Can Designers Help Deliver Better Services?
When it comes to improving services, is it worth spending money on service designers? Of course, improving services can be attempted without recourse to seeking expert help, but the result is more than likely to be a false economy. Changes in service design will be long-lasting and profitable only if they are driven by insights gained by close observation of the people who use those services. It is this human-centred approach that lays at the heart of everything our design teams do at IDEO.
Design challenges are inherently complex – and every client has their own particular knots to untie - but over the years, our experience has shown that better service design depends on overcoming four crucial problems that are common to all our clients: how to get closer to consumers; how to collaborate across every part of organisation; how to create a strong narrative that inspires key people and finally, how to conquer the fear of failure. Hand in hand with identifying the problems our clients all share has gone the development of techniques to tackle them. This article takes a look at these in detail and shows how they can be used in collaboration with organisations of every size and in every business.
Having an array of techniques, however, is only half the story. To be effective, they have to be used with great sensitivity. Time and effort are well spent when they go beyond recording what people initially reveal into the more intriguing territory of what they actually feel. To uncover these often contradictory and always intricate aspects of human behaviour requires one thing above all – empathy. Let’s begin by seeing how an approach that strives to identify with people’s feelings and difficulties can drive innovation in service design.
Getting closer to the consumer
To get closer you need to dig deeper. We engage with people in their real-life contexts, to unearth those latent rational and emotional needs that many cannot articulate, and may not even be aware of, because of the bewildering ability of human beings to intuitively develop coping strategies. By close observation of how people truly behave, we can come to understand what they think and feel as much as what they say and do.
Our focus is also wide as well as deep. We spend time with a full range of stakeholders, not just the end consumers. So, for instance, for a credit card project, our research would encompass not only the card users and their families, but also the cards' sales and call centre staff, and the staff in the shops where the cards are used. The kinds of consumers we choose to get close to also goes beyond the conventional. We select a relatively small number of ‘extreme’ users, such as low income unemployed and affluent CEOs; control freaks and hedonists; early adopters and laggards. The ‘contrast’ level of these extremes gives us more insight than the ‘white noise’ generated by large numbers of moderate users. Our experience is that these extreme users are inherently predictive of mainstream needs.
We use a variety of techniques to investigate people's latent as well as explicit needs, and to encourage storytelling, which we find reveals much more than basic facts. We call one such technique Personal Archaeology, which is used to catalogue evidence of a person's lifestyle, revealing their behaviours, habits, values and emotional triggers. By asking someone to disinter the contents of their handbag or wallet, and talk us through the ‘artifacts’ found, people share with us their unique stories, built around not only ‘hard’ evidence such as receipts and bills, but also those objects they choose to spend their daily lives with (and sometimes forget!)
We might also ask someone to talk us through the last five purchases made with a credit card and compare these to the last five purchases made with cash or a debit card. These highly personalised narratives paint a more unguarded and accurate picture of priorities and behaviour than those derived from traditional market research.
A conversation about money is often much more than merely rational: it can be loaded with emotion and post-rationalisation. To bring this complexity into focus, we use a technique called The Five Why's (asking “why?” in response to five consecutive answers). Someone might say 'I open my credit card statements after I've looked at all my other mail' 'why?' 'because they always look so intimidating' 'why? 'because I feel as though they’re making me feel bad about the fun things I did last month' etc. This technique requires delicate handling, but when applied empathically, it prompts people to examine and express the underlying reasons for their behaviours.
An example of how these techniques can help a client get closer to their customers, and point towards a relatively small change in their operation which brings big benefits, is Bank of America. To better understand the market the bank wanted to focus on - boomer-age women with kids - IDEO conducted observations across the US with the bank’s innovation team. Together, we discovered that many of the women we talked to would often round up their financial transactions to the nearest dollar. When asked why they did this, most said it was for speed and convenience. In addition, the team found that many moms had difficulty saving, giving their reasons as either lack of resources or willpower.
These observations were shared in a series of brainstorming sessions, which generated a solution that uses the habits existing on the one hand to resolve the problems persisting on the other. Called Keep the Change, the service automatically rounds up purchases made with the bank’s debit card to the nearest dollar and transfers the difference from the customers’ checking accounts into their savings accounts. This elegant and easy to understand method of helping customers save was launched in October 2005. By May 2008, the eight million customers who had signed up to Keep the Change had accumulated approximately $10 billion in savings.
