Tag Archive | service experience camp

SXC Day 2 Barcamps – Learning to visualize & Documenting customer journey with Experience Fellow

Nov23

Learning to visualize – say it in 3 frames!

In my first bar camp session, Mauro Rego from Service Design Berlin promised us the attendees to learn how to visualize and do a canvas tool on anything. First assignment for us was to illustrate in 5 frames how to do a toast (=toasted bread). After the individual assignment, we as a team would have to agree which 5 drawings out of 25 in sequence represented the action best. Then we had to reduce the frames in 3 still keeping the message clear! It is astonishing how well illustrated pictures can speak so much. The next assignment was way more difficult – with the same process we would illustrate as a team how to help a group of people to plan their shared holiday trip. Here the different perceptions of the assignment would step in and we got a bit stuck. But in the end we managed to produce the following holiday planning canvas/tool which is cool! The benefit of these kind of tools is enabling communication.

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Introduction to a customer journey documentation tool
The second and last barcamp session was lead by Marc Stickdorn (author of This is design thinking) and Klaus Schwarzenberger. They introduced a tool for making contextual interviews on existing services. The tool is called Experience Fellow and the person making the journey and reporting on it can download it free from application stores for IOS and Android. We experimented on the app and Marc showed us what kind of analysis can be drawn from the data entries. It seemed handy and was priced reasonably for research use.Marc recommended to use diverse data types (qualitative, quantitative), to use diverse researchers and diverse methods when aiming at deep insights on customers. Triangulate – triangulate – triangulate!A bold plan of improving the health of african women

The last key note speech of SXC15 was held by Melanie Wendland, who works for M4ID and teaches also a course in Laurea on SD in digital context. M4ID is involved in an impressive project to improve women’s health in Sub-Saharan Africa with the means of service design methods. They engaged diverse stakeholders of up to 500 persons to the user research, including african health care providers and women themselves to define how to improve services. Codesign was also used. The result was a customer journey of a safe delivery of a baby, one significant outcome of the project being the involvement of men into the journey as fathers or partners.

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Ending panel – takeaways 

The short panel in the end encouraged the designers to continue enabling transformation and to dure the struggles of the journey. Adapting slowly by making it work first in teams, then progressing into organization. What happened in Paris during the conference prompted one panelist to point out that development is cyclical in reality – sometimes it goes backwards but then at some point turns again to positive.Last takeaways in a nutshell…

 

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SXC15 Day 1 Bar camps – Designer in the enterprise world & Data Canvas tool

Nov22

Designer in the enterprise world by SAP

Marion and Heike from SAP shared their experiences with us on implementing SD in the corporation world. Being a service designer in an enterprise requires expertise in a multitude of areas and teamwork with internal stakeholders that have divergent motivations. In large projects it is crucial to have moments of synchronization to stay aligned. Service designer has to learn to sell the approach, learn the language of business and teams and adapt the vocabulary of “what is design” to get the message through. It is useful to know how to measure impacts, to use the power of data and metrics to convince others. Peers should be made to experience the process, but not by pushing by force.

They introduced an interesting illustration on different work styles and productiveness vs. time, see below. The value of service designer’s work is constituted in the late phases of the project whereas regarding engineering skills the case is the opposite. They also pointed out that the development team members tend to develop empathy for the team whereas it is in the service designer’s role to develop the empathy for the end customer.

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Data Canvas

My second bar camp was held by Katrin Mathis, who is currently graduating from Laurea. Katrin has developed a new tool called Data Canvas to help out to consider the role of data when developing services and to understand quickly what data exists for the client organization.

The dimensions used in the canvas are whether the data is internal or external and whether the frequency of update is low or high. Internal data has a higher usage potential as it is under full control. With external data there is the risk of discontinuance and lack of uniqueness if competitors can access the same data.

The canvas can be worked on for example from angles such as what data has the highest potential, who benefits, how to tune the business model to take into account existing data. The business canvas elements can help in structuring the data canvas. The process requires engaging diverse experts. The additional variables are the trustworthiness of data source (expressed with red-orange-green colors of post-it notes) and the structure level of data (expressed with forms square-triangle-round of post-it notes). More on Katrin’s work on her pages.

(SXC15 continues in further blog posts.)

Wall for attendee profiles
SXC15
conference café

Service Experience Camp (SXC) 2015 – a deep dive into SD and DT with european peers

Nov22

 The welcoming words of the organizers enlightened us about the movement behind camp event organizing – Service Design Berlin is a knowledge sharing community arranging regularly events on current topics of service design for design thinkers.

In the camp event the purpose is to learn from each other how to go forward with design thinking in our individual contexts. The learning and exchange mainly occurs in bar camp events which is an innovative concept in itself. The participants can bring along with them a topic which they want to share with others in a bar camp session, the idea being a two way exchange of knowledge and resources between the bar camp organizer and attendants. In the beginning of both days, all bar camps would be pitched to facilitate the choice of which camp to attend. There would be from 4 to 6 different bar camps running paralelly, each lasting one hour roughly.

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Bar camp sessions’ wall

So let’s go camping like good scouts do! But some guidance from key note speeches first.

Louise Down, the Director of Design for Government Digital Service (UK) talked in her keynote about Designing public services – a different approach.

Louise mentioned some pretty interesting figures to begin with. UK government has saved 2,4 MEUR thanks to applying service design. Currently there is a 300 service designers’ community working in the public services. I heard from other camp attendee that UK is considered to be in the forefront of SD adoption in the public sector. So an example to keep an eye on for the Finnish public sector alongside well known Estonian e-service development.

Louise mentioned lessons on how to scale SD:

  • hire good people
  • build the boring things no-one wants to do (such as identification, payments, publishing)
  • understand how services work on the internet (develop consistent style with style guide, define how to ask person details understandably)
  • learn by making
  • do not give up – be persistent!

According to Louise, service failures cause the biggest costs to the public sector that could be avoided with good SD. She also pointed out how important it is to use “proper people speak” when designing services. See a video she showed us of UK governmental services’ and the user’s point of view about doing power of attorney online.

Another key note speaker was Kristina Rodig from energy provider E-on. To achieve a more customer centered process, new process, roles, tools and methods have been introduced in the company. Touchpoints with customers used to be rare, mainly focusing on the yearly invoicing. They conducted two major journey projects which addressed core processes from meter reading to payment. The work resulted in concepts that allow for individual customer journeys, such as an early warning system that makes it easy for customers to check whether their consumption is in balance with their advance payments or not.

Bar camp experiences to be continued….in the next blog post.

SXC15 pass
Coje Berlin

(Yes those wooden boxes are for sleeping!)