Service Design for Beginners

January 20th, 2010 Comment 0

I recently held a short introductory presentation on service design, for a non-designer audience of SME CEOs. Here are the (translated) presentation slides, together with short recaps of my presentation.

Service Design Presentation Slide: Introduction

In this short talk, I’ll present the field of service design to you – a field that has grown a lot over the recent years, but is still rather unknown for many leaders of small to medium sized companies.

Service Design Presentation: The service industry in numbers

Today, the service sector makes up the biggest part of the economy, up to 75% in Western Europe. This number is a result of a major shift during the last century, as you know: the move from an industrial, product-based economy, to a post-industrial, knowledge- and service-based one.

Service Design Presentation: Products, services and communication in the past

On top of that, the digital revolution has blurred the boundaries between product, service and communication. It used to be quite simple … you had your product, designed by a product designer and packaged by a packaging design firm – and then you used various kinds of market communication to get it out to your customers. If you worked with services, the process was much the same, even though most likely, nobody consciously designed or packaged your service.

Service Design Presentation: Products, services and communication now

Now, however, there’s increasing confusion about what actually constitutes a product, service or brand communication – it all comes together on the web, in phone apps, etc. Also, even in traditional products, there’s a trend for a larger service component: in a world where getting ahead of the competition becomes harder and harder, it’s a way of obtaining a competitive advantage.

Service Design Presentation Slide: Product design, and service design?

But weirdly enough, even though services are so dominant in the economy, many companies don’t invest at all in the design of them. Even though practically every company that makes products take great care in their design, only a fifth of service companies do the equivalent.

Service Design Presentation Slide: Service characteristics and implications for design

Of course, services are not as straight-forward as design objects as products. They have certain characteristics, that have to be taken into account when designing:

First of all, services are created here and now – in the moment of their consumption. This means that they are harder to control fully with design; utterly, the success of a service is always dependent of the person who executes it. Secondly, a service is both tangible and intangible – a hotel night, for example, is not just the access to the physical room, but also many, intangible, interactions. Design of a service, therefore has to be multi-dimensional, taking all aspects into account. Also, it’s often difficult to measure and detect quality in a service, which makes the customer search for clues: designing visual and behavioural clues of a high quality service is important.

Service Design Presentation Slide: What can be designed?

Here, you see the dimensions of a service that can be designed: you can design the procedures and behaviour that make up the service, its physical and visual components – the place where the service is executed, digital interfaces, etc – and how the service is communicated. These dimensions all interact to produce the user’s overall impression of the service.

Service Design Presentation Slide: Service Design Workflow

How is it done, then? Well, very briefly, the process of service design is very much like the design of other things. It starts with a research phase, followed by numerous design proposals that are tested and developed, and, often after several iterations, the design is implemented.

Service Design Presentation Slide: Service Blueprint

Service design employs a number of methods for research and design, but I don’t have the time to show you more than one. An important part of designing service is producing a service blueprint – a schematic “recipe” for the execution of the service. Service blueprints are a kind of service roadmaps – tangible, visual documents that show us where and how customers and companies interact. They can be employed both in the research phase, when analysing the status quo, and as design tools.

Service Design Presentation Slide: Service Touchpoints

I’ve stressed the importance of tangible elements in a service – they often play a large part in how a customer judges service quality, as the abstractness of services is challenging to people. This is especially true with more complex services like medical or professional services. That’s why paying attention to touchpoints is important. Touchpoint can refer to several things, but here I use it as a term for physical interactions between the user and the service provider. Touchpoints can be divided into interacting with staff, the physical environment of the service, physical components (like a user’s manual or a key), screen interfaces and communication (advertising, brochures).

Service Design Presentation Slide: The need for service design in the future

This was a brief introduction to the field of service design. A field that, it seems, has a huge potential of growth in the coming years. Several factors imply that the need for service design will grow: for example, as I mentioned earlier, the service component in products is increasing in importance. Also, customer expectations are, on the whole, rising – today, customers expect excellence in every service of any significant value, and letting your services develop on an ad hoc basis won’t simply be possible any more if you want to stay in competition. It’s time to start paying close attention to the design of your services.

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Jump for Joy – the Visual Language of Stock Image Clichés

January 20th, 2010 Comment 0

This girl I’m sure you’re familiar with: the Health-Happiness-Energy Woman. Dressed in white, she goes down to the beach, stretches out her arms, and JUMPS. She does this to express her joy of living, and, not infrequently, her love for algae smoothies. An odd creature if you would meet her in real life, but so common in the brochures, ads, websites, posters that surround you that you don’t even notice her. A stock image cliché.