Collaborating across silos
No matter the size of an organisation, services tend to be delivered through multiple departments that are designed to support their own operational efficiencies rather than deliver a holistic service experience for the consumer. Anyone ordering a item from a retailer and then having to deal separately with a delivery service that operates independently, will recognise the fracture lines that often appear in what ideally should be a seamless operation.
Without resorting to massive restructuring, IDEO’s collaborative approach to service design can have a beneficial ripple-effect across organisations hampered by a silo mentality, bringing wholeness to inherent fragmentation. As we have seen, getting close to consumers allows designers, working with our client’s team, to map the fault-lines between a consumer’s needs and their actual experiences. These are then shared in an ‘open mind’ environment which allows and encourages unrestricted thinking. With few rules to constrain them, ideas flow freely and new possibilities are imagined, questioned and tested.
This collaborative mindset generates a mutually-shared sense of dedication to discovering solutions, and an optimism about making them work. This is exhilarating to experience, of course, but more importantly, it creates tangible results. For instance, working with healthcare provider Kaiser Premanente, we shared our service design techniques with nurses, doctors and administrators so that with us, they could find ways to improve the experiences of both practitioners and patients.
One project focused on re-designing nurse-staff shift changes, which present one of the biggest challenges to the continuity of patient care. As nurses go on and off a shift, a crucial exchange of information and duties must take place in order to ensure safety, quality of care and efficiency. A core project team, working in four hospitals, brought together IDEO designers and people from across the organisational silos, including a strategist, a technology expert, a process designer and a union representative. In observing shift changes around the clock, they discovered that every nurse had developed their own particular ways to prioritise and communicate information.
The team explored potential solutions through rapid collaborative prototyping, such as the videoed performance of new ideas about how to achieve a consistent and efficient shift change. In only one week, they had built a working prototype that included new procedures and some simple software with which nurses could call up previous shift-change notes and add new ones. The design that emerged, shaped by hospital and patients, was implemented on every ward in 40 hospitals and has led to higher quality of knowledge transfer and a 50% reduction in preparation time.
Creating a strong narrative
For improvements in service design to take root and flourish, they must first survive certain unfavourable conditions which often exist within an organisation. Changes in service design may have a strong champion in place at the time they are introduced, but as rapid staff movement becomes increasingly the norm, implementation of these changes can take longer than this person is in post. Without an advocate to defend and see through the changes, competing agendas and competition for resources may divert the energy needed to keep the momentum going.
For the ripple effect of change to flow across the silos of an organisation, there needs to be commitment to that change from all influential stakeholders (from marketing and service development to finance and human resources). Having everyone on board is essential, as challenging existing paradigms requires endurance and imagination. The solution is a strong narrative that describes the changes in service design in a consistent and compelling way, which will win over key people and give them a story they understand and can easily share.
Good designers are good storytellers, and a good story makes ideas accessible to client stakeholders so they can collaborate effectively. Each silo in an organisation tends to speak its own language, for instance in telecoms, the technical people speak about bytes, whilst the business arm is likely to be talking about ARPU’s (that’s Average Revenue Per User for the uninitiated). But both ‘tribes’ can understand the language of consumers, as they can all relate to the universal experience of being one. The job of the designer is to translate their diverse languages into the common language of the consumer and tell the consumer’s story in a way that will fire their imagination.
A fine example of this is the 3D structure IDEO constructed for a major telecommunications company, which made tangible the story of the consumers’ experience. It was built as a response to the telecom’s confusion of marketing materials, beginning with the most common touchpoint, the monthly bill, which typically appears as a blur of numbers. This was visualised as a blizzard of irrelevant information. A swirling storm of digits told the story of how most consumers experience their bill and brought into sharp focus the lost opportunity there is in not making the data meaningful and interesting.
The problems inherent in another silo of the business were tackled in the part of the journey which visualised the obstacle course that consumers must negotiate to leave a contract. This part of the structure was plastered with marketing materials from those competitor operators offering more flexibility in quitting, making concrete the ironic point that an operator that made leaving it easier was more likely to pick up new customers. By bringing together the challenges faced by different parts of the organisation, speaking about them in the commonly understood language of the consumer and giving them material presence in a 3D structure, this project created a strong narrative that everyone could grasp, and prompted solutions that sparked across the void between the company’s silos.
