A couple of years ago, a very kind Product Manager gave me a book called “This is Service Design Thinking.” It was shrink-wrapped and everything after they had received it on a training course. I finally got around to reading it this weekend. The book is beautifully made… hard cover, thick pages and even with little coloured book mark ribbons strewn throughout.
I consider myself lucky, having worked with many different user experience folk who have helped shape my understanding of Service Design and this book helped to add a few more tools to my toolkit and a nice way of trying to shape it. When we write software, we already incorporate a lot of the design thinking concepts – really trying to understand the “touch points” that a customer has with an organisation and how software fits into these different needs. We don’t always get to work at a high level of an organisation – something that I believe is necessary if you are truly going to help shape or influence an organisation’s service offering to customers. Software is only one part of the puzzle. However it is becoming more and more relevant as software (or hosted software) starts to become a major or only channel for service delivery to customers.
We already make use of many of the tools described, but a few new ones to me included:
- Service safaris – A nice name for the technique of visiting people to observe them interacting with an existing service.
- Cultural probes – The “probe” in a scientific sense but basically a kit given to customers to allow them to take snapshots of their own life in the context of a service to build a greater awareness of what’s important to them. These probes stay with candidates for a while but a researcher may send texts or emails to prompt for a different insight. Requires constant attention to the information being submitted back
- Expectation maps – Building a visualisation of what a customer expects when they interact with a service. Useful for comparing different expectations across different touchpoints, or offerings.
- Desktop walkthrough – I haven’t seen this technique probably because it seems to demand more preparation than others. Basically this is a 3D small scale model of a service environment that allows people to interact with it. I can see this being highly engaging.
- Service Roleplay – A scenario where staff members are asked to enact several situations where they might come into contact with a customer. Video is often used to provide feedback and act as a basis for discussion.
- Customer lifecycle maps – A holistic view of a customer’s relationship with a service provider. Their example one maps out loyalty over time. I can see the map being annotated by events to trigger insight
I really enjoyed the book. There are some nice studies at the end. I did protest at the simplified description of “Agile software development” but it’s small detail in the larger set of things. My only gripe is that the beauty of the book comes at the price of being significantly heavy to lug around.