Happy!

All communication is based on some sort of shared references. Designers communicate with a visual language that’s meant to be understood by the recipient, often instantly. It’s no wonder then, that many marketing communication images are constant repeats, Plato-esque variations of the same ideal images – especially when representing abstract concepts: fun, health, stress.

Happy!

The low cost of images from the gigantic stock image banks, and probably in turn the working conditions of stock image photographers (creating images for maximum usability for popular keywords instead of a defined brief, at low fees), mean that these cheesy concept images are everywhere. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, communicating through simple symbols – woman biting apple for healthy, grey-haired man with sweater over shoulders stroking a golden retriever for post-retirement healthy. It does get the point across instantly to broad target groups, even if those images are equally instantly forgotten. If you’re trying to differentiate your brand against competitors, obviously they’re very counter-productive …

Happy!

… but easy as they are to mock, these stock image clones are also a reminder of how easily visual clichés are reproduced, and difficult the balance is between communicating well within the reference world of your audience and being dispensible, derivative, boring. There are a myriad of similar repeating images/visual elements in the sexier, slicker high-end part of the design world, that can be just as damaging to your brand.

Happy!

The fascinating thing about stock images: you only really start to notice the Health-Happiness-Energy Woman when she’s taken out of context and multiplied, like in this post. Different models, different beaches, different oceans – the same jump. And you only really see the strangeness of her ways when you look at a picture that strays too much from your mind’s ideal image. Like this one, above: too heavily bent forward, she looks bound for the humiliation of landing face down in the sand. Now, she’s almost a little disturbing, her open mouth possibly letting out not a joyful shout but a mad scream. Another angle, colouring, pose might have instead tweaked even this quite hopeless image subject from cliché to readable-but-attention-grabbing. But instead, most photographers settle for slight variations of the exact same image.

2XHappy!

Another thing, how can they all jump so HIGH?

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The “Great Product” Claim

January 13th, 2010 Comment 5

No, planned brand communication cannot be replaced by “delivering a great product or service that will get your customers talking (online)”, like I’ve heard said more than once in recent years. Not that you shouldn’t. You should deliver a spectacular product, if you can. But there’s something far too simple about this concept.

The fundamental flaw, as I see it, is a naive conceptualisation of what makes a “great product”. I’d say everybody would agree that the quality of the product is intrinsically linked to human experience. That is, at least when talking about products in this context (as objects on a market, as opposed to objects in a test setting or similar), it’s the user’s experience and opinion of the product that matters. A great product is one which the user thinks is a great product.

But there are literally hundreds of studies made on consumers over the course of the last, say, fifty years that tell you that people’s appraisal of a product is a highly subjective thing – a wonderfully complex concept filled with cultural bias, preconceptions, situational factors … All very typical for the complicated creature that is the human being. Consumers who drink beer with visible brands see those beers tasting very differently and prefer beers with their favorite brand label, whereas unbranded beers are judged as tasting similar to each other (Allison&Uhl:1964). Your enjoyment of a certain wine increases when you think it’s more expensive, even when you’re actually being served the same wine over and over. And so on.

When claiming that a “great product is the new marketing”, one seems to assume that suddenly, humans experience a product through a radically less complex process: a very non-human objective appraisal of product qualities, that will be shared equally objectively to information-hungry potential new consumers. But surely, it’s been a while since anyone could seriously have such a schematic concept of human behaviour. Even the Homo Economicus died some time ago, after years of illness.

This is not to say that people’s true conception of the quality of a product can be easily subverted by branding. It’s to say that there is no “true conception” based only on the physical product, and therefore, communication plays an integral part in the experience of the product. Together with other aspects (like, obviously, intrinsic product qualities), it helps create very real enjoyment. All very complicated business, and very human. That’s what makes it so interesting.

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Holiday Reading on Design, Information, Culture

December 23rd, 2009 Comment 0

For the holidays, I’ve collected a couple of articles that designers (and design interested non-designers) should read, from recent weeks when like me you’ve been too busy with before-Christmas deadlines.

Slaves of the Feed – This is not the realtime we’ve been looking for
Thomas Petersen, founder and partner of Danish digital creative agency Hello discusses our digital life and ponders possible ways to solve the problem of information overload with design.

Re-thinking Interaction Design
Johnny Kolko claims interaction design should move away from talking both branding and user experience. I don’t agree with everything Kolko writes, specifically I find he’s muddling macro and micro perspectives on the role of interaction design (there’s both a critique of UX and branding as ways of maximizing profits, and a critique of using design for that purpose in the first place, and neither are fully explored), but there are some interesting points made about design’s role in culture.

