The Explosive Website

So I have this evolving theory - the Explosive Website - and it kind of runs like this. The web, when it's good, is setting this amazing service experience which is becoming increasingly dominant.

Witness Amazon. I can find and order a book within a minute. It remembers who I am, it knows what I like, and (very occasionally suggests things I didn't know I'd like). It's always on and it does the same thing every time I go. I search for the author, mispelling it, and I get it within seconds. I look inside and reject it. Amazon recommends two others. I opt to buy one of them. So this service experience is smart, predictable and efficient.

Witness the DVLA tax disc service on Directgov. I can renew my road tax within a minute. Again, it's predictable, it's always on. Another straightforward service experience.

Now let's compare the offline cousins of these services.

Witness a recent Borders experience. I go in, it's busy and the foyer is cluttered with irrelevant things being pushed at me. The way finding makes me suspect I'm being forced past impulse purchases. The shelving system isn't dewey decimal, so I have to guess the category. It's two floors up. I get there, I browse. i can't find. So I opt to drill down and search through an expert. i look for one and, a couple of minutes later, I find an arty looking student. He doesn't recognise the book. We walk to the terminal and he searches & locates the book. We find the right shelf and he pulls it off. I read the back cover and decide I don't want it after all. I spend the next ten minutes browsing the shelves, get a bit hot and jaded, and leave. This is not a great service experience.

I'm not going to dwell on the DVLA one, only to summarise as "what paperwork? where is it? how long is that post office queue? but I don't have that with me! oh - my insurer has closed it's helpline until 8am. etc etc etc. Awful. Abysmal.

But, but - before we start suggesting all shops should be closed and we should do it all online - I considered this - when the offline book buying service works, I love it more than I ever love the perfect Amazon service. I like to feel the books, to chat to the staff (all of whom are trying to write books). I like to support the business community. It's three dimensional. Even at its very best Amazon lacks the emotional service experience. It's two dimensional and, other than the financial saving, it's unrewarding. I'm trying to pin down the third dimension... it's something human and instinctive.

iTunes is an even more extreme example. My desire to own the CD (the tangible product I can love) is only slightly beaten by my desire to pay less (and end up with a two dimensional thing I have less love for).

Anyway - that's why the theory is "the explosive website" - there's a sense that the web is setting the benchmark for service - so it's inherently expansive. Working in the digital realm, I hear more and more about how digital thought leadership is influencing offline business leaders. This is generally accepted as "a good thing". But there's also something of a threat in the explosivity - it's charged, and potentially damaging. There's a risk that the expansion is so fast that our desire for things fast and cheap means we lose that important third dimension of the service.

Witness Woolworths - the much loved UK chain - which yes was killed by the downturn, but that was the bolt gun to the head. Woolworths was lame because it couldn't compete with the choice of eBay, because its staff were surly and gave piss poor service compared to an eBay jiffy bag. But what a price - we lost an institution that was a much loved part of the high street. It perversely had huge staff and customer loyalty. I think there was something of the third dimension in that.

Similarly but more tangentially, I had this same discussion about CAP policy reform with my dad. I was mourning the loss of small french farmers that bring such life to breton villages. My dad was saying good riddance to a heavily unionised, over subsidized and grumpy bunch of Frenchmen. But he loves those breton villages as much as I do. I was trying to articulate how technocratic decisions based on speed and efficiency are so often inhuman. So often in our race for what we're told is better (books in seconds) we throw the baby out with the bathwater (the taciturn book seller with encyclopedic knowledge).

So - the explosive website - a service conundrum in draft.

Live Well with Mayo

Very inspired by Paul Robare's work at Carnegie Mellon on Mayo's "beyond primary care" service design. Well though through, with some interesting ideas at the end. I suspect in the USA you get more room to experiment than the UK, where the domination of the NHS behemoth makes things a little trickier. Nevertheless, all good grist to the mill.

Want to get a handle on Service Design?

I highly recommend a listen to Peter Day's (one of THE voices of Radio 4) programme on design thinking. Great and hugely diverse references to impact as the true measure of design.

• Great reference to Virgin's terminal experience (which Engine can be proud of). And the plane - if you want people to sleep on planes, don't give them a sofabed, give them a chair - and a bed!
  
