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Service design
Thinking outside the boxee
Yup that’s right. First they had the idea to get the Internet on your TV (remember WebTV?) then it was all about TV on the Internet (Hulu, CBS, CNN, etc. ) and now we’ve got TV on the Internet put back on your TV (boxee).
For those of you not already in the know, boxee is a multi-platform media center with a 10-foot interface for aggregating video, music and photos that exist both offline and online. Others have failed in this space, but the boxee offering pushes the paradigm of content distribution and consumption in some interesting ways.
Doing research right at kajeet
There comes a time in any parent’s life when she has the face the inevitable: Her child’s first cell phone. That time has come at last for me, and I confess I have been dreading it. What if she buys 50 ring tones? What if she calls China? What if she sends a prank photo to a friend and ends up going to jail and having to register as a sex offender for life? (That’s right, I’m a parent: I can go from “my kid might overspend my money” to “my kid might go to jail” in ten seconds flat.)
It was with utter delight, therefore, that I stumbled across kajeet, a cell phone service for ‘tweens and their parents. What sets kajeet apart is not their phones (they don’t make any), or their network (they’re essentially a Sprint reseller), but the service. With kajeet, parents can fine-tune what their kids can and can’t do, and who pays for what. You can set up separate wallets for the parents and the kid, such that the parents can pay for phone calls to Mom and Dad, but the kid has to pay for calls to friends or goodies like ringtones and wallpaper. You can set up times of day for certain activities, like only emergency phone calls during school hours. You can even track the location of your kid’s phone using its built-in GPS and online tracking tools.
When I discovered kajeet, I was in parental heaven. The service was so exquisitely tuned to my needs that I started to get professionally curious. What was the process that had led to this product?
The kajeet origin story goes something like this: Three dads saw a need, and created a company. Now, that’s a great start, but there had to be more to that story. They must have done their homework. So to learn more I spoke with kajeet’s SVP of Corporate and Business Development, Carol Politi.
Credit cards for preschoolers?
I have a daughter named Skye. A few years ago, I was planning a family trip to England, and I signed her up for United's frequent flier program, Mileage Plus. A few months after we returned, the junk mail started arriving. I knew when I signed her up that she would get some junk mail — Mileage Plus statements, promotions and such.
What I didn't expect was this:
This is a credit card offer from Chase. Skye has gotten at least 30 of these fairly thick envelopes in the last year alone.
Many people might ask, "What's the big deal? We all get lots of credit card offers."
Well, the big deal is that Skye is three years old. United knows that she's a preschooler; they required her date of birth when I created her Mileage Plus account. Somewhere in the information chain between United and Chase's bulk mail department, that information was ignored.
Economizer: A Cooper service concept
People are looking for ways to economize in these uncertain times. We can all see the evidence of environmental crisis brewing alongside the economic downturn, and it's easy to feel powerless in the face of such global forces. With politicians and businesses seeking avenues to a sustainable future, Cooper wondered how design might help individuals cut costs while also encouraging behavior that was environmentally responsible.
This all started when Environmental Defense approached Cooper, asking us to imagine new ways to make it easier for people to save resources. We performed research throughout the Bay Area, then collaborated with Environmental Defense to model our findings and identify design opportunities. From this point of inspiration, we continued on our own, crafting a quick eco-friendly concept: Economizer, a service that helps consumers save money while making sustainable choices. The service consists of a core set of internet-aware services with optional components such as hardware data collectors, social networking applications, and dedicated smart phone interfaces.
Economizer: Scenario 1 on Vimeo
(Watch this video in fullscreen mode by clicking the icon in the lower right of the player.)
Folkware
In his recent article for TechCrunch, salesforce.com CEO and chairman Marc Benioff frames the web 1.0 revolution as “Anyone can transact” with great 1-to-many online transactional applications like Google and Amazon. The 2.0 revolution was “Anyone can participate” with a host of many-to-many online applications like LiveJournal, Flickr, and YouTube that really put the focus on user-generated content.