Conquering the fear of failure
Change is expensive and risky, so it’s not surprising that organisations often take the line of least resistance, favouring changes in services that appear familiar and feasible over those that are new and untested, no matter how desirable they may know them to be.
The IDEO approach is to use prototypes: quick, low cost mock-ups which allow emerging ideas to be expressed, explored, modified and shared with teams, clients and stakeholders in a way that is tangible yet economical. Further into the development process, more detailed prototypes are introduced to help manage risk, through testing multiple iterations and refinements with users before the client commits to the cost of substantial implementation and roll out.
We have found that prototypes facilitate more emotive client communication and encourage more informed decision-making. By giving physical form to an idea, prototypes enable a project to continually move forward by helping to generate, evaluate, evolve and communicate the value of a proposed solution.
As we have seen, organisations are often fragmented, with multiple and disparate factions (such as brand, marketing, technology, customer care, delivery channels) all of which impact on the service offering. Prototypes that look and behave like an end service enable a diverse range of stakeholders to engage with, and evaluate, a concept from their specific perspective or area of responsibility. A prototype can cheaply and quickly communicate a service proposition and prompt questions around technical feasibility, consumer desirability and business viability.
Typically, we would begin by describing a customer’s journey through a service, plotting, among other things, how they become aware, join, use and pay for a service. For example, for a mobile phone service, the signposts of the journey would include Awareness (the consumer’s first encounter with the service, through ads in a magazine, for instance), Join (in store, online etc), Use (of the service itself) and Pay (via a paper or online statement).
We then identify all the interactions between the service and the consumer, which we call ‘service touch points’. It is these that provide the richest prototyping opportunities, by allowing the implications of each touch point to be explored in relation to the target market (and related Unique Selling Point) They also allow us to explore the scale of the business idea and its implications for brand, marketing, technology, customer care, delivery channels and so on.
Each prototype is designed to address a specific issue. For example, prototyping Awareness touch points, such as digital and print advertising, helps us explore the target audience for this service. We can pinpoint what media is associated with those segments of the market we want to reach, identified by lifestyle, worldview and the benefits described in an advert. This ensures the Awareness touch point talks directly to the needs and aspirations of the target audience. Awareness prototypes provide answers to an array of questions, including: What is the service’s USP? How many customers is this service for? Who will it appeal to? How will customers perceive and understand the service? How will they gauge its value? And does the brand have permission to deliver this kind of service?
An example of how prototyping can offer highly-focussed but inexpensive ways to measure the possible risk in change can be seen in our work with the hotel brand Marriott. TownePlace Suites are long-stay hotels, which aim to meet the needs of those on extended business trips. IDEO delivered an ‘experience blueprint’, which was designed to act as a roadmap for understanding extended stay guest behaviour. It identified key touch points in the guest journey, and developed relevant spaces and services around them. Included in these was the revamping of the lobby to convey the extended stay experience as more home-like than hotel, with a wall map of visitor-recommended local destinations that served as a DIY concierge, and a pantry area stocked with locally-sourced food. In the guest rooms, a versatile work/live layout was designed to strike a balance between business and relaxation.
IDEO worked with Marriott to employ rapid prototyping with guests and general managers, creating early feedback loops and decreasing implementation costs. Full size, white MDF mock ups of the spaces, with key features highlighted in colour, provided enough to imagine the real experience without the expense of building the real thing. These prototypes were less about testing to kill ideas and more about resolving the problems ideas may produce, so that guests and general managers were able to experience them and form an opinion on how to improve them. Prototypes give the design team and the client permission to get things wrong. Quickly made and introduced early in the design process, we can move on together at speed, having identified mistakes and still with the confidence to try new things. Clearly it’s better to learn from a cheap MDF mock up in the first weeks of a project than discover problems in an expensive fully furnished room years into development.
We began by asserting that designers can deliver better services. But only those that root their innovations in insights gained from close observation of human behaviour. It is then that their solutions resonate with the people they are designed for, and deliver lasting and profitable results. By using, with empathy and skill, techniques that allow our clients to get closer to the consumer, that encourage collaboration across every part of an organisation, that create a strong narrative for key people to relate to, and that frees the client from their fear of failure, we believe that our human-centred approach allows us to say with confidence ‘yes, designers can indeed deliver better services.’
About the Author
Fran Samalionis