Lavrans Løvlie, co-founder of the London-based service design consultancy live|work, began his talk with a brief history of service design before focusing on ROI (Return On Investment) as his main subject. While he quipped that he normally talks about ROI only to non-designers, the the subject was quite topical after Mikkel Rasmussen’s presentation about the impact of design and business.
Framing Lavrans’ presentation was the live|work perspective that service design is both a value set and a skill set. The value set is that of applying their skills to make the world a better place. One example is their admittedly Utopian goal of producing what they call Service Envy by creating services which people people can use to tell other people about themselves, their values, and their identities.
Starting off with a little history of services, Lavrans observed that while product design was once about humanizing, it is now more about creating identity markers. So even as we experience a shift from products towards services, we lack a steward for humanizing them. Growth in enterprise systems (databases), communication technologies (paying your tax via SMS), and the internet (accessing information, collaboration), and a growing realization that we cannot keep producing and consuming things (that we must shift consumption to immaterial consumption), has not seen a matching growth in service productivity.
This lack of growth in service productivity is curious, considering how a single company likely provides customers with a number of different services—call centers, third-party services, web, print, marketing, products, people, mobile—yet doesn’t likely focus on the delivery of those services. Indeed, as one company described itself to live|work: “our organization is so complex that the only people who have a complete idea of our organization is the customer.” Sounds like an opportunity for service design!
Live|work have now built up a number of case studies and learnings from a variety of projects, such as their work with Streetcar, a UK-based car-sharing service. Their experience with Streetcar and other projects led them to develop Service Usability. Service Usability tests services, and has developed a method for testing quality across touch points. Based on servqual and usability tests on the web, Service Usability employs an SU Index to measure four qualities (proposition, experience, usability, accessibility) on a scale of zero to ten.
Using this SU Index, live|work look at issues which affect services, such as: the performance of touch points (the location of the car in a car-sharing scheme is a touch point, for example), the top ten things that prevent you from making money (can be some big things), and the top ten quick fixes that will impact on business.
Some of the lessons they’ve learned through live|work and Service Usability:
- Make it a shared process - prevent people from stopping the process by making the change transparent or using a staged gateway process
- Design for decisionmaking - help companies envision outcomes
- Enable the organization to innovate - prototypes enable employees to experiment and change their environment
- Launch and learn
- Quality is a feed, not a project
Live|work also presented an analysis of their work with Streetcar through the lens of a triple bottom line analysis. Triple bottom line takes into account social and environmental performance in addition to standard economic metrics, and provides a more holistic view of business which encourages more sustainable behavior. Live|work uses triple bottom line analysis to put hard numbers with soft details, and analyzes both the benefits to customers and the company.
Some of the questions during the Q&A afterwards touched on scalability (there should be much more potential to scale in the service sector than the product sector), the business model of service design (think continual consultancy: industry is based on an industrial model, so it thinks in projects, not consultancy), and usability (accessibility deals with rules and regulations—”is it legal?”—whereas usability is about ease of use).
Next: Andrea Koerselman of IDEO