designed and thought in terms of a holistic brand experience

Cool, so we just design those services like we’ve always done for sites and apps, right? The tricky thing about products and services these days compared to the websites we built in 2000 is that they need to exist not as isolated experiences, but as part of a much larger digital ecosystem. An airliner’s kiosk system needs to interact seamlessly with its mobile app, and an in-store digital retail experience should work seamlessly with the iPad shopping app. They are all touchpoints in an overall customer experience of the brand.

3. Well designed services are marketing differentiators, a reason people will buy your product

Nike+ is a reason to buy Nike running shoes. Wiithings is a reason to buy their bathroom scale. Twelpforce may or may not be a reason to frequent Best Buy. Digital services are increasingly being added onto the products we used, not as an afterthought or nice to have, but as a core part of the product proposition. They are a reason you’d buy product x over product y, and for that reason their design becomes business critical.

4. Poorly designed services can destroy customer satisfaction and recommendation

When a service is core to your product experience, and you get it wrong, the results are ugly. Ford plunged from 5th to 23rd in the 2011 JD Power & Associates satisfaction survey, with the primary culprit being identified the MyFord Touch in-car telematics system. Ford aren’t just selling a car, they are selling a driving experience. And the service that lived at the heart of that experience wasn’t good enough, resulting in a vocally disgruntled customer base. The service layer has become as important as the product itself.

Summary = Products companies are becoming service companies, and ultimately experience companies

All of which brings us to the last point. There tended to be a quite clear division for many companies between product companies (like Fiat or Samsung) and service companies (like say Geek Squad). Except now your Fiat comes with EcoDrive, and your Samsung TV comes with an appstore. These companies that are traditionally products companies are now becoming service companies, which requires a different mindset and approach, and different skillsets for success. If you get it right, it can be a major market differentiator. And as you can see in the case of Ford, if you get it wrong, it has very big consequences. The ubiquitous computing era is here, it’s up to us to design services and experiences to make the most of it.
 

What is Service Design?

Published at August 7, 2011 in Uncategorized. 11 Comments

Service Design is a strange one. It’s been around as a concept since the 80’s, yet many people have never heard of it. And among the ones that have, including those practising it, there’s no commonly accepted definition. An opening quote from the the book ‘This is Service Design‘ says it all: ”If you would ask ten people what service design is, you would end up with eleven different answers — at least.”

The two best definitions I’ve seen are:

“Service Design is an emerging field focused on the creation of well thought through experiences using a combination of intangible and tangible mediums. It provides numerous benefits to the end user experience. Service design as a practice generally results in the design of systems and processes aimed at providing a holistic service to the user” - Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design

“Service Design helps to innovate (create new) or improve (existing) services to make them more useful, usable, desirable for clients and efficient as well as effective for organisations. wlt is a new holistic, multi-disciplinary, integrative field.” - Stefan Moritz

Clear as mud? The problem in all the definitions is that service design as a concept is so encompassing and holistic that it tends to become fuzzy and hard to pin down. This isn’t helped by the fact that there’s a lot of debate and blurring around whether it’s best even called service design, as a recent article in UX Magazine notes it is often equally (and possibly more accurately) referred to as “holistic design” or “multi-channel experience design”. Holistic design could work but is almost too broad as to be helpful. Experience design I would prefer, except it’s already been subverted and is often stretched to be used as a substitute for traditional information architecture, which is missing the point. So for at least the moment, Service Design is the term du jour.

So what is important about Service Design? What distinguishes it from traditional information architecture? The key points that the definitions I gravitate towards have in common are:

  • Service Design is about designing services, and the experience of using those services.
  • Service Design is user-centered, and wherever possible involves the potential end-users and stakeholders in a co-creative design process.
  • Service Design is multi-disciplinary. It’s not about a singular skill set, like say graphic design. To design successful service experiences takes a combination of business, research, strategy, design, architecture and delivery to make service design.
  • Service Design is multi-channel, multi-platform, and bridges the real and physical worlds. This is another defining characteristic — it’s not just about designing a website user interface, or a single product. It’s about designing an entire holistic experience across all touchpoints.
  • Service Design designs not just self-contained experiences but services that live within internal, partner, and customer ecosystems.
  • The goal of service design is invention, innovation or improvement of services to provide superior experiences for the customers and competitive advantages for the service providers.

Service Design as a concept was born in the 80’s, started getting popular in the mid-2000’s, and is just about ready for it’s time in the spotlight. Next post we’ll explore why it’s important and why it’s one of the next big things.