user experience design Tag Archives - General Assembly Blog

A service, unlike a product, is intangible — you can’t hold it or touch it. Rather, it’s a series of intertwined, specifically orchestrated activities. Services unfold over time across steps and channels. Also unlike a product, both the production and consumption of a service happen simultaneously. The service is the interplay between the customer and service provider.

Service design is a practice that contributes to delivering a great user experience. In fact, the quality of the service is frequently what makes or breaks a person’s experience with an organization. Whether service design is being used to improve existing services or create new ones, it takes into account the needs of both the customer and the service provider.

Service design is a big deal because we engage with services much more than we engage with specific products. We take public transportation, go out to lunch, manage our money, go to concerts, get medical help, pay our taxes, register our cars, and so forth. Certainly, there are tangible products and tools that we — and service providers — use in the process, but that’s only part of it. From the service design perspective, it’s that overall exchange we care about — and that exchange needs to work for all parties. We certainly notice when it doesn’t, and we, as customers, simply look elsewhere the minute it fails.

The more complex and interconnected our world gets, the more opportunities there are for service failure — making good service design more critical than ever. Service quality often suffers due to the complexity of linking systems together in a way that makes sense to both customers and service providers. Service designers must come to the rescue, and many designers who previously focused on designing digital interfaces are now turning their attention to services.

Service design is becoming a high-profile skill in industries such as financial services, health care, social services, and beyond, popping up in ads for product design and user experience roles. However, it’s nothing particularly new. When talking about UX design, many people’s first inclination is to think about digital products. But UX design is as much about physical products and services as it is about digital services. It’s also about ensuring that an organization has the processes and skills in place to deliver on the promise.

Although they ultimately have a slightly different focus, at the highest level, the philosophy of service design and UX design is the same:

• It’s holistic. It involves considering all channels and players involved, and understanding what happens before, during, and after any interactions.
• It’s user-centered. It puts the experience of all of the people involved at the heart of every decision made.
• It embodies design thinking. It uses the designers’ approach and methods to balance people’s needs (desirability) with what’s doable (feasibility) and what’s appropriate for the business (viability).
• It’s increasingly the differentiator between companies. As a product or service becomes a commodity and the barriers for consumers moving between providers are lowered (think financial services or telecommunications), it’s the quality of the service and experience that determines whether people embrace your offering.

In a feature-rich, constantly-on world, thoughtful service design gives organizations a unique opportunity to distinguish themselves from their competitors. Businesses are now innovating and redefining themselves based on their service in several key ways:

• Improving routine services, like renewing a driver’s license or getting a cell phone plan. In the case of a driver’s license (where there’s no competition), delivering better service is good for everyone. In the case of a telecommunications provider, it can be the difference between retaining or losing a customer.
• Totally overhauling an experience, such as Disney’s introduction of its MagicBand to park visitors. The MagicBand wrist band facilitates payment, placing orders, making restaurant reservations, entering your hotel, finding the rest of your party, and even delivering greetings from Disney characters who know you by name. The technology is one thing — but it’s the people and processes that make this all happen.
• Revolutionizing an industry, like the way Airbnb and Uber reimagined accommodation and ride services by upending who provides the services, how they are acquired, and the interchange between providers and customers.
• Going from product to service, like how Square provides small-business loans to customers using its point-of-sale solution, or the aircraft jet engine manufacturer Rolls Royce offers support services based on the fact that it’s already collecting usage data.

Service design requires big-picture thinking. This means not merely focusing on designing the particular products and tools used in the interchange between customers and service providers, but also understanding and optimizing how everything and everyone fits together — who does what, when and how they do it — to achieve a desired result. As service designers, we talk about the “line of visibility,” and study both the “onstage” activities (what the customer sees and hears) and the “backstage” activities (services, processes, and tools used behind the scenes), and we choreograph the interplay.

As illustrated in the figure below, when designing (or redesigning) a service, we take a top-down approach, starting by focusing on the desired experience, and from there considering the interactions, touchpoints, and procedures needed to create it. Armed with this knowledge, we are able to determine the best products and tools to use, and we design these to optimize the overall experience.

To be successful, we must:

• Have a clear understanding of the reason and demand for the service, and the ability of the provider to deliver.
• Focus the design on customers’ needs, ensuring that the service will be valuable and efficient.
• Treat “unusual” circumstances and typical situations as equally important in thinking out the requirements to accommodate them, as that’s when service often breaks down.
• Design with input from users of the service, and collaboration with all relevant stakeholders providing the service.
• Prototype the service before developing it in full.
• Start with a minimum viable service (MVS), and use an iterative design process based on feedback and analysis to refine and add to the service.

User experience design students at General Assembly learn to think holistically. UX is not merely user interface (UI) design; it’s about the before, during, and after use. UX design involves applying user-centered design techniques like research and low-fidelity prototyping to ensure that you’re solving the right problem before polishing the solution. When you learn about UX design at GA, whether it’s through our full-time Immersive program, part-time course on campus or online, or a short-form workshop or bootcamp, you learn to think about the overarching ecosystem you are designing for. Students train to recognize that people’s experiences are formed over time, based on interactions across individual and broad touchpoints. They also learn how our roadmaps allow us to focus in on figuring out how to get there from here.

