Tag : service design

For the last few months, we've been working with Skype to create a new service proposition for small businesses. Today, we're launching in private beta. If you’re an entrepreneur, or working in a small business that’s looking to grow, Skype in the workspace is a place to meet potential partners, suppliers, or customers anywhere in the world. You can promote your service, send messages, talk, or meet face-to-face over Skype. And it's free. 

So this isn't an actual Smiths lyric, but this bastardised version has been rattling around in my head while thinking about the whole Instagram + Facebook thing over the last week. In trying to figure out how I feel about it I keep returning to a couple of ideas. 

Part 2 in an occasional series about how digital products and services can learn from real world experiences

Last week we had our first Picle strategy meeting since getting back to blighty from SXSW. We have digested a lot of feedback from tweets, emails, reviews, articles, as well as testing it out ourselves, and it was time to step back and take a look at where we're at.

We started off by evaluating how the launch went and how people have responded to the concept of Picle. Stuart drew this rather rudimentary graph of the potential life span of Picle.

Part 1 in an occasional series about how digital products and services can learn from real world experiences.

Yesterday @malbonster and @bobbyc had the honour of accepting a Tomorrow Award  for Skype in the classroom, a  service and technology mash-up that connects teachers around the world and helps them collaborate on Skype-based teaching projects.

We are thrilled that Skype in the classroom has been recognised, and we’re especially happy for our client, Skype, with whom we enjoy a strong partnership. 

We've been looking at using barcodes for a small research project. I've haven't been too interested in the whole qr codes that open a web page on your phone thing, as it seems a lot of effort for low value result. But this service proposition from Tesco (in it's South Korean guise) is quite awe inspiring. Say hello to  advertising as a service platform.

More service design stuff, this time in the form of videos.

1. Oliver King, co-founder and director of Engine Service Design, talks about the difference between service design and user experience in this talk.  

Service Design and User Experience: Same or Different? from Engine service design on Vimeo.

This week's presentations focus on service design. Without further ado:

1 . Urijoe created this set of slides about the tools and methods they use to communicate their service design projects for a multi-stakeholder audience. I particularly like what they say about 'making critical predictions' based on the context and information. 

A quick search for 'Apple should buy Instagram' on Google shows that the general thinking of the inter-brain is Apple should / will / can kill Instagram with it's own social photo sharing service. Over and above the fact that Apple are famously useless at anything social ('Dad, what's Ping?'), the reason for Apple being rubbish at social sharing is that their entire culture is built on secrecy. Not sharing is their business model. It also extends into their service model. You must live your life inside the iTerms and Conditions, sorry I mean - iTunes. Your apps must pass the App store quality control and even your iAds are vetted. In this context, I am not sure Apple are capable of allowing grubby little people to share stuff in the context of their brand.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon