Bill Hollins provided a nice overview of services, covering pizza (”Pizza is just ‘cheese on toast–it’s delivery that makes it attractive”) to the unique challenges that services face (you can’t store services, so you have to manage both downtime and demand which increases by the hour). His presentation focused on using design management to develop new services, and some considerations you should keep in mind during the development process. One key point, which matches observations from my earlier post, is that we need to move past “design is important” and on to “how to do it”.

Good stuff…check it out (I’ve also added some of my some notes after the video):

Some of my notes from Bill’s talk:

• Because you can’t store services—, the question becomes “how do you manage demand variation?” You have to take into consideration downtime, when your demand decreases and your supply/capacity must react accordingly. But you also have to consider demand which increases by the hour.

• Bill observed that compared to traditional industry and design fields, services accept innovation more easily.

• Customers buy benefits, advantages, USPs (Unique Selling Propositions). Therefore, what is it about your service which supplies those benefits, advantages, and USPs?

• Bill’s definition of design management is “the process for developing new services”. While this term and definition might be contested by proponents of design management, service design, concept design, transformation design, etc., at the heart of all this varying terminology is essentially the same.

• Culture can affect customer needs - designs for a European audience may not work in the US, much less in Asian countries.

• Define success as financial - before your business or solution can create an impact in any other domain (be it social, environmental, etc.) it must survive in the marketplace. If it doesn’t survive, all the additional benefits it might have brought are now moot. Therefore, we must define success first on a financial basis and subsequently along any other metric we choose.

• Realize you have both internal and external customers - External customers are your customers. Your internal customers are in effect your workforce. You should not pursue the happiness and satisfaction of one set of customers at the expense of the other.

• Failure can arise from one of three factors: the market, financial, and technical.

• One tactic for learning how to design good services is to simply observe: why is this a good service, what makes it so good?

• We as designers need to move past the “design is important” argument and focus instead on to “how to do it”.

Note: Look for new posts on the service design symposium every two weeks. We look forward to sharing some of the great presentations that were given by the speakers and hope you’ll glean some insights from what they have to say.

And just so you don’t miss it, here is a link to the post on the Bill Moggridge presentation.