In the middle of November I’ve attended the Service Experience Camp in Berlin – a service design event that is a mixture of keynotes and bar camp sessions. It’s one of those few events that are truly holistically designed – with great attention paid to the speakers diversity, space that allows for meaningful conversation, tasty food and participants wellbeing ( yoga stretching was involved) . Body, mind and soul are being well cared for during the 48 hours. So if you are a service designer or service design student – you should definitely experience it.

Foto credits: Serivce Design Berlin

This year’s camp was focused around the theme “Struggling for change”. Here are my main takeaways:

Designing “un-sexy “ services 

A lot of services that we use everyday such as energy, water or waste management are with time becoming invisible to us. Most of us probably don’t even think of them in terms of “services”. Nowadays when the cost of switching for e.g. energy provider has been radically reduced, providers of those services are facing a challenge of making their services memorable and valuable to the customer. Trying to create differentiators other than price. In her keynote, dr. Kristina Rodig, Head of Customer Insight & Innovation at E.ON discussed the difficulty of delivering delightful customer journey for gas and electricity customers. After discovering that customers only contact E.ON every half of year with questions related either to the end of the year bill or contract, the company has embarked on the mission to create innovative concept that will keep customers engaged during the whole year. The ideas developed through out the project included: an early warning system helping customers to check the balance of their energy consumption, new bill layout and payment reminders with storyline. Slide deck is available here

Foto credits: E.ON

Service design in the corporation –  how to effectively bring service design in house

 This is not a new topic, what I however found interesting was the visible change of the corporations’ commitment to the service design. It looks like we are approaching another level of service design maturity – the numbers of in house service designers has rapidly increased and organizations have started providing service design training for their employees. Companies that contract service design agencies no longer asked for just a solution, more often they want to use this opportunity to train their employees in service design. As a repercussion this change pushes service designers to become better facilitators and effectively teach project members throughout the length of the project.

Implementation

Luis Arnal during his talk Service Innovation in ‘Emerging Markets pointed that “designing the service is not the end” and ultimately the challenge is the successful implementation of the service. With implementation being the goal of service design projects come different responsibilities for service designers and deeper cooperation between design agencies and their clients. There were quite a few discussions being had around this issue with the main consensus being that a new level of commitment is needed. Commitment, that involves designers empathy towards the clients and their internal problems as also a better stakeholders management. This approach can help to discover internal issues that might prevent the service/solution from being implemented. 

Abundance of tools and toolkits

Service design relays heavily on the use of design tools such as personas, journey maps, blueprints etc. – still it seems like every year we can see more and more tools popping up that are suppose to help us do a better job. In fact there are so many tools being created that I personally have problems keeping track of them. At SXC we had an opportunity to try out new design tools and there were definitely plenty to choose from!

 Relationship canvas – well it seems like those days there is a design canvas for pretty much everything – business model, project canvas, strategy, personal business model and now there also is a relationship canvas. More here 

Jobs to be done – it’s an approach often used by UX designers, product owners and teams working with scrum method that “helps the innovator understand that customers don’t buy products and services; they hire various solutions at various times to get a wide array of jobs done.” Learn how to use it here

IoT Service Kit – toolkit has been created by Futurice. It helps to map IoT concepts in real world. It can be downloaded from here

Foto credits: Futurice

Data canvas – canvas for data-driven business model innovation which helps to analyze internal and external data available to the company. Canvas has been created by a former SID student – Katrin Mathis (http://www.katrin-mathis.de/en/services/business-design/data-canvas/)

Foto credits: Katrin Mathis

Brain spin – cards with drawings of different shapes that help to inspire creativity (http://www.brainspingame.com/)

Scenes – is a set of pre-defined illustrations that helps to create storyboards. Scenes has been developed by SAP and can be downloaded from their website (https://experience.sap.com/designservices/scenes)

Foto credits: SAP

Lastly…100 questions toolkit – cards that help spark conversations that can be used as icebreakers  http://www.theschooloflife.com/shop/100questions/

Written by Marta Grochowska