Initial Ideas 2 – Josh Akers

Initial Ideas 3 – Josh Akers

By putting customer convenience and satisfaction at the forefront of total design, designers are forced to think of (and then design) the customer experience. Often this starts by blueprinting the likely customer experience then improving the proposed service through the elimination of ‘blockages’ to efficiency and satisfaction. 

A Blueprint is defined as a ‘process broken down chronologically into sequential constituent stages’.

Blueprinting has only recently been developed as a method for designing services. But it is increasingly being used much more widely in the design of – and for improvement in – services.

The process involves describing, in small detail, the various stages of the delivery of a service. In other disciplines it is sometimes called aProject schedule, Project or Process Plan, or a Process Map. 

In fact it’s unlikely that an effective service can be designed without the use of a blueprint which describes both customer activities and parallel activities. This will show all interactions by and with customers – in fact, it almost defines what a service is.

The blueprint can be compiled at any stage of the design process to help identify potential problems and benefits. 
Blueprints should always be presented with a base of time: this is essential for determining parallel stages and concurrencies, total time, and therefore cost.

Drawing a blueprint of the service

• Focus mainly on the ‘touch points’ at which the customer interfaces with the service providers. There will also be other parallel blueprints that will affect customer satisfaction.
• Enhance the blueprint by looking at the sensory side of the customer experience. At each stage of the experience what does the customer see, hear, smell, touch or taste? By improving each of these the customer experience is enhanced.
• Look at the process. Look at the customer chain and understand how customers relate to the process. This will identify bottlenecks and areas where the service quality may be improved. Then you can design the problems out of the process.
• Through blueprinting service quality, which tends to be mainly qualitative and therefore difficult to measure, can be made more quantitative by giving the service process the appearance of a production line.
• When doing a blueprint, do it then do it again.  First put everything you think you need to know into logical boxes. Then subdivide these into twice as much detail and twice as many boxes.  This system works better the more details that are described.  It is important to remember two things:

1. The entire process needs to be mapped
2. It should be mapped in very small steps in order to identify problem areas, to which a cure can be identified.

In a service, match the length of time of one stage of the process with the next, so that as a customer finishes one stage they go straight on to the next without having to wait (called ‘line of balance).  This promotes a much higher quality service.

Blueprints should always be presented with a base of time for determining the parallel stages, the concurrencies, the total time and therefore, cost.

Service design can be both tangible and intangible. It can involve artefacts and other things including communication, environment and behaviours. Whichever form it takes it must be consistent, easy to use and be strategically applied.

Only recently have managers in organisations involved in the service sector realised that a conscious effort in applying design techniques to services can result in greater customer satisfaction, greater control over their offerings and greater profits.

Recently, several consultancies including Live|Work and Engine have turned their attention to designing services and are offering their assistance to the wider community.

Many senior managers involved in the service sector are still unaware of the benefits that design can bring to their offerings and, as a result, many organisations are operating at a sub-optimum level.

Unfortunately, there are few resources available that can assist these managers in the application of design to their service products. In this section, you can find an overview of the discipline and some tips on implementing service design in your organisation.
 

What is a service?

In Principles of Marketing, Philip Kotler defines a service as ‘any activity or benefit that one party can give to another, that is essentially intangible and does not result in the ownership of anything. Its production may or may not be tied to a physical product.’
There are five ways in which most services differ from manufactured products:  

1. Customer contact - Generally, in manufacturing the customer is probably unaware of how the product came about. In services, production and consumption tend to occur at the same time.
2. Quality - In manufacturing measures tend to be quantitative, and quality tends to be measured against things like drawings. The measures of quality in a service tend to be qualitative and there are few quantitative measures. As a result, there is a wider variability in services and it is more difficult to control the quality of a service – as it is often down to the individual person supplying it.
3. Storability - Because services tend to be intangible, it is usually impossible to store them. For example, a car in a showroom if not sold today can be sold tomorrow but an empty seat on an aeroplane loses its value once the plane has left.
4. Tangibility - One can physically touch a manufactured product but most services are intangible. One cannot touch legal advice or a journey, though one can often see the results.
5. Transportability - Most services cannot be transported and therefore, exported (though the means of producing these services often can). It is estimated that only 11% of services are exportable although this is fast changing

Service design as a growing discipline

Business and management courses are fast-growing areas in education and increasingly,  courses or modules in these courses are being included that show how to manage products and services. The design of services is a natural component of such courses. 

