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Services
Modern cell
phone service
menu and
address book
Photos
Nicolas Zurcher
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Telephone for
operator-assisted
phone service
Photo
Ryan McVay
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typical American family, the phone was almost always being used
when the kids were at home. Contrast this with Britain, where
every second is paid for, and parents limited their spending by
forbidding the use of the phone; when the phone rang, it was
probably because someone had died.
The phone left its tether behind with cellular services, and
competition between providers became much more confused.
Sometimes it was based on performance, sometimes on price, and
sometimes on features. Complexity jumped up a notch with the
i-mode2 service in Japan, which went from zero to 33 million
subscribers in only three years.The service offered Internet access
on the phone, with interactions that, though not very easy to
learn, were mastered by teenagers as well as adults with enough
patience; many Japanese people have long commutes in crowded
trains, with time to puzzle over the interactions with screens and
button pushes, but where it is too embarrassing to talk out loud.
This was paralleled by the use of short message service (SMS) in
Europe, dubbed texting, and instigated first in Finland by
Nokia. It is amazing to watch the young expert users of phones,
whether in Tokyo or Helsinki, typing words deftly with their
thumbs on a ten-key numeric pad.They are the elite operators of
modern telephones, leaving most of us in a fog of confusion,
condemned to simplistic numeric dialing.
There is very exciting potential for a personal communication service that handles voice, data, images, and eventually
video. For now, the designs are struggling to leap from the
enthusiast phase to the consumer phase, without the intervening
professional phase to sort things out.There is confusion at several
levels in the service hierarchy, as the technology evolves. The
industry feels a bit like the computer business did before the
desktop emerged as a standard design approach.
In 2005 we are seeing a competitive collision between PDAs3
and cell phones, as the PDAs add telephone functionality, and the
cell phones include many of the functions of the PDA, with access
to the Internet becoming standard for both platforms.The design
of the interactions for the PDA has evolved from the PC, adapted
to accommodate miniaturization, while the design of the
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interactions for the cell phone has evolved from simple calls,
adapted to add functions. The PDA is easier to use, but fewer
people own them, so the telephone platform is starting to
dominate in spite of the challenges posed by the interaction
design.
Within the telephone platform there are still widely different
standards and layers of complexity.The basic difficulty is that the
layered structure takes away the possibility of creative control
from a single source.The underlying layer is the infrastructure, but
that is fragmented by the contributing technologies; cellular
networks, microwaves, satellites and so on supplement landlines of
many types and speeds. Next is the handset layer, with the
individual instruments containing displays and speakers for output
and buttons and microphones for input. There is not yet a
standard way of arranging these interactive elements, so the
designs vary widely in ease of use and speed of learning. On top
of that are the layers of the service providers, both the phone
service itself, and the data access services for messaging, email, and
all of the Web-based services. Each of these data access layers is
hoping to find customers across more than one service provider,
so the interactions are at best a compromise between the user
interfaces on the various service providers, and at worst
completely new and different. The Web access layer also suffers
from the scalability problem, as the interaction design is a scaleddown version of a Web-based service that was initially designed
for normal, computer-sized screens and keyboards. Only a few of
the Web-based services design a special version of their
interaction for the phone-based display and control limitations.
All of this complexity makes for phone services with bad
interaction design, and there are great opportunities as well as
challenges in designing phone services that people can enjoy and
learn quickly.
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Shibuya crossing
Photo
Author
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The first task was to put together the perfect team for the
new venture. He advertised the available positions inside NTT
DoCoMo, and forty people applied. He was looking for
individuals with the right background and skills who would
respond to new challenges as well as working well under stress.
Helped by McKinsey he set up stress interviews with twentyfour of the candidates, to test their response to pressure situations,
and selected five people with business and technical backgrounds,
two of them in their early twenties. This rigorous interviewing
process helped Enoki form his ideas about what the new service
should be like, as he was forced to answer questions from the
applicants, and as he went along found himself more and more
confident about his answers.
His vision became clearer: the service should appeal to young
people and amateurs as well as people with jobs and commutes.
