Bill Moggridge Keynote on Service Design

Bill Moggridge (co-founder of IDEO) talking about a holistic approach to service design, service design as a narrative, and people and prototyping - definitely worth a watch.  

Visualising User Reseach

A review of the article Communicating through Visualisations: Service Designers on Visualising User Research

This paper investigates how and why service designers use visualisation techniques to communicate user research. It also attempts to categorise the techniques based on the intended recipient. As an example, for internal purposes post it notes and rough sketches can be used to visualise ideas and user research. In contrast when communicating with stakeholders, and specifically the client, the output is normally much more aesthetically pleasing and only relevant information is presented in a summarised form. To gather evidence for the paper, the author interviewed 14 service designers.

There is an interesting statement that claims visualisations have received little interest by the academic service design community. This is quite surprising because I would have thought that academics would create service design concepts and theory, and therefore the visualisation tools. From my experience in engineering and management, it is academics who create the concepts and theory behind the subjects and professionals in industry use and develop them.

I would at least expect academics and professionals to collaborate when developing theory, techniques or even the service design language. A divide between academic and professional service designers has been discussed in the paper Beyond the experience - In search of an operative paradigm for the industrialisation of services.

Making services tangible by visualising is cited as the main goal of the visualisation techniques. A similar point was also mentioned in the Spicing up User Journeys paper.

The author thought that the goals for visualisation can be further broken down into three main objectives:

1. Communication within the design team
2. Communication with ones memory
3. Communication with stakeholders outside of the design team

As I’m currently working on a service design project I completely agree with these objectives. I can particularly relate to numbers 2 and 3. I performed a lot of user research, interviews, questionnaires etc and visualising the information and insights has been important in actually remembering what I had done, who I had interviewed and the insights and conclusions gathered from the research. The visualisations such as stakeholder maps, user journeys and personas where really helpful when explaining my progress to colleagues and tutors.

Coming from a technical and non creative background it was also useful to learn about when and for what purpose the various visualisation techniques are used. All of the tools were new to me so reading this paper was very insightful. 

Competitor Research

Having trawled the internet looking for healthy food delivery services in Glasgow I have not found any direct competitors to the healthy and sustainable lunch delivery service that I am considering developing. 

There are a lot of companies around Glasgow that offer sit-in healthy foods and delivery of corporate buffets (often less healthy than the sit-in menu) usually with a minimum spend of around £30. My research to date suggests that there isn't anything set up for individuals or small groups of people wanting to order healthy food to the office. 

If there are comparative services I still think there would be plenty of space for the positioning a new healthy food service. 

The below image is the menu for Martha's in Glasgow which is a good example of fresh healthy ingredients with at least 1 portion of fruit and veg per meal. The menu has been put together by a nutritionist with the aim of avoiding the afternoon carb crash; crucial for a productive afternoon! 

I actually went to the restaurant and tried the red dragon pork. It was really tasty and filling yet I didn't have an afternoon 'slump'. Ideal.

Although there are food services with a similar philosophy to what I am proposing, I think a healthy food delivery only service would need to have much less divergence in its meals and snacks to be cost effective.

The Industrialisation of Services

Review of the conference paper - Beyond the experience. In search of an operative paradigm for the industrialisation of services.

The article aims to highlight the need for a universal framework for service designers and proposes a ‘toolbox’ to help bridge the gap between conflicting areas in the development of service design.

The first area is the need to develop methodological tools for analysing, designing and representing services – I see this as a theoretical aspect, or academic. And the second, focusing on real projects where service design thinking is used in the creation/development of the service  – so very much practical or occurring in industry.

User experience, co-creation and front and backstage aspects of services are discussed. It is stated that in practice the backstage of a service is often overlooked. I think it is too easy to focus on the frontstage activities when designing for user experience since front stage activities are where the user interacts with the service. I think this point is strengthened by the fact that many service designers do not have a proper design background and without a framework in place could find it difficult to use visualisation tools and looking at the service holistically.

Co-creation with the service stakeholders is hugely important in service design but, again, without a structured framework this could distract from the backstage elements of a service. If the backstage activities and supporting processes are not ‘designed’ in harmony with the frontstage interactions, the service probably won’t be delivered to its potential and could in fact be detrimental to the user experience. 

A final point discusses the need for designers to communicate with customers, and other stakeholders such as engineers, to make clear what their roles are. Representation or visual tools are a simple and engaging way of doing this. I have to disagree with the author that this is still a problem.  Having started to read around the subject it is apparent that there is a wide range if representational tools that are used across the service design industry and although each service design company and even individual designer may have their own take on the tools the end result is very much the same. The article is almost 4 years old so it is possible that developments have been made since the article was written. 

Thinking and Doing Ethnography in Service Design

The following discussion refers to the paper 'Thinking and Doing Ethnography in Service Design' by Segelstrom et al. 

Problem 

Working on a service design project to improve the quality of life for elderly people in a run down area of Sweden, the design team came across a problem. It was proving difficult to find participants for necessary ethnographic research and hence creating empathy. 

Solution
The designers contacted a social club for elderly people living in the area and managed to arrange to take part in walking quiz. The design team added a research question between every normal quiz question and accompanied the participants through the walk. 

They found that in addition to answering quantitative research questions on the quiz sheet, participants discussed the research topics in more detail which led to some important insights both during the walk and in follow up interviews. The follow up interviews might not have been possible without the success of the walking discussions.

Analysis

I think this is a good example of a creative solution to a problem that most designers will face at some point - having difficulty finding participants for ethnographic research. 

What is also interesting is that once the participants started to answer the questions they were happy to discuss the topics in a lot more detail. Their quality of life and feeling safe in their  neighborhood is obviously important to them and I think most people would engage with designers who are creating a service for them if the circumstances are right.

This is Service Design Thinking

I came across this video on YouTube, it is a trailer about a service design textbook called This is Service Design Thinking. Interestingly the analogy about the two coffee shops that I quoted in my first blog was mentioned. A nice 1 minute summary of what service design is about!    

Service Design Project

I will be using the service design methods and tools that will be presented in workshops and seminars throughout the project to improve an existing service or create a new one.  A key part of the project will be co-creating the service with stakeholders over (hopefully!) several workshops. The deliverables will include presenting my proposal verbally and in a written report.

In typical service design style I plastered my wall with post it notes to generate some ideas of which I selected several areas to research.  

The two areas that I have decided to focus my research on are:-

A healthy and sustainable lunch delivery service for people in Glasgow.

Introducing a new service for a work hub/work community campus.