• There are plans to open a college in Northumbria that has services and service design as its main focus.  This is planned to have 6,000 new service design graduates per year and between 270 to 350 faculty by 2012.
• The University of California, Berkeley is offering a Services Science graduate course for the first time in 2006.
• Paul Horn, Senior Vice President and Director of IBM Research, has suggested a new academic discipline of Services Science that would ‘bring together work in the more established fields of computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, management sciences, and social and legal sciences, in order to develop the skills required for a services-led economy.
   

There is a need to educate service providers on the importance of total design, to show that it needs process and leadership – and also to show that innovation can occur throughout every stage of a product’s usage.

I have differentiated and highlighted; the characteristics of established, more traditional design process, and new innovative design processes.

Established

• Core Rules – Discover / Define / Develop / Deliver
• No ‘best’ practice, however there are common factors
• Design Council’s ‘Double Diamond’ (2005) is great example
• Linear form, with less adaptability

Innovative

• Adaptability – Changing/stretching core rules
• Meets benefits of everyone; from designer, client and user
• Evolving constantly
• ‘Blueprinting’ – a new technique by using a detailed step-by-step customer experience
• ‘Service design’ – includes companies such as Engine and Live Work
• Multi-disciplinary – breaking boundaries of typical graphic design
• Experimentation/testing

Divided into four distinct phases, Discover, Define, Developand Deliver, it maps the divergent and convergent stages of the design process, showing the different modes of thinking that designers use.

Discover
The first quarter of the double diamond model marks the start of the project. This begins with an initial idea or inspiration, often sourced from a discovery phase in which user needs are identified. These include:

• Market research
• User research
• Managing information 
• Design research groups.

Define
The second quarter of the double diamond model represents thedefinition stage, in which interpretation and alignment of these needs to business objectives is achieved. Key activities during the Define stage are:

• Project development
• Project management
• Project sign-off.

Develop
The third quarter marks a period of development where design-led solutions are developed, iterated and tested within the company. Key activities and objectives during the Develop stage are:

• Multi-disciplinary working
• Visual management
• Development methods
• Testing.

Deliver
The final quarter of the double diamond model represents the delivery stage, where the resulting product or service is finalised and launched in the relevant market. The key activities and objectives during this stage are:

• Final testing, approval and launch
• Targets, evaluation and feedback loops.

The work of Graphic Thought Facility is defined less by a distinctive visual language than the rigour with which the designers approach the process of developing and executing graphic projects. The defining characteristic of GTF’s finished work is its eclecticism. Drawing on a diverse range of typefaces – from robust use of Helvetica in the Digitopolis gallery at the Science Museum in London, to the curlicue lettering in marketing material for Habitat – printing techniques and materials, GTF reinvents its graphic style for each project.
 

Founded in London in 1990 by Paul Neale and Andy Stevens after they graduated in graphic design from the Royal College of Art GTF has since combined cultural projects – for Manchester Art Gallery, the Frieze Art Fair and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre as well as the visual identity of the Design Museum – with commercial commissions from Habitat and the design of graphic-based products such as the MeBox storage system. Huw Morgan is now a partner of GTF alongside Neale and Stevens.
 

Where: London, UK

When: 1990

Style: Varied / Strong themes

Where: London, UK

When: 2001

Style: Swiss / Modernist / Technology

Making something unique but universal in a cultural climate that strives for novelty and declares that everything is possible, is a daunting prospect. By embracing technological invention without being dictated to, Norm’s designers have found their own method for dealing with those endless possibilities. ‘We narrow the fields of what is possible,’ says Krebs, unabashedly. 

For Norm, it is all about standards, parameters and templates, setting them and pushing against them, to discover creativity and innovation within a set of limits, by way of repetition and constant refining. Windlin has observed that method at work: ‘They are clearly working on creating their own Norm cosmos, which has its own sets of rules and preferences.

Where: Zurich, Switzerland

When: 1999

Style: Swiss / Modernist / Interactive / System based

This Morning we met and each presented our ideas. We were all thinking along similar lines in regards to what we need to include but we had different ideas about how to display the information. As a team we were able to collaborate our ideas and come up with a combined idea that was stronger than any of our initial ones. After clarifying the final details of the concept we were able to start designing.

We spent the rest of the day concentrating on the design and production of the concept and have come near to completion this afternoon. Tomorrow we plan to meet at 9.30 to finish a print our final design.