He could see that there would be new opportunities to achieve
this if messaging and Internet access could enhance the normal
phone service, but it would have to be designed in a way that
would appeal to impatient youngsters and technophobic adults.
None of the people he had found inside NTT DoCoMo would
find it easy to think about the nature of content and services that
might have this appeal, so he decided to look outside. That was
when he thought of bringing in Mari Matsunaga, who knew how
to make magic with very few words in a classified employment ad.
Mari Matsunaga has been dubbed the mother of i-mode by
the Japanese press and was recognized as Asias Most Powerful
Businesswoman in 2000 by Fortune magazine, for her
contribution to the success of the business. She has a combination
of panache and drive that has allowed her to break through the
gender barrier and achieve popularity and recognition as a leader
and entrepreneur. She graduated from Meiji University with a
degree in French literature and joined Recruit, the company that
owns and runs a multitude of magazines full of classified ads. She
served as chief editor of magazines such as Employment Journal and
Travail, and honed the art of communicating meaningful messages
with very few wordsa skill that would become of crucial
importance in the confined space of the screen on an early cell
phone. She is a member of Japans Tax Advisory Council and
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Photo Author
Takeshi Natsuno
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Takeshi Natsuno
We have successfully introduced the Internet way of thinking
rather than the telecoms way of thinking to implement this
service.
Takeshi Natsuno, April 2002
Examples of
i-mode phones
top left
First generation
top right
Second
generation
bottom left
Third generation
bottom right
Fourth generation
Photos
Author
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A balanced portfolio
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now I have more than 2,000 official content partners, and more than
50,000 independent content providers, so now nobody will say 67 was
enough.
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adjust the speed of evolution of each different layer to form the total
value chain.
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The user interface of this phone was and is very important. The user
interface of the browser and phone should be easy enough for
everybody! This is not a PC. Not so many people really read manuals,
and even though we have thick manuals with all the phones, and my
staff is always working very hard to publish very good manuals, not
so many people really read that. The very basic concept of UI
development is how to make everything intuitive.
When we first designed i-mode phone specifications, we requested
our handset vendors to have an i-mode button to launch the browser,
and four directional keys to navigate in the browser. I dont mandate
the circular design for the four keys. Some vendors are using a jog
dial, which is fine. I didnt want to limit the creativity of the
vendors, so I only provided the minimum specification we should
need. All the remaining controls are the same as a simple phone.
Another great feature of i-mode was icon-based communication.
We developed more than 180 icons, in addition to the normal
characters in the alphabet. Each icon shows a message, like the heart
mark that always shows you some kind of love message, and the
smiling icon shows that you are happy. Even before i-mode there was
a big boom for high school students to use pagers and short
messages over the phone using icons. We thought that without icons
we could not get support from very young ladies and young boys and
girls, so we took these features into our service. The difference from
our competitors was that we mandated these icons to all our handset
vendors, so that now 32 million people can communicate with one
another using these icons.
i-mode game
Playing downloaded ringing tones
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Minute 13
Kaoru waits for the email, but there is no sign of it. Then she
remembers that she has her junk mail filter on, which could be
rejecting it. She goes into her preferences set up and turns off the
junk mail filter. No, theres still no sign of the email!
Minute 15
She calls Coca-Cola customer service, using one cell phone to
make the call and another to check the email. The customer
service agent sends a message, but it is the address of a link site,
not the barcode.
Minute 17
The link site asks her to enter her name, address, home address,
phone number, i-mode address, and birthday. She completes the
form.
Minute 21
An email containing a barcode comes through; the excitement
warms her up a little! She presses the button on the machine for
i-mode purchase. The display on the machine asks for a cash
deposit to cover the purchase. Then she is asked to put the cell
phone up against a window on the machine so that it can read the
barcode. Nothing happens! It requests backlight on the cell
phone. She turns on the backlight, and it reads the barcode!
Minute 30
She tries again.The machine recognizes the bar code, accepts cash
deposit, tells balance, allows purchase and offers receipt. Lights
flash. She chooses a hot drink!
