I question the statement: We know what service activities are and we know what design activity is.
I don’t know what services are. I don’t know what design is. More precisely, I don’t know what any of these things is NOT.
Is a Bank Teller machine a service or a product? Answer: both. To the company that makes it, it is a product. To the person that uses it, it is a service. And note, a service that does not involve people.
Is a digital camera a product or service? Answer, it provides me with a service -- an experience. The more I analyze both products and services, the less able I am to find the dividing line. Financial services are designed and marketed as products. Cameras, washing machines, and both office and household items are designed and marketed as products, but we buy them because they provide services -- and experiences.
Services, it has been said, have front stages and back stages. The front stage is the part we interact with. The back stage is all that invisible back-office stuff.
But backstages often have employees working therein, and for each employee, there is a front stage and a back stage. The front stage is what people or equipment they interact with. Their back stage is all the rest of their organization (or interacting organizations) that are involved.
Backstages often involve efficient operations. Here is where the operations experts love to apply their trade. But they underestimate the importance of social and psychological factors on the efficiency, morale, and turnover of employees.
So services are far more complex than most products. Products usually have a front stage and then a simple backstage. Services are much richer, much more complex. I have never found a decent treatment of services, despite the hundreds (thousands?) of books and articles written about them. Why? Because mostly they are focused upon the operations, or just the front stage, or occasionally some of the back stage. Never have I seen a good treatment that applies both design and management thinking, that cares about both efficiency and the superior experience for both customers and employees.
Services are rich, complex, and different than products. Sure, designers can -- and must -- play a role. But like all aspects of design, it also requires expertise about the kind of services.
A Disney theme park is different than an airline than a bank than a financial company. A university is different than a trade school than a bookstore than a newspaper than a website. Yet all of these are services.
Example: Captain of my last United Airlines flight handwrote on his business card a personal note to all the top-tier fliers on his airplane (I was in First class and am a million-mile flier on United). Where does this fit? How did United gain such loyalty from its staff that the Captain initiated this very nice thank-you note. Where does this fit into the customer experience analysis? Waiting in lines is a component of services that can be investigated by both efficient, operations methods and by psychological theory applied to design (mostly from the field of interaction design: a paper of mine on this topic, about to be printed in the MIT Sloan Management review is available -- just ask). Are these examples the typical service design issues that we address?
My response is no -- but my response is stronger. I don’t think there is such a thing as "typical" when it comes to services. Some services are performed solely by machines, some by people: most by a mix of the two.
Can the normal design process of observe, ideate, prototype, iterate apply? Yes, there is where I believe design has the greatest leverage -- in our methods.
Enough. Off to judge a student design show.
Don Norman
Don Norman
Nielsen Norman Group
Breed Professor of Design, Northwestern University
Visiting Distinguished Professor. KAIST, Daejeon, Korea
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www.jnd.org/
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