Don Norman’s attack on design research, and ensuing debate
If you have missed this somehow, the debate goes on about what actually drives innovation, technology or design – and whether there’s actually any point in ethnographic and similar research into the consumer’s deep, subconscious wishes. Norman’s answer is basically no, as he finds that technology more often than not creates the needs it fills. Design research is only useful for small incremental changes, he claims (compare this to what Roberto Verganti says in Design Driven Innovation, a book I wrote about earlier this year!) Three responses to this claim: Bruce Nussbaum, who disagrees, Adam Richardson, who thinks Norman’s definition of design research is too narrow, and Steve Portigal, who raises some interesting questions around several points in Norman’s piece.

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The Professional Services Brand – Don't Worry, Do It Right

November 30th, 2009 Comment 0

This year, PricewaterhouseCoopers came seventh in the Best Brands of British Origin study. PwC outranked a range of household UK names such as the BBC, Marks and Spencer and Virgin. The strength and visibility of this very typical professional services brand is not unique – all of the large professional services firms invest heavily in their brand and have done for decades. Still, there lingers some skepticism among small firms about the visual identity part of brands, and, in fact, any kind of marketing other than word-of-mouth. The fear I encounter when networking with owners of small-sized professional services firms is more or less this: “I don’t want to come across as a cheesy sales person, so I’d feel uncomfortable with a website, a fancy logotype, marketing material, anything that markets me to clients in an obvious way. My clients come to me from recommendations.”

However, you’re not afraid of branding. You’re afraid of bad branding and marketing.

This is very understandable. There are so many examples of small- to mid-sized firms which market their offering in a way that will make you cringe. Salesy, pushy and cliche-filled material, pestered with stock images of laptop carrying Ken dolls with light blue shirts. Not unlike if Gucci were to start doing the same kind of ads as a discount hardware store. Or getting into consumer telesales. Basically, you can do it the wrong way, and you can do the wrong things for your line of business. You are right to think that both will destroy your business rather than building it.

Part of the problem, I’d say, is that these firms are in the hands of branding and design consultancies that say they’re experts on every kind of business. Some have, doubtlessly, the expertise and sensitivity to “get” both the world of consumer products and the world of professional services. But others simply apply a consumer thinking to a B2B context, and then add a touch of visual conservatism to get a suitably PS look. Also, these firms have not found an agency that thinks professional services are exciting. There still exists an unfortunate view that professional services are “no fun”, in relation to consumer product brands that can be built with humourous ads, colourful packaging design and viral campaigns featuring, say, giant talking rabbits .Instead find someone who’s excited by the prospect of helping you grow your business, and who knows your line of business enough to be able to find room for creativity, in an appropriate context.

Secondly, you are building your brand the right way – a professional reputation is the foundation for the professional services brand. What the visual part of branding will add to that is mainly a form of emotional support for the potential client, who is perhaps the most frightened of any potential client. She’s about to buy something that doesn’t yet exist, is intangible, highly complex, and that she’s unlikely to be able to accurately judge the quality of. She will be unconsciously looking for clues that tell her that recommendations and your own verbal presentation are correct – you are truly professional, and you’re right for her business. Those clues are largely visual, and as a professional services provider with much fewer touchpoints than within consumer products, each clue counts.

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Tangible Aspects of Hotel Service Design – Do You Need Every Logo?

November 18th, 2009 Comment 4

Recently, I stayed a couple of nights at an Elite hotel. The Swedish Elite chain consists of twenty or so nice, mid-priced hotels, often charming old inner-city hotels. It’s also got an attractive and suitable, mostly black and white, brand language, done by people who obviously know what they’re doing. But. This is what a night or two at an Elite hotel leaves on the retina (well, a selection).

Elite Umbrella

Elite Sign

Elite Napkins

Elite Showergel etc

Elite Don't Disturb Sign

Elite Brochures

Elite Stairs

Elite Hanger

Not pictured: flags, plates, cups, under-bathroom-glass-paper-towels, laundry bags, pens, notepads, etc, etc.

Elite are of course not unique in this. Many service businesses whose services provide a lot of physical touchpoints – hotels, airlines, etc – put a logotype on everything they see. I understand why, but still wonder: does branding necessarily mean repeating your logotype constantly? It seems to me to be a quite dated way of doing things. Shouldn’t graphic design rather help heighten the brand experience by adding to the positive experience of the service? For example, in this case, by helping to create a welcoming atmosphere and a feeling of (mid-priced…) luxury. (You can get that in a logo, but most likely it’s more easily with other means, especially since there’s a convention of “discreet=exclusive, personal, tasteful”.) Of course there are times when a logo is very helpful on a service artifact. You want to know that the check-in kiosk is from BA if you’re flying BA. But you could still remove 1/2 of these Elite logos and still not be unsure at all of where you’re staying.