Susan Wolfe, who teaches GA’s User Experience Design Immersive in San Francisco and Sydney, has practiced UX design, run consultancies, mentored project teams, and introduced UX design practices and cultures into organizations around the globe. She has established and managed in-house UX teams within software, hardware, and services companies in the Silicon Valley. In her work, she takes a holistic service design perspective and applies the most appropriate user-centered design thinking techniques to identify issues and ultimately create the optimal experience.

Every great design begins with great research. By using techniques like user interviews, contextual inquiry, and competitive analysis, user experience (UX) designers have the opportunity to learn about user pain points, motivations, and preferences in a very personal way. But tracking all of that data and finding patterns can be difficult, especially when trying to navigate a long text document or pages of handwritten notes. That’s why UX designers practice affinity mapping.

An affinity map, also known as an affinity diagram, gives designers a complete picture of their early research process. It is a physical, tactile, and editable design artifact that’s invaluable for showcasing trends, themes, and areas of opportunity for discovery and improvement. With just a few tools, you can create a visual representation of large amounts of data that will help to inform your future strategy.

Creating an affinity map is easy. All you’ll need is some paper to write ideas, writing tools, and a surface to mix, match, and move your notes around. A few tools that will help you build these maps are:

• Sticky notes: If you Googled “affinity map” right now, you’d find photos upon photos of sticky notes with designers clustered around them. These are the crux of your map. They’re the right size to write down bite-size pieces of research, and they’re easy to move around and group together to show research themes and related findings. You’ll go through more of these than you think, so stock up! Minis will be too compact to write on, so go for the standard size or slightly larger.
• Markers: Pen and pencil can be too light to read, especially if you’re building a map with a team. Markers help make sure everyone can read all of the ideas — whether they’re right next to the map or a few feet away.
• A large, flat, writing surface: You’ll need a large enough area to post a bunch of different sticky-note thoughts, but also add additional observations that provide context to your research. These could be themes you see emerging, questions you want to follow up on in additional research, or brainstorming ideas. Large dry-erase boards can work, but most designers I know prefer to stick up large-scale Post-its on the wall.

Your initial research can come from a lot of places: in-person interviews, observations you see of users interacting with a current product or service, internet searches, and surveys. All of this user data now needs a place to go. Enter the affinity map! Being able to separate data out into moveable blocks (like sticky notes) will allow you to get a better scope of the qualitative and quantitative data you’ve collected. The first step is to write out all your research findings on your trusty sticky notes. You can group together like information later, but for now you just need to get it out of your head or your notebook and into this new working space.

Things to jot down may include:

• Statistics and other key facts: These could be from your own data collection, surveys, or secondary research. Chances are some of these numbers and research-backed facts will help to reinforce some of the more subjective observations you’ve collected from in-person interviews.
• Personal observations or insights: What has jumped out at you as you’ve navigated your research? These “aha” moments could be the beginning of some deeper insights and point the way to future exploration. Add them in now and thank yourself later.
• User quotes: User interviews give you tons of information — hooray! But the pieces of interviews that can actually be used to inform your future design are buried in bits and bobs of small talk, tangential stories, and relevant, but not crucial facts or observations. Don’t give up! Read through your notes as though you’re reading an essay or novel. If a sentence jumps out at you, that’s a green light to jot it down.

Now that you have a small mountain of sticky notes posted around you, get to grouping! Group user quotes that highlight similar issues or opportunities together. Statistics that all fall in the same area of research should go to together, too. As your groups start to solidify, annotate with a marker on your paper or whiteboard to begin to put notes in broader categories.

A few tips to help your organize your groups and categories:

• Your first categories are probably not going to be your final categories. Don’t be afraid to move sticky notes around to areas where it doesn’t look like they belong; you may find a relationship between two disparate user issues that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
• Take photos. Paper gets crumpled, and sometimes sticky notes flutter to the floor and are stepped on by an unsuspecting coworker. Document your process so that if you do have to put it back together at one point, you won’t be starting from Square One.
• Ask for input. Once you feel good about the organization of your map, have another person (either from your team or someone else) take a look. Are they finding the same patterns you did? If they’re not, it might be an indicator that you’ve narrowed your research down too much. Always start broad before you focus too intently on one area. The design process is iterative, and your affinity map may be, as well.

At GA, we encourage learning by doing. In our part- and full-time UX design courses, we introduce affinity mapping as a way to organize and synthesize initial research from user interviews. Students then use affinity mapping techniques to find patterns and key observations to guide the rest of their process.

As the course continues and research gets deeper, affinity maps become even more important as a way to keep track of data. By establishing the practice early on, students have a solid foundation in this skill and can move confidently forward. Happy mapping!

Rachel Wendte is a designer, content strategist, and marketer who teaches the User Experience Design Immersive course at GA’s Chicago campus. She is passionate about communicating design for connection, and uses her skills in client management, user research, and strategic thinking to craft meaningful solutions that are user-friendly and aligned with client goals. Before learning UX, she worked as an arts administrator and social media consultant.