Tag : service design

18 posts

A service in need of a verb

Author: Isaac Pinnock

“I’ll just hoover the floor” as he pulled out the Dyson.
 
“Have you got some Sellotape?”
“Yes” she replied, handing over the Scotch tape.
 
There are many brands that have become generic catch all names for an entire class of products. The generic is so ingrained in our psyches that it’s difficult to imagine calling them anything else. To try and call them anything else would mark you out as a pedant. They’re a shorthand that helps makes life go along quickly.
 
How long does it take for a name to become a generic identifier? What happens in the meta zone when a service is crying out for a name, a visual shorthand or action to identify it by?
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Design for a two speed world

Author: Isaac Pinnock

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

As designers and makers we all aspire to be able to grow and improve the things we create. Either because it’s part of the plan (a minimum viable product launch), or because since release you’ve discovered new user behaviours or requirements that need to be rolled in. Or it may be because technology and standards have changed around you. Unleashing a new release is what agilistas live for. But what happens if you can’t? What happens if you can’t improve upon your original product and make a second release?
 
This could be for any number of reasons – changing priorities, budgets drying up, teams moving on or the project’s sponsors having a ‘that’ll do’ attitude. Or maybe the world has shifted, and you’re stuck with a design, product or technology platform that simply can’t be updated easily without massive investment.
 
Ticket machine interface
 
A good example of this are the self-service ticket machines at railway stations. It’s difficult to imagine a more heinous crime against user experience than the machines across the National Express network. Instead of speeding up or simplifying the ticket buying process, they add complexity and hassle – what should be easy is made into a soul-destroying moment.
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Picle Developments

Author: Will Roissetter

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.

 

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Design to inspire confidence

Author: Isaac Pinnock

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

What happens when a new service replaces one that you’re familiar with? A service that you’ve used for as long as you can remember, infrequently but at times of high emotion and potential stress?
 
The new service is intended to be better – speeding up a process by being available anywhere from the palm of your hand. It has the potential to make a moment in life easier, but is the transition from old to new easy or a moment of strife?
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Skype in the classroom is a Tomorrow Awards winner

Author: Sara Williams

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. 

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The future of the supermarket (and possibly everything else)

Author: Paul Sims

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.

 

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Slideshare presentations of the week: service design (2)

Author: Anjali Ramachandran

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. 

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