• And Churchill's vision for Design Council - "Britain can make it!" But what companies need from designers is changing - it's not the physical artefact, and not just an aesthetic. Systems, services and business models are now being designed and protoyped.
  
• Street Car was a business model design idea from RCA graduates.
  
• Buster drain cleaner: owner jumped on the designed demand programme. It hit "the soul of the company".
  
• HMV Westfield store designed with online business in mind - the explosive website hits home - the shop is colour coded based on the online store. Not music, videos and games - instead listen, watch and play.
• Air conditioner manufacturer who designed components which brought massive cost effeiciencies - within the product itself and also stock control

"Design thinking is an important idea who's design has come." Great summary of all that's exciting about service design right now.

Service design laggard

I've taken my eyes off the service design agenda for a few weeks. Firstly for a well deserved holiday, which was wonderful, secondly because I needed to focus on the other side of my brain with a bit of pure creativity (see last post), and finally because I had some Big Things To Do at work - not al SD related. That all seems to have played out nicely and I'm now re-engaging the SD gear and starting to leave the garage again on a steady pedal. What better way than with a new book - New Service Development and Innovation in the New Economy. Which is under pressure as it has to compete with the rather excellent Child 44.

Find your community

There's been a lot of talk recently about community being the new focus group. See here and here. The argument is: don't create an artificial focus group to represent your users (they probably won't tell you the truth anyway), but instead find out who your community is and listen to them. Actively.

In all the discussions an interesting and common thread seems to be the live essence of the customer relationship. About servicing that customer at that moment in time. This is only successful in companies that give their staff the confidence/ability/flexibility to adapt within procedures to make it happen. It's what IDEO talked about at the Service Design conference in Amsterdam - that customers work well with metascript - a continuum of branded touchpoints that help them do what they need to do. When the metascrip fails - and a company stops holding the customer's hand - they resort to the helpline... or increasingly they just twitter all 300 of their friends instantly. The damage of not knowing your community, listening to them and adapting your service to make it engaging and fun, is likely to be very costly indeed.

Service Science - awful name, interesting idea

IBM have recognised the skills gap of people unqualified to manage service-based institutions. So they created an acronym - SSME - Service Science, Management and Engineering. This is basically service design, but fascinating that a technocratic company like IBM have turned it into a science- based practice. If you were to go now and get a degree in service management - would you expect a Bachelor of Arts, or a Bachelor of Science? Does it matter? I'm an arts grad so to me, yes, it would. And also service is a creative activity, which relies on the service provider creating a good customer experience at every moment, tailored to specific customers. It's not a science.

But let's be honest - IBM's expertise is in selling to their services, and they're savvy enough to know that service "design" would be too fluffy for them to stomach. Make it a science, with predictable process and methods, and then you put your captain of industry clients at rest. But I doubt very much whether SSME could be transformational.

Oh - and they have a pretty good definition of service design. Perhaps we could all sign up to it before the next SD conference! Save ourselves a lot of debate.

Designing for a service economy

This is a pretty interesting article about the massive value service has to our western economies, and yet how little service design is about. Most interesting thing however is that this is a management consultant talking. They have smelt something on the wind...

From the horse's mouth

Some great testimonials about service design in this Engine video

Transformation - service design in disguise

It all sounds like a 1974 sci-fi short story, but apparently "2009 is all about transformation". Business Week kicked off the debate on 3rd Jan, saying that innovation was dead - a victim of corporate hubris - and my word it hasn't stopped since. Worth a look. Transformation being humanising technology. Letting customers produce your service etc.

Also - editor of industrial design bible Core 77 was quoted as saying that "in 2009... we’re going to see an explosion of Service Design around the world. Many firms are already practicing it, but it will take on a new urgency as more and more people recognize service as the new product." Which is all good too. I took on my new role of Director of Service Design at the Team in November. So I'm hoping they're both right!

Great thing about all of this is that, since 2005, the public sector has been all over transformation. Take a look here to find out. Having failed for years to successfully innovate, they've leapfrogged onto the next big thing. And the remarkable thing? It appears to be working. Although to find out exactly how well, we'll have to wait for the 2008 annual report due later this month.