This cautionary tale shows a fatal disconnect between the
designers of the Coca-Cola i-mode service and their customers.
Not even the most patient person is willing to wait so long for
interactions, even in setup mode. How ironic to be asked to use
coins to pay for the account!
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Photo Author
Chris Downs, Ben Reason, and Lavrans Lvlie (left to right) of Live|Work
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Live|Work
Starting Live|Work
Service Ecology
poster for Fiat
Multi+ actors
Illustration
Live|Work
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the last few of years, but we hadnt really been talking about it. So
we said we need to be a service design company.
Designing services is something we felt we were already doing,
but we didnt have a name for it. No one was saying we were
designing services. It was sometimes called a customer experience,
but we thought it was slightly deeper than that. Customer experience
might only be part of the whole service story. The concept of full
service takes into account all the stakeholders, thinking about what
the back-end system is having to do, what the motivations of the
staff are, and the motivations of the competitors. The customer
experience is part of that.
Lavrans Lvlie admits that they were very surprised that they
could not find any other service design companies out there to
learn from, so they had to spend their first few months trying to
decide what services could be in a design context:
Service Ecology
poster for Fiat
Multi+
relationships
Illustration
Live|Work
Four touch-point
examples overleaf
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Designing Services
When you browse the Live|Work Web site, you notice a link to
View the Glossary. Click on it and you find this introduction:
Service Design is a new mix of existing practices, new terms, current
values, and evolved methods and skills founded in the traditional
design disciplines. As part of our research, we take part in defining
this practice. Here are some of the words we use a lot at
the moment . . .
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Yeah, youve defined that challenge pretty well, in that you cant
express yourself through your bank account, but you can express
yourself through the choice of car you drive. Services are developed.
Services are run and operated throughout the world, but theyre not
often designed. Theyre not crafted to the same level of expertise that
products, interactions, and interfaces are. As designers, we know how
to inscribe cultural meaning into objects and interfaces, but we dont
know how do inscribe cultural meaning into a service. Im proud of
owning a Rolex watch, but Im not proud of having a bank account.
2. Service ecologies
A service ecology is a process we use to establish a systemic view of
the service and the context it will operate in. We map service
ecologies in order to map the actors affected by a service and the
relationships between them, reveal new opportunities and inspire
ideas, and to establish the overall service concept. Ultimately, we
strive to create sustainable service ecologies, where the actors
involved exchange value in ways that are mutually beneficial over
time.
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3. Touch-points
Service touch-points are the tangibles that make up the total
experience of using a service. Touch-points can take many forms, from
advertising to personal cards, Web interactions, mobile phone and PC
interfaces, bills, retail shops, call centers, and customer
representatives. When we design services, we consider all touchpoints in totality and craft them in order to create a clear and
consistent unified customer experience.
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entering their details, and then think about billing and receiving a
bill for that service.
4. Service envy
We can think of products as serving two basic needs: to perform the
function they are engineered to do, and to confirm and communicate
the owners set of values. The second function is crucial. Products
help us identify ourselves through a complex product and brand
language. If we want to make people desire services more than
products, then services will also have to communicate these values,
and we have to create services that help people tell one another who
they are. Our major challenge is to enable people to express who they
are through the use of services instead of through ownership of
things. We must create service envy.
5. Evidencing
We often start mapping assumptions about a future service and
animate these ideas as tangible evidence; both negative and
aspirational futures are embodied as designed touch-points. We focus
as much on the effects of possible designs as the design of the
service itself. Therefore, evidence can often be a newspaper article
describing the results of the service, and other third parties response
to an innovation. This type of archaeology of the future enables us
to make early qualitative judgments about the implications of a
design. Evidencing can be done as a workshop or as more focused
production of touch-points. Ultimately it allows customers and
collaborators to play back their own assumptions as concrete
experiences rather than abstract evaluations.
Service envy
Evidencing
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the mind of the onlooker. Chris talks about faking it, by which
he means that quick and informal techniques can be used to
create the evidence:
Faking is a state of mind, and its something we use right across the
process. We might fake an advert or we might fake a piece of CCTV
footage of somebody using a service as evidence that this service
already exists. Faking and evidence are things that we use together
quite a lot. We fake bills as evidence that a service exists.
