Why make me work?
I like deals just as much as everyone else. And I’m sure someone within my credit card company thinks they’re offering something good for their customers while also promoting some business initiative. But why make me work? Why do I have to enroll to receive extra points for a limited time? Too many businesses ask too [...]
Brandon Schauer at Service Design Drinks
Tonight we kicked off service design drinks 2012 strong with Brandon Schauer doing a repeat performance of his keynote talk from the Service Design Network Conference: The Business Case for (or Against) Service Design (PDF 19.7 MB). His provoking talk identifies a huge imbalance of spending, where many more billions go to advertising (telling people how great [...]
Pretend you’re in a focus group.
Of all the things I have pretended in my life, and I have pretended a lot, I never once considered pretending that I was in a focus group. Talk about boring! Dear ING, pretend I’m a normal human being and talk to me like one. Thanks.
This Is Service Design – UX Week 2011
Jared Cole and I ran a one-day workshop at UX Week 2011 called This Is Service Design. The title borrows from the the title of the book, This Is Service Design Thinking, which I contributed to. The workshop builds off last year’s workshop, From Products to Services, but with a couple changes. We dropped sketch [...]
San Francisco Service Design Drinks Video
Here’s a video montage of the last SF Service Design Drinks that Chris McCarthy, Director of the Innovation Learning Network and an Innovation Specialist with Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation Consultancy, put together and posted on his blog. SF Service Design: Facebook | Twitter
Service Design Talk at SIGUX Seoul
During my last visit to Seoul, I had the pleasure of presenting From Product to Services, the intro presentation Jared Cole and I used at our UX Week workshop, to the SIGUX group in Seoul. My colleague Peter Merholz also presented during the event. The audience included folks from Samsung, SKT, KT, LG, the DNA, [...]
May SF Service Design Drinks Recap
On May 20, a group of very interesting people got together for the fourth SF Service Design Drinks. Unlike the previous events, which were held in bars, this one was hosted at Adaptive Path, who graciously provided the venue plus beers and snacks for the attendees (it helps that I work there). The turnout was [...]
Service Design Thinking?
A Brief Guide to Service Design (UX Brighton) by Paul Thurston & Nick Marsh View more presentations from Harry Brignull. I’m glad to see many similarities between this presentation and the one I presented at IxD10. Ideas that definitely overlap include: services are important, services are everywhere, they are designed by everyone, and they are [...]
Can Service Design Take Off in the US?
Despite the growth of service design firms in Europe, the success of the Service Design Network, and the globally self-organized service design drinks, including one in San Francisco, service design still really hasn’t made its move on the United States. And while many designers I talk to are very interested in service design, businesses are [...]
First Official SF Service Design Drinks
I’m excited to report that the first official San Francisco Service Design Drinks this past Thursday was a success! People actually showed up! It was awesome! The only negative: I forgot to take photos! Everyone seemed really excited and positive. So we decided to make it a monthly event. Bar 821 was a bit loud, [...]
Service Design: an Interaction Design Perspective
On February 5, 2010, at Interaction10, I presented Service Design: an Interaction Design Perspective. Since studying interaction design and service design at Carnegie Mellon University, I have wrestled with the relationship between the two. During an interview with Jeff Howard, a few days after graduating, I tried to address this relationship. It was both a [...]
iPad as Service Enabler
It’s hard not to be underwhelmed by a product that we already had a good idea of what it would be, especially if you’ve ever used an iPhone. But aside from there being little surprises, and an arguably terrible name (there’s nothing poetic about iPad), what I find more interesting are services the device will [...]
Service Design Drinks SF
A small party of Bay Area peeps interested in talking about service design got together this past Friday at Lime in the Castro. The somewhat last-minute event was organized by Aidan Kenny, who was here on business from Kilkenny, Ireland. The gathering included people from organizations like the American Heart Association, Adaptive Path, Apple, Intuit, [...]
Speaking at IxD10
I will be speaking at the Interaction 10 conference on Friday, February 5 in Savannah. The title of my talk will be “Service Design: an Interaction Design Perspective.” What is service design? How is it different from interaction design? Or isn’t it? As an interaction designer with service design education and experience, I will offer [...]
Service Design Network Conference 2009
Two weeks ago, I was on the island of Madeira, Portugal, for the second annual Service Design Network conference. Like last year, I was part of the planning board. My main role was to review content submissions and help put together the conference program. I also served as a judge for the service design competition [...]
Process not a differentiator?
Last week I had a chat with Jeff Howard, during which I described the presentations at the Service Design Network conference in November. My observation from the conference is that service designers seem to know what service design looks like. The process shown during the presentations looked very similar. This prompted Jeff to suggest that [...]
Service Design: What’s Next?
For the past three years, I have attended a conference on service design. In 2006, during the first ever conference on service design, everyone felt excited to come together as a community and begin talking about this new design practice. Last year, we pushed a bit at the borders of service design (Many Eyes as [...]
Participating in the Service Design Conference in Amsterdam
I’m really excited to be participating in the inaugural Service Design Network conference in Amsterdam November 24–26, which I have also been helping to organize (thanks to my involvement with the Emergence conference). I am moderating a panel of Scandinavians on the 25th and then facilitating a workshop on service design for mobile services on [...]
Bringing Emotion into the Design Process
I’d like to continue a comment about bringing emotion into the design process because I think it deserves its own post. Kip said: Design has some valuable roots in its ties with emotion, but in many ways we’ve lost touch. Can we bring a sophisticated discussion of “emotion” back on the table and include it [...]
UPMC Neurosurgery Clinic
For this service design project, our team worked with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Center for Quality Improvement and Innovation to identify design opportunities for Dr. Amin Kassam’s Neurosurgery Clinic. Due to being able to perform a rare brain surgery by going through the patient’s nose rather than cutting open the skull, Dr. [...]
Wall Street: Hurdle for Service/Experience
This morning I read a NY Times article called “Put Buyers First? What a Concept” about an experience the writer had with Amazon.com days before Christmas. The PlayStation 3 he bought for his son had not arrived, so he looked up the tracking details only to find it had been delivered and signed for by [...]
Designed to Never End
Adam Greenfield seemed really excited about Matt Webb’s year-end wrap-up, so I checked it out. It’s a bit of an abstract ramble of ideas, which didn’t excite me as much. But one idea sparked a thought: “In order to keep going, the path of a user through a website must be designed to never end. [...]
What is the experience?
Designers often argue about whether we’re designing an experience or designing for an experience, and ponder the more philosophical aspects of having an experience. Is an experience something designers shape? Is it something participants make? Arguably, every experience is unique. But if this is true, what do we mean when we talk about the experience? [...]
Thoughts and Feedback on the UPMC Service Design Project
Last week during finals, the four teams from the Designing for Service class presented their process and solutions to the class and invited guests, which included folks from University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), for whom we were designing. During the presentation I took notes on what I thought were interesting ideas that were either [...]