Service thinking :

Service Design cannot escape talking about experience and experiences. The current and future experiences of people – service customers, clients, users, patients, consumers, etc – are the context that service design works in.

Service Design cannot escape talking about experience and experiences. The current and future experiences of people – service customers, clients, users, patients, consumers, etc – are the context that service design works in.

Working with experiences is to service design what working with communications is to graphic design – ultimately we are trying to influence the quality of experience that people have of a service. We can see the importance of experience in many aspects of design from design of interactions with information technologies like the web; know in the trade as UXD (user experience design) to the employment of design by the UK National Health Service in their ‘experience based design toolkit’. The experience of the service user, clicking a mouse or visiting a hospital, is an incredibly important consideration in the design of a service. It is important because the service needs the user to perform their part in enacting the service – clicking the mouse or telling the doctor about their symptoms. (See livework: Service Thinking for more.)

But somehow the word experience, and the way it dominates the discussion of service design, is unsatisfactory.

It may be that the association with manufactured experiences – a la Disney – feels like it associates service design with entertainment. The idea that we live in an experience economy where we are elevated above the basic needs of food, shelter, health seems rather too focused on those who are so lucky.

It may be that experience is a rather soft term that is difficult to defend against hard factors in services such as economics, operations or policy. When I think about experience as a factor in say a hospital even I find it hard to argue for quality of experience when there are significant medical matters that surely must take priority.

When my six year old fell off her bike and bit through half her tongue we took her to the local A&E, who didn’t have the skills to stitch it up, then to UCL where there is a specialist facial injuries team. At first the registrar suggested the operation could be done under local anesthetic (which seemed crazy to us and the nurse who clearly had more experience of small children). We then waited for ten hours while the surgery team fixed up a clearly more serious car crash patient and finally my daughter was in to theatre. It was a short procedure – 20 minutes – and the nurse promised to call us when she was out so that we would be there with her as she came out of the anesthetic. This didn’t happen and we spent an hour of more pacing around worrying that something had gone seriously wrong and fearing the worst. Actually what had happened was that the nurse was on her own and had to stay with my daughter whilst she recovered and was not able to call us. My daughter was distraught not having us with her and we were pacing the ward. The final outcome is that we all went home that night and now there is not even a scar on my daughter’s tongue.

I use this story to explain by ambivalence with the word experience. The experience was terrible, but the medical outcome was excellent and I know what I would prefer. I know that service design has the ability to contribute to the effectiveness of a service in terms of the hard factors – positive economic results, successful operations or policy outcomes – and fear its association with only the softer ‘nice to have’ qualities.

When I say I know it can contribute to hard factors this is based on the outcomes of projects live|work has worked on where we have created new revenue streams or boosted existing businesses; where we have significantly improved the operations of a service and where we have helped to achieve important policy outcomes. See case studies

So to date live|work has preferred to talk about services themselves rather than experiences – which we see as a crucial element to understand and consider in service design but as one of a number of factors alongside the economics, operations and knowledge of domain expertise. Service Thinking is about how to pull these factors together and use the service user as an organizing ‘common ground’ around whom all aspects of the service can focus. We often say that ‘the one thing we can all agree on is the customer’.

However, experience is an essential factor and we continue to use the word in our day-to-day work and in the way we describe what we do to our clients. Perhaps what we need is to deepen our understanding of what we mean by experience, to give it a language that eventually can complement other disciplines in its nuance and specificity. To kick off this project I would like to offer three qualifiers of ‘experience’ that help us to be clearer about what we are focusing on.

What kind of experiences?
The reason we think experience is important is that telling the stories of the people who use services (or are effected by services) we are able to either identify opportunities for innovation and improvement or describe future experiences as a way to communicate our designs. I think we need to be more specific about the kind of experiences we are describing.

1. Are we talking about task experiences – the experiences of trying to get something done?
2. Are we talking about commercial experiences – the experience and how it reflects our perception of value?
3. Or are we talking about life experiences – the experiences that shape our wider quality of life?

User experience
An individual’s ability to complete tasks within a service can be crucial to the success of a service. The way that tasks are designed can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of the service. Live|work have regularly redesigned tasks within a service in ways that have increased service performance or revenue.

Web based services have pioneered a focus on user experience as an essential component of the way they operate. Google are able to evaluate how different shades of blue in links influences click through rates on search results. This usability approach based on understanding how well people can achieve their goals is valuable and is applied by designers to a range of contexts from shopping to city navigation.

In this context – task based activity – the experience is of using the service. A individual is generally trying to use the tangible elements of a service – it’s signage, interfaces, communications etc – as they attempt to complete day to day tasks such as find their platform, buy some tickets or understand the fare choices. Needless to say when these tasks are hard to achieve people get very frustrated.

I suggest that user experience is primarily concerned with tasks, short time frames and interactions with touchpoints (although some service staff can be fairly unusable on a bad day).

Customer experience
Live|work have clients who’s goal is to improve the experience their customer have of using their services as they calculate that this will increase the amount customers use (and pay for) their services and also reduce the number of customers who choose to take their custom elsewhere. Churn, as we have learnt to call the turnover of customers between competing service providers, is a costly business, as new customers must be persuaded to replace those who leave.

Customer experience is in some senses the sum of the tasks involved in using a service. If I am constantly frustrated then I may leave and go elsewhere. However, it is also something more that that. As a customer I have expectations of a service in terms of quality and value that overarch the day-to-day tasks I undertake. These expectations are set by the brand and my experience of other services and are closely tied to the amount I am paying. Think budget or premium air travel. If my experience does not match my expectations I will be disappointed and become more likely to switch next time. In this case the emotion of bad service is not frustration but a reflection on the quality I am getting for my money. In many respects the customer experience is the experience of ‘paying’ for a service.

For this reason customer experience is an odd term to apply to public sector services, like education, healthcare or prison. It is, however, a term more and more in use in public organisations as they find that they are compared to their commercial counterparts and that expectations have been set elsewhere.

Customer experiences are longer term than user experiences but generally have some limits to them – possibly contractual limits like car insurance. The experience is the total of my interactions with the service.

Human experience
As in my hospital story above some service experiences are not primarily about tasks or custom but go much deeper and touch our emotions much more significantly. Most visible in the types of public service I mentioned like education or healthcare. In these cases there are tasks to complete successfully and we have a right to feel that there is value for money in the delivery of the service. But beyond these issues there is a greater impact that I can only call human experience. These services impact who we are and our sense of ourselves. Think about how school affects all of us, and the difference between enjoying and hating your time at school. Human experience bears on a range of emotions from dignity to achievement. Service designers must consider the impact the service has on people and their sense of who they are.

If things go wrong here it is not a frustration or value equation but something that effects the development of people’s lives. The service is much less something we interact with and much more a part of our lives.

Human experiences are often longer term, but not exclusively. They may well stay with us for longer. They are also much less clear cut as I am much more involved in the service, unlike the clarity of being a customer.

Conclusion

Having written this and created these three types of experience, and I realize that there are others, I feel justified in my dissatisfaction with the catch all term ‘experience’. It seems essential to know if we are making tasks more achievable or having an impact on deeper emotions.

I can also now partly answer my question in response to our hospital experience. Whilst the task was completed successfully there was clearly an impact on us as a family. In this case going home with a stitched up daughter helped us put the trauma behind us. But I can see how in other cases a lack of attention to the human experience could be much more damaging.