6. Experience prototyping
How can we prototype the experience of using services that are
intangible, may take place over a lifetime and have multiple touchpoints, media, and modes? We look at prototypes of a service
experience as an equivalent to the way a product or architectural
model prototypes the object. We design multiple service touch-points,
set the scene, the place and the time of a service experience, and
establish a way for participants to suspend their disbelief, in the way
that theater is able to temporarily transport an audience. We use
experience prototypes to do rapid service prototyping, involving
customers, experts, and clients in developing and refining services.
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8. Service blueprinting
In our definition, a service blueprint describes a service in enough
detail to implement and maintain it. The blueprint is used by
business process managers, designers, and software engineers during
development and works as a guide to service managers that operate
services on a day-to-day basis. The blueprint informs service
managers about the features and quality of the service, ranging from
the flow of use to technical infrastructure and brand management.
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Photo Author
Fran Samalionis
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Fran Samalionis
Some customers are so used to an existing product, it does not
even cross their mind to ask for a new solution.
Dorothy Leonard,9 Harvard Business School
Service Innovation
Amtrak Acela
exterior, caf car,
and axonometric
of first-class car
Photos
Courtesy of
Amtrak
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interest rate applies to your savings account and to your credit card.
You can also choose not to receive interest on your savings account
in order to take that interest off your mortgage. Its a brilliant
business idea, but completely unintuitive to customers. A lot of banks
are using massive advertising campaigns to educate customers on
what it could mean for them, but they are talking about interest
rates, which is confusing, and there is no emotional connection for
people.
Process
You start with observationscustomer observations and other
stakeholders in the service ecology as well. From those observations
you develop insights and then craft the insights into a framework.
The framework bounds the problem for you, reducing the complexity,
and from that framework you can start to generate lots of ideas. You
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dont just leave those ideas floating in the ether, but ground them
very quickly into prototypes, of many different levels and fidelities.
Through iterative prototyping, you work toward the most effective
solution.
In service design its not just getting in tune with the customer.
We have to consider all the other different stakeholders in the mix.
That probably includes the business perspective, brand perspective,
technology, operations, and the relationship between the business and
competition. It may also include some viewpoints of stakeholders who
are less obviously part of the service on first analysis but turn out to
be very important, for example industry commentators. We use the
same empathic techniques to understand customers and to understand
those different perspectives.
We are looking for insights from these observations. An example of
a business insight could be the J curve on a financial product, its
profitability over time, and what the business needs from the
underlying product behind the service. In technology, it could be the
map of available technologies and a systems approach: how the
technologies will interact with each other, what they can support,
what they cant support, and how you can make movement between
channels seamless. On a customer perspective, it could be their
behavior around money or what motivates them. You need to pull all
these different insights together into a framework to reduce the
complexity and bound the problem.
One of the frameworks that we found most useful in service
design is a customer journey. That journey starts from, say, becoming
aware of the proposition, and then moving on to engage with it, and
then potentially moving on to join it. Theres some value that the
consumer gets from the proposition, like feeling smart, and eventually
they may move on to advocacy. This can potentially become a
virtuous circle.
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Observations of
Zina, a wellorganized person
who already uses
online banking.
She says, I like
to find efficient
ways to do
things.
Photos
Courtesy of IDEO
Juniper was an online bank. A bunch of guys that had come out of
Bank One11 had decided that they wanted to do a startup. When they
came to us, they were running around trying to solve every
conceivable customer problem. What they really needed was some
clarity and a point of view about what they could offer as a service
provider. We took them through our process, moving from
observations to insights to frameworks, and then through to
prototyping.
We started with a broad range of observations, picking a fairly
diverse range of people in America, across different coasts, different
ethnic backgrounds, and different incomes, because we were looking
for different attitudes to money.