Conversations with machines
Every time I get on the phone with some corporation or other, I find myself reflecting on why voice interfaces are so uniquely infuriating. Clearly, I’m not the only one who thinks so, or sites like dialahuman.com and gethuman.com wouldn’t exist. I suspect the problem lies not only in wretched usability, but also in the fact that voice interaction sets higher expectations for reasonable, human-like behavior. If humans interact with computers as if they were also human, as discussed by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass in The Media Equation, this seems even more true for computers other software-powered devices that accept voice input in addition to using voice output; after all, if it can understand what you’re saying, it must be able to think, right? In their very readable 2005 book, Wired for Speech, Nass and another colleague, Scott Brave, assert that this is indeed true. Hearing a human say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that” three or four times in a row would be enough to inspire violent impulses in the most dedicated pacifist, and many people have similar reactions to voice interfaces. So is a more “human” interface necessarily better?
Even though we know we’re talking to a machine, we humans respond to perceived emotion even in recorded voices. For several days after we installed a new phone system in our offices, people continually commented on the doleful female voice that responded to deleted phone messages by saying “duuh-leted,” dragging out the first syllable and drooping at the end, kind of like a mopey teenager asked to take out the garbage. Discontented machines are especially noticeable, though excessive perkiness is irritating in some circumstances: “I’m sorry, you’ve been on hold for 20 minutes, so your session has expired.”
The airline industry needs to check their own baggage
I wasn't surprised to read that the airline industry was rated the worst in customer ratings. It seems like every week there's a news story about one of the major airlines raising their fees or adding another miscellaneous cost on top of their base ticket prices. I'm slightly sympathetic to the fact that the airlines are dealing with ever-increasing oil expenses, but not all airlines are dealing with their struggles in the same way.
I was pretty outraged when American, United, and US Airlines announced plans to charge an extra $15 per checked bag. This is already on top of the $25 for a second checked bag that they (and in fairness most other airlines) already charge. Why couldn't they simply add $15 to the price of their tickets? Because they can't compete on price with low cost carriers like Southwest and are feeling the squeeze from both sides.
Now more and more travelers will abandon checking luggage and cram all number of accessories into smaller carry-on bags, thereby causing long lines through security and long boarding times while they struggle to shove their bags overhead with little assistance. This will ultimately lead to delays and more misery.
The bottom line is that for flying, people mainly care about cost and if you've flown on Southwest, American, United or Virgin America there's not a great deal of difference in service — so why pay more? If anything, I enjoy flying on Southwest and Virgin America more because the employees tend to be friendlier and the personal entertainment on longer flights breaks up the time.
Until airlines like American can prove that their higher prices reflect a better and more enjoyable service I'll keep picking the lowest price I can find. I don't mind sucking it up even if I end up in a middle seat between two big burly guys with no elbow room. We've all been there.
Instead of these airline companies being creative with accounting, they need to get creative with designing better experiences like Alaska Airlines is doing or consider re-engineering planes to fly with alternative fuels like Virgin highlighted recently when they used 5% biofuel. I might pay $15 more if I think it's worth it but I definitely won't pay an extra $15 to have a more miserable experience when I know I can pay less elsewhere.
With any luck, one of the travel sites will be updated so that I can search flights and compare the full cost for my travel knowing that I'll be gone for two weeks and will definitely be checking one bag if not two. Then the larger airlines will maybe take note and change their travel plans.
What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments
Goal-Directed Service Design
Most people think of Goal-Directed Design techniques as focused on product design, but they work equally well for services. A service is comprised of the various "touchpoints" between a customer and a business. Touchpoints include public-facing systems such as web sites and web-enabled software, but can include other channels as well, such as brick-and-mortar stores, points of sale, interactive voice response systems, email and postal mail, too.
A service model best fits offerings that are intangible, distributed in space, or play out over a length of time, especially on a routine basis. Some obvious examples include: electricity, hotