Service Design

Service Design Tools

Roberta Tassi has assembled quite a collection of delicious deliverables for Service Design as part of her thesis. www.servicedesigntools.org is a helpful resource in refining our approach for the work we're doing at Different right now. New challenges arise with each new project, as none are quite alike. This site showcases a few different ways to solve similar problems.

Experience Map

Starbucks Service Experience Design - A map of positive and negative factors felt by customers as they move through the end to end experience is a powerful means to realise opportunities. The artefact hints at the emotional journey along the way and coupled with events within the control of Starbucks, it highlights the areas in need of attention to deliver the most impact on experience.

We have been creating these for our Service Design projects at Different as part of the Experience Research and Strategy phases. They're very powerful communication tools that have seen us open the eyes of even the most conservative clients. As such, they deliver tremendous value in terms of supplying clients with the "ah ha!" moment regarding this crazy dark art we practice called "Experience Design".

We're still too fluffy

OZ-IA is an information architecture conference held here in Sydney annually. I presented this year on a topic which has occupied me the past few years: Selling user experience design and the value of design thinking to business.

The thrust of the presentation goes like this:

1. We, as a profession, have largely failed to make great product experiences.
2. There are certain people that matter in the world of design, and it's not designers. It's the people who pay to have things built
3. Communicating the value of design to people who pay to have things made needs to be better done by the industry. They call this "Selling" and we can learn it from traditional salesmen.