One technique was to trace a bill through a home. This was
interesting because at that time in the US, people were still using
checkbooks to pay their bills, unlike the UK, where everything is set
up for payment by direct debit. Using a checkbook meant that people
had to be in tune with their bill cycle, otherwise they would be
horrendously late paying their bills. People used different
mechanisms. Some would move the bill around the home. It lands on
the doorstep, it sits by the door for a while, then it moves into the
kitchen, onto a little pile. From the kitchen the pile moves into the
bedroom and sits there for a while. Eventually, when it gets a certain
size, it moves into the study, where somebody can sit down and go
through the ritualistic task of writing checks and paying their bills.
Some people would create a space on a shelf that was a certain
size, and when the bills filled up that space, they knew that it was
time to sit down and pay them. They were using their environment to
gently remind them to pay their bills. This kind of observation
became very interesting when we were looking for insights to inspire
a proposition for Juniper.
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Long-term view
DREAMER
PATHFINDER
High engagement
Low engagement
ONLOOKER
ORGANIZER
Short-term view
Framework
populated by
drawings of
money
One pathfinder drew her family in a shelter, and that shelter sat on
a coin, but the face of the coin was the whole globe, so you can see
her holistic global perspective. For one organizer it was all about
the money; she drew a bubble above her head with dollar signs in it,
and she was holding an empty wallet, indicating that she remembered
the complete picture and had no need for cash. One dreamer drew
an island paradise, which was his ultimate money dream. An
onlooker drew a pile of gold coming in and all the stuff that he
could spend his money on going out; there were all these icons of the
things that he would spend his money on, like a car, and a TV, and so
on.
When we looked at what people were drawing, there was a good
face validity with the psychographic matrix that we had developed. It
was not necessarily statistically significant, but it became very easy
for us to take somebodys drawing and to understand, Oh, yeah, no,
theyre a pathfinder, or Theyre an onlooker. We had about thirty or
forty people at Juniper draw their own money, and they became very
intrigued by our diagnosis in terms of what quadrant they sat in.
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Sketch designs
using Macromedia
Dreamweaver
main area of the screen would give you all of the details about that
item.The link between the dashboard and the details, in the same
overall visual space, made you feel that you were in the same place
all the time. Everything was served up to you in the same frame.
Most of the time, you just wanted to dip into the Web channel to
understand, Am I on track, whats my account balance? If you
did want some more detail, it was offered to you in the same
space.
The designers started with sketch paper prototypes,
developing ideas for the interactions with the dashboard, and how
different frames might appear and what sort of information
structure needed to be in those frames. Soon they wanted to try
some experience prototypes, so they moved onto the screen. In
this case they leaped straight into the design of HTML pages,
using Macromedia Dreamweaver to simulate a Web experience.
This had the important advantage that they could take assets
developed during the experience prototyping and deliver them to
Juniper for use in constructing the site. As the design moved
forward they built up a library of interaction assets and were able
to quickly prototype different configurations and transitions,
forming experiential examples of the whole interaction.
Fran describes the solution to the problem that onlookers
had with paying their bills on time and the dangers of crossselling:
One of the things we knew about onlookers was that, because
theyre not particularly engaged in finances, theyre often late in
paying their bills. What we wanted to do was find a way to help
them, much like we saw in the observations, when people would stack
their bills as a gentle reminder to pay them; we wanted to create that
same gentle reminder online. We created a message center, where we
could send little alerts about how things were progressing or
transacting on their accounts. They could configure those alerts, as
different people had different ways of staying in rhythm with their
bill cycle. The message center was a good place for this to happen, as
it was coordinated in one place, although they could also receive
alerts on their phone or through their email.
We started to understand how Juniper could benefit from crossselling. There are many places where its inappropriate to cross-sell a
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customer from one product into another. For example, if they had a
query about their account, or even a complaint about their account,
trying to cross-sell them after youve resolved that query is dangerous
and probably damaging. All the good will youve created during the
phone call is lost if you add a sales message at the end. But the
message center, where Juniper is being helpful with alerts, and where
customers are used to receiving information about their accounts,
became the perfect place to position cross-sell.
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Homepage
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Tools and
calculators
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