Service Design: Designing Cross-channel Service Experiences
Design Thinking Visualised
Service Design Case Study: Greater Good Studio
Image Courtesy of Anothelunch.com
In "Designing Everything but the Food" Core 77 presents a case study of the social design project undertaken by Chicago's Greater Good Studios to redesign the school lunch service. Think this has nothing to do with service design or business? Think of the school cafeteria as a business that serves high volumes of very discerning customers, with limited budget and time. Think of the students as leader users...
ROI for Design
Image Courtesy of British Design Council
Though design thinking has undoubtedly captured the attention of the business world, return on investment (ROI) is still the elephant in the room. Designers are often at pains to point out that many of the subjective benefits of design are difficult to quantify – so they don’t bother. Businesses, on the other hand, ignore the benefits of design on the basis that “if it can’t be measured it doesn’t exist”. Personally, I’m a strong believer in combining the insight of qualitative data with the rigour of quantitative data.
I was thinking about the ROI for design recently when a blog posting by Bart Doorneweert pointed out the British Design Council’s Report “Design Index: The Impact of Design on Stock Market Performance”. The report shows that businesses which invested in design consistently outperformed their peers. The report looks at a decade’s worth of data between 1994-2004, and shows that design-led companies outperformed the FTSE 100 index by as much as 200 per cent. What’s also interesting to note is that the results are consistent in both bull and bear markets.
The Sharing Experience Europe (SEE) network has put together a useful resource for businesses wishing to evaluate the impact of design. The SEE Policy Booklet No. 3 evaluates the impact of design impact on: Companies; National Industry; Programmes & Policies, and Economy & Society.
Another promising piece of research is the Design ROI tool which is a collaboration between the Finish Design Business Association (FDBA) in collaboration with academics from the Aalto University in Helsinki. The tool aims to measure and predict the financial outcomes of design and could be particularly useful for SMEs wishing to quantify the impact of design investments.
by Andrew Pope
Impact of Design on Stock Market Performance
Tim Brown, CEO and President of IDEO on Innovation
Service Design + Design Thinking
One of the best books about service design thinking over the last number of years is Stickdorn and Schneider's "This is Service Design Thinking". It's the book that I use as my text anytime I teach service design. It does a pretty good job of describing what makes a service different from physical products and also of highlighting the various tools at the disposal of the service designer. If I had one criticism is that it fails to give any in-depth examples of some of the tools being used. This is inevitable given the breadth of tools available to the service designer/design thinker.
DESIS Lab Melbourne (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability) invited Marc Stickdorn to discuss his book in November 2011. The presentation provides a good background to Service Design and the book.
Customer Journey Mapping
Image Courtesy of UXMatters
Journey mapping is a structured visualisation of a service's user experience. Although there is no standard agreed upon format, the journey map typically illustrates service touchpoints, and customer emotions on the journey from pre-service to post-service delivery. Service delivery is typically multi-channelled and time-based and leverages multiple information sources. By providing service designers with a longitudinal view of the customer experience, service designers can identify problems and opportunities for service innovation. It also allows the service designer to reflect on individual touchpoints and to analyse discrete stages of the customer journey.
As all service users will differ, customer journey maps are typically created for multiple user types, or personas. This allows the service designer to compare several customer experiences. The links below provide excellent examples of how customer journey maps are being used by organisations to improve user experience and service delivery.
Further Reading:
http://desonance.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/customer-experience-mapping/
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/11/using_customer_journey_maps_to.html
http://sixrevisions.com/user-experience-ux/customer-journey-maps/
http://service-design-network.org/node/1707/
Hack Design
A number of months ago I began taking the Hack Design course. It is a series of curated design lessons aimed at technologists. The course has been an absolute revelation for me. Each week I receive an e-mail packed with design tutorials and resources aimed at programmers. Each lesson presents a new topic such as "colour theory", "typography", "design hierarchy" etc. It's a great resource and absolutely essential for non-designer wishing to get a grasp of the fundamentals. One of the exercises in week one was to watch Gary Hustwit's film Objectified. The film has interviews with such design luminaries as Dieter Rams, Jonathan Ives and the late Bill Moggridge. It's a fascinating insight into the design process and designers themselves. I would highly recommend the course and film.
Design Thinking in Education
Image Courtesy of Sean MacEntee
The role of the university has been questioned in the face of disruptive technologies such as massive online open course (MOOC) technologies and the rising cost of university tuition. Such external forces will no doubt have a long term impact on the nature of course delivery and enrollment numbers across all universities. As such, the issue of the “student experience” has become critical to the long-term success of any university course. If content, the argument goes, is the sole benchmark for the educational experience, then universities will inevitably be wiped out by MOOCs.
It is within context described above that we are seeing universities embrace the concept of design thinking. Design thinking is collaborative, it is physical and, it is social. It goes against the traditional lecture model that MOOCs try so hard to replicate. Collaboration, inclusivity, reflection, peer review and trust are all hallmarks of a great student experience, but they are also hallmarks of design thinking. Design thinking is discipline agnostic, and can provide benefits to students and staff alike by creating solutions to real problems. It is however, overhyped and overextended and is being offered as a panacea to every organisational malaise from falling university numbers to declining profits.
This is not to underplay or diminish the role of design thinking. I am a strong advocate of the technique. However, context is important – and context in case of design thinking is empathy. Empathy is about understanding the user and what the user requires. The most important element of design thinking, in my mind, is that it challenges widely held beliefs. It provides us with an alternative means of arriving at the “truth”. I think one of the key benefits of any university degree should be one’s ability to question assumptions and critically analyse the past - analytical thinking. However, intuitive thinking is sometimes jettisoned at its expense. Roger Martin in his book “The Design of Business” describes how companies often protect themselves from the randomness of intuitive thinking. Martin argues that such thinking often hampers the creation of new knowledge. A University, or any educational system, should not simply represent a means of recycling old knowledge (though knowledge dissemination is an important function). Education should also provide students with the tools and skills to create new knowledge and it is here that design thinking excels.
So design thinking is not a silver bullet, but it can inspire students and businesses alike to challenge assumptions and bring a more human-centered approach to the fore. Over the next few years you will see many more universities embracing the design thinking concept both as sales tool (in the face of the rising threat from MOOCs) and a means of enhancing the student experience.