Also, the logotype is in many cases a sign of ownership. If it’s not applied with moderation, there’s a risk of the guest feeling like living in someone else’s room. Someone who’s marked all their belongings with “Property of…” before letting you move in. (Well, you shouldn’t steal hotel hangers, obviously, but that’s another issue.)

There’s also the question of standardization. You know you’re in a chain hotel, obviously, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing at all. The standard’s more predictable, etc. But in hotels that have their own atmosphere, overuse of logotypes are unnecessarily intrusive and detracts from the hotel experience. I understand the need to make your mark as a chain, but still.

Here’s a more modern way of letting your brand visually put its mark on your hotel, in a way that heightens the experience of the service. What would happen if a large hotel chain translated this way of thinking to its own brand and clientele?

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Visual Thinking as a Business Problem Solving Tool – A Couple of Useful Presentations

November 3rd, 2009 Comment 1

Dan Roam – The Back of the Napkin presentations

(Use fullscreen…)

David Armano – Thinking Visually

Chris Finlay – Visual Thinking

Kelsey Roger – Visual and Creative Thinking: What We Learned from Peter Pan and Willy Wonka

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Design + Ethnography Intersections Pt 2

October 29th, 2009 Comment 0

Here’s a couple of more links, continuing this post from the other day: Design + Ethnography Intersections Pt 1.

Sara L. Beckman & Michael Barry: Innovation as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking

2007 Article
Article in the California Management Review linking innovation, design thinking and ethnographic methods. Awarded the 2009 Accenture award by CMR. Authors work at PointForward, where you can find lots of short case stories of ethno-informed design.

Download article PDF, or, yes there’s a lazy option, see the Vimeo video.

AIGA: Design Meets Research

2008 Article
Article from AIGA giving a concise history of the evolution of market research for design and discussing the pros and cons of different approaches. Argues for ethnographic methods as a way to dig deeper into a consumer’s mind.

Read it here

Dori Tunstall: Design anthropology: What can it add to your design practice?

Adobe Design Center Tutorial
Quote extensive introduction to design anthropology (not a tutorial of any sort, in fact), underlying ideas, challenges, possibilities, etc. Written by Associate Professor of Design Anthropology at University of Illinois Dori Tunstall, who’s also worked for Sapient, Arc Worldwide, and AIGA’s Design for Democracy.

Read it here. The author’s blog, posts tagged ‘design anthropology’ here.

University of Dundee: Master’s Degree in Design Ethnography

Degree
If you can’t get enough of design + ethnography, well, there’s the opportunity of getting a master’s in design ethnography from the University of Dundee, UK. (Actually it sounds quite tempting … I love Scotland.)

More about the degree.

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Design + Ethnography Intersections Pt I

October 25th, 2009 Comment 8

Lately, I’ve been doing some research on how ethnographic methods are used in design – and how design thinking and processes are used to create real world business (as well as social) solutions from ethnographic research. A few interesting links that I’ve found are below, with short descriptions. All are not new, but they provide an online-material-review of sorts that can be useful. Avoiding too much scrolling in the same post, I’ll divide it into two parts.

(A little disclaimer: sometimes, the design world uses the word ethnography a bit more liberally than I would. I’d say some degree of immersion would be necessary? Sometimes, the simple word observation would seem to cover some of these practices just fine. Which is fine. Non-participatory observation is fine. If you’re designing new airport signage, say, you’re very much helped by observing how many travellers that are currently confusedly circling the arrivals hall hunting for a restroom. But it won’t really help you gain much deeper insight, will it? Anyway, in one or two of the links in this review (not necessarily in this part though) it’s not all that clear how ethnographic their ethnography is, but the links might still provide for some interesting thoughts.)

Christina Wasson: Ethnography in the Field of Design

2000 Article
Much quoted academic text on the use of ethnography in a design context. Christina Wasson is an anthropologist, and associate professor of anthropology at UNT. She’s has worked for E-Lab, a design firm that uses anthropological research to develop new product ideas, where she developed an interest in design anthropology. She’s also done consulting class projects for clients like Motorola and Microsoft.

Download PDF of article here, or if you unlike me don’t have a certain sentimental fondness for badly scanned academic article PDFs, it’s online here.

