Filed under Good Experiences
September 10, 2006 at 10:05 am
Service Design as a profession has probably been around as long as Information Architecture. Watching Birgit Mager’s talk today was interesting in that she clearly has tried to accomplish most of the things the IA community talked about. Emphasis on *talked*. Those include but are not limited to exhibitions, awards and lots and lots of research.
From the various research projects Birgit has at the University of Cologne, I was most interested in the “Genre” one. They are looking at how genres of service (and what kind of genres are there) can help benchmark and improve services. For example, hotels and hospitals have more in common than a bunch of beds and people in - identifying the genre that has these commonalities may help hospitals improve the quality of their services by looking at the successes of hotels. Having bene interested in Peter’s genre crusade, I think this takes it to the next level.
Filed under Good Experiences
September 9, 2006 at 2:03 pm
I’m writing this during lunch since web access has been intermitent, but otherwise, I never saw a conference run so smoothly. Kudos for the CMU graduate students foresight and effort to design and deliver such a great conference.
Ok, now with the goodies:
The day started with Mary Jo Bitner talking about Customer-Focused Service Design and Innovation. As expected, it was great. She’s done most of the research work that is trully focused on service. My itch to go back to school was bothering me all through her presentation as she reinforced how much research they are doing at the Center of Services Leadership in University of Arizona.
I recorded a video of the end of her presentation that I’ll publish later. She mentioned a bunch of interesting references I am not familiar with yet, but the one that jumped out was the service profit chain diagram from HBR that talks about how investment in people (internally in the firm), is a strategy to outward impact to the people outside the firm (customers). I am interested in this because the “focus on the user” that UCD brings to this discussion can sound losey-gosey. Because her focus is on people it impacts internal and external involvement (which in the context of service design is a very blury line because of co-creation).
She’s also a great presenter and though I felt extremely ignorant not knowing the majority of references, I realized how much of my business school background I should be revisiting.
An interesting insight was also the potential of bridgint the gap between the design of a service and its execution. She emphasysed the balance needed and how execution should not be out of sight from those involved during design.
More later…
Filed under Good Experiences
September 9, 2006 at 9:28 am
I’m at Emergence 06: Service Design in Pittsburgh this weekend and today is workshop day with Shelley Evenson and Hugh Dubberly.
It has been a great time so far and I can tell it’s going to be one of those energizing conferences from which I return ready to get smackin’. I know, it sounds idiotic, but that’s the result that some events (IA Summit, IA retreats, etc) have on me.
Two things hint that it has been going well. One, I have five times as many questions as I had before I came (usually before I arrive at an event like this I write down the 3-5 things I want to answer/explore by the time I’m through with the conference). The second, is that I veemently disagree with some people’s perspectives. Nothing gets me thinking harder about things than completely opposite views, so that’s been invaluable. The great thing about this one in particular, is that people had opposing views that make a lot of sense, not random rants without any link to reality - which happens more frequently than one would like at large conferences…
(I think the workshop was also good because 70% of all presenters in the conference were there). They started out with a presentation with some concepts agregating what Shelley and Hugh agree on in terms of what makes up service design. They included definitions - I can’t stress how much I love this, because how else can you talk about something new without grounding your argument on something? Kudos. Whether I agreed or disagreed with the terminology and how they framed some issues, it was one of the most helpful collections of service design “clues” I’ve seen lately.
After that we went through a few exercises, outlining good and bad brand experiences using the P&G brand statement model, then breaking down the overall steps of the interaction and concluding with what was most memorable about that experience. I like that break-down, I can see doing that rapidly to initiate competitive analysis at the inception of a project.
After that we brainstormed ways to improve on some of our chosen brand experiences. I think it’s an easier exercise if you focus on bad experiences, so we chose Netflix which was our example of a great one. We still came up with some pretty interesting ways to make it better, expand the business and provide more value to customers.
Overall, it was a great opportunity to think about service design in different levels and I think it’s a great idea to start a conference with a workshop where you have to exercise that thinking prior to watching two days of lectures.
In conclusions, here are my questions for now.
“Setting expectations” seems to have substantial impact in the quality of the brand experience. What dimensions of setting expectations should be considered? Any particular methods apply globaly? Is everything contextual?
There was much talk about knowledge-based services, but what *other* kinds of services are there? If there is only one relevant category, why categorize it as such? If this doesn’t aid understanding, we shouldn’t be using this terminology.
“Design of the interface” - Shelley talked about the how the ‘interface’ on the service level has different dimensions than the interface on the product level. How can one move on from a product-focus work on the interface to addressing the interface of the whole service?
More later, no time to type now.
