Viewing all ideas posted in Service Design
Last week I posted about how businesses over-invest in advertising and under-invest in the improvement of the service experience, which creates what I call a Service Anticipation Gap, or SAG. Customers are falsely led to expect a service that's better than what it can be. The result is wasted ad spend and revenue losses from customer (dis)engagement.
The Challenge
Businesses have gotten used to confidently connecting spending on ads and seeing the returns in revenue. Or as @odannyboy overheard, “Advertising is a lazy man's monetization.”
And here's where the folks that plan and design services have stumbled. We haven't been able to make the same connections between investments and results that make an investment decision in good service design a no-duh. The efforts to improve services haven't historically met with the same financial success as ad spends, and therefore business lack the confidence to spend on it. Confidence is lost because coordinating systems and people with a vision of how the service really should be isn't as easy as pumping out ads via a partner agency.
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Has a commercial ever brought you to tears? Images of families reconnecting in an airport or a child hugging their parent with delight because a service was able to bring together a magic moment? I think we've all seen some wet eyes resulting from a well crafted 30-second ad spot.
How about tears brought about from an actual service? Or someone jumping in the air with joy because of how great that check-in process was? Nada. It's a rare, rare bird.
But what if—WHAT IF—services were just as good as they were advertised to be? What if they were even close? Wouldn't that be a shocker? Or OMG, wouldn't that be an incredible business!
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Last week saw the latest release of Instapaper, a service for saving web pages for reading later. It seems like a simple thing, but Instapaper has embedded itself into my life surprisingly deeply, and is a must-have for folks who find themselves with dozens of tabs in their browser of articles they want to read, but don't quite have the time for right now. Instapaper also proves quite instructive of how to deliver great experiences.
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If you design services or want to learn more about how design is being applied to the design of services, do not miss your opportunity to grab an early bird ticket to the Service Design Network conference in San Francisco this October.
As co-chair of this event, I've been helping to put together some great content around the theme of business and design, or From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet. The conference will explore what happens when service design meets business. We’ll look at how, where, and when the two professions work together to generate value, what we can learn from each other, and ask what the future of this relationship might be.
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I'm currently working on a project looking at the future of commerce. One area of interest, particularly after the announcement of Google Wallet, is payments. In our research, we've paid particular attention to the payment act, and it's interesting what it reveals about the broader commerce experience.
Most current point-of-sale setups are directly descendent from ye olde cash registers. As such, they provide a distinct division between the buyer and the merchant. Such a division may not have been a big deal when all that a cash register did was tally up items. But recently, I returned a rental car, and was faced with…
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Today’s announcement by Apple that the App Store will support a subscription model for users to pay creators for digital content is a declaration of the inevitable. For customers, subscriptions can deliver what is perceived as more value for a better price. For creators, it establishes a relationship and a longer, repeatable revenue stream.
For these reasons, subscription models will become an increasingly popular payment method not just through the App Store but across industries. The App Store and Netflix are just the tip of the iceberg. But what does the change mean for experiences and experience design?
1. Designing…
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The baby boomer generation is starting to retire and policy changes mean more people will have access to healthcare services. How will the healthcare system cope with the influx of new patients? That’s a question Chris McCarthy, Director of the Innovation Learning Network and an Innovation Specialist with Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation Consultancy, brought to the table at the latest San Francisco Service Design Drinks event hosted by Adaptive Path*. The challenge: how can non-healthcare services and systems support or offset the existing healthcare systems?
Designers, healthcare experts, and a fair number of non-designers interested in the topic came…
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Adaptive Path is hosting the January edition of SF Service Design Drinks this Thursday, January 20. This event will feature a design challenge from Chris McCarthy, Director of the Innovation Learning Network at Kaiser Permanente, and UX Week presenter. The focus of the challenge will be non-healthcare provided healthcare services.
This is an open event, but please RSVP at the SF SDD Facebook page, so we can plan accordingly. Hope to see you there!
You can find Service Design Drink groups and events globally at servicedesigning.org.
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Which European city doesn’t think there are enough bikes on the roads?
Believe it or not, the city of Copenhagen. In collaboration with Living Labs, the City of Copenhagen sent out a call for pilots: bike-centric ideas that would help their city become carbon-neutral by 2025.
This naturally intrigued us at AP Amsterdam. We are used to—and love—living in a bike-centric city. Our team (Monica Nordhausen, Henning Fischer, Willem Boijens and myself) considered it a challenge to come up with a new idea for Copenhagen, a city that—let’s face it—has one of the best (if…
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How do you know that design is the right approach to improving your service? According to Kaiser Permanente’s Chris McCarthy, it’s the joy expressed on the faces of nurses while co-designing new service solutions. “You don’t see that when you do business process redesign,” he says.
McCarthy, Director of the Innovation Learning Network and an Innovation Specialist with Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation Consultancy, and Christi Zuber, director of the Innovation Consultancy, express their mission as “trying to bring humanity back into the workplace.” During their UX Week presentation, Don’t Forget the Humans!, they share their journey…
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