Leslie MacNeil: Design Ethnography: Strategy for Visual Communications

2009 Graduate Thesis
Very, very good text that covers just about every way design and ethnography can meet (at least when speaking about tangible design and not applied design thinking), including case studies of designer-ethnographer collaborations. And, which makes it even more relevant for me, it specifically discusses visual communication, as opposed to product design which otherwise tends to be synonymous with “design” in this context (all those mobile phones!). Academia-phobics have nothing to fear, either, from downloading this since it’s a beautiful and inviting booklet designed by MacNeil herself.

Download PDF here.

IDEO + WKK Foundation: Tangible Steps Toward Tomorrow

2007 Case Study
IDEO is a human-centered design agency more or less impossible to miss talking about these subjects. In this case study, they’ve used ethnographic methods + design thinking to come up with solutions for evolving early education. Do explore other case studies from IDEO as well, many are interesting.

Download PDF case story here.

AIGA + Cheskin: An Ethnography Primer

2007 Information Leaflet
Quite basic primer, veered towards how design can be helped by ethnographic insights. As it’s targeted to designers and pitches ethnography to them in their daily practice, the role of designers solving other types of problems with the aid of ethnographic fieldwork (as in the IDEO case study) is not covered, however, it’s a nice introduction text. Cheskin is a US-based consumer insights consultancy.

Download PDF leaflet here.

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A Definition of Design Thinking

September 29th, 2009 Comment 0

Design thinking is a word that keeps coming up in business innovation discussions, and has done so for a couple of years. In my discussions, at least with non-designers and more traditionally oriented business people, it’s usually because I bring it up … which often puts me in the role of having to explain what design thinking is and why (I think) it’s one of the most promising ways to take your business to a new level. I thought it might be a good idea to put some of my thoughts on the subject in a post as well. Think of it as a crash course in design thinking for people that have missed out, rather than a thorough examination of how the term is used and what it can mean. I COULD talk for hours …

What is design thinking?

First of all, design thinking can basically be defined as using design methods to develop business. Now this doesn’t mean designing physical artifacts. It can be an integral part of using design thinking, but it’s not its core. Rather, it’s about thinking as a designer (or, naturally, letting a designer in to think with you.). At the Rotman School of Management, one of the schools that have been in the forefront of design thinking with their Business Design program, design thinking is conceptualized as an “integrative way of thinking and problem-solving that can be applied to all components of business”. Heather Fraser, from the Rotman School, talks of the following integral principles in design thinking (with my comments after the dashes):

Empathy and Deep Human Understanding – good designers are human-centered

Multi-disciplinary and Cross Industry Collaboration – good designers find inspiration in cross-pollution

Ability to Imagine New Possibilities – good designers find opportunities in new places

Embracing Constraints as a Source of Creativity – good designers love constraints and make their best work on a tightly defined brief

Making the Abstract Visually Concrete – good designers translate a concept that’s contained in the mind to something visible that can communicate

Iterative Prototyping and Co-creation with Users – good designers make many prototypes, and create them alongside their customers

Intuition and Common Sense – good designers make decisions based on instinct and gut feelings (in combination with research and logic, mind you)

Drawing Inspiration from a Broad Repertoire – good designers get themselves a broad range of experiences to learn from

Vision and Perseverance – good designers follow through with their visions*

What does design thinking DO, exactly?

Design thinking helps you in any area of business that needs innovation – and frankly, what area of your business is completely stable? It’s useful when developing new products or services or creating new ways of marketing. Or, of course, reinventing your brand or your entire business model. With the help of design thinking, you’ll produce bigger ideas, truly transformative innovation, and you get a more holistic way to take on complex challenges. And the great thing is, unlike some other business theories that become trendy, it’s not just a catchphrase for top level management in large companies. There are design thinking case studies of giant corporations like GE or Procter & Gamble, but it can be just as easily – or more easily – applied to small business entrepreneurs. For a designer with an interest in business (and if you aren’t interested in advancing your clients’ business, why are you a designer?), it’s an opportunity to help create innovative brands and businesses at a core level, not just as the visual afterthought we’re often left to deal with. Our design trained mind is our biggest competitive advantage in any field of business.

* I borrowed these aspects of design thinking from this excellent blog post by Jesse Thompson. Do read it, it provides plenty of examples.

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  • This is a blog about communication theory and strategy, consumer insight, brands and trends by Ylva Lindberg. Ylva works with strategic branding and design in Stockholm, Sweden. Feel free to contact her via , or add her to your network on LinkedIn.