You might not like Starbucks coffee (I don’t) but this service experience map shows that the quality of the coffee is nearly irrelevant when you consider what happens when customers visit their shops. The opportunities and risks are all in the service. From the Little Springs Design blog
I have been reading some interesting articles on how service designers have been using Behavioural Sciences to improve customer satisfaction and… to make more money.
Behavioural sciences have shown that customers have a short memory span and we should bear this in mind as we design and manage services. It’s not as evil and deceiving as it sounds – it is more about leaving the best to end. Some of the findings that are relevant to user-experience include:
This is a great endorsement to UX designers and clients who understand that they need to dedicate as much attention to homepages as to lower level/exit pages – knowing that any page can be an entry point and that they have little control over the user’s exit points.
Using some basic Behavioural Sciences concepts to improve business is no evil plot to control the customer’s mind. It’s about sustaining the quality along the whole user-experience and surprising the user positively at the end – whenever that is.
Read more:
Want to Perfect your Company’s Service? Use Behavioral Science
Richard Chase for Harvard Business Review
Sometimes when you try to decide if the output of an interactive project is a product or a service, things get blurry. Traditionally products are defined as tangible goods as opposed to services which are defined as intangible goods. Not so helpful… What is that tangible on the web? Perhaps the interface, but not much else.
I prefer the definition which says a product is something we own whilst a service is something we can use temporarily. The difference between buying and hiring a dinner jacket.
This definition seems useful, so I’ll try to apply it to a few real life projects (the output of which I would have called generically Product in the past):
An e-learning platform – Definitely providing an education service
An online newspaper – An information service
A software-as-a-service online shop – Can provide a similar service to a sales assistant offering expert advice and guiding the customer towards a suitable service package.
A mobile mapping application – A tricky one. I have downloaded the software (so I own it), but for it to be useful at all I need data provided by the mapping company (a service) facilitated by my network operator (also a service).
A multinational corporate website – Essentially a marketing and communication tool between company, customers, investors, press, etc. At the same time you can consider it as a provider of self-customer-services.
Why is this differentiation relevant to interactive projects?
It is pretty clear that many online projects will generate hybrid product-service offerings, just as in the physical world. But I think we (practitioners) are developing more services than we imagined, yet treating them mostly as products.
Services usually involve longer or repeated engagements with the user and perhaps we can contemplate that more efficiently. It would be really interesting to start using rich design tools such as service blueprinting in addition to content maps and prototypes.
Let’s see how it works in practice.
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Some interesting reading: Better than owning
