After spending a long quarter working on the basics of service design, I find myself looking back and realize that I’m still processing what I really learned. The simple statement of “everything sold to you that is not a physical item is a service” really changed my perspective of Western business, and much of commerce itself. Realizing that much of today’s technology is even shifting towards providing a service rather than giving you software or hardware that you “own”, I believe that I made the right choice to add this field to my curriculum at SCAD.
So, in lieu of an ongoing series of posts describing simply everything I’ve been doing during the quarter, I’ve decided to end with one long retrospective. Though we’ve had several “assignments”, I’ll be focusing on the three primary service providers which most of the class revolved around- a restaurant, a museum, and a big-box store, as well as the realizations and efforts described throughout.
The beginning of the quarter was surprising pleasant, given this was an 8 am class. Someone had the brilliant idea of having our first service safari be at the local breakfast joint, which couldn’t have been a better choice. Sitting at our tables, we hastily wrote down every little niddly detail of every single action taken by staff. As a relatively easy-going person, not much really bothers me when going out for a bite to eat, unless it’s something really, really terrible. It was hard for me to imagine our developed personas really being bothered by things such as inconveniently-timed drink orders or a leaky thermos, but considering even the small details bothering potential customers is critical in service design.
As we transitioned to the museum, our team seemed much more confident with the tools needed to generate blueprints and break apart services, so the safari at the museum seemed to be a lot more engaging. Hang-ups where customers could get confused or areas where the service was confusing or even just plain bad stood out quite a bit more, which made it easier to record them. Short interviews with staff and customers yielded insights we never considered ourselves, and made a train museum that at first seem like a complete experience become one that lacked polish and felt incomplete. This created a great starting point for our own devices, modifying the original service by tweaking various components and then transforming it into one that was based around tablet navigation.
Our final project Revolved around big-box stores, the worst service safari we had. From our experience with the previous projects, the faults of Best Buy’s customer experience were glaring, and rather disappointing. I had gone into this store many times throughout the years to buy music, videogames, etc, and had never really thought it to be all that bad. It seems I was really just putting up with it though, as our team realized that it could be much, much better. After many revisions, we came up with an alternative service that enhanced customer navigation using tablet-based technology, aiding the customer in helping them find what they want faster, all the while empowering them in the buying experience.
In all, the lesson that really stuck with me throughout this class is that the small things we seem to barely notice while shopping contribute greatly to the overall experience. I’m looking forward to delving deeper into this idea in Service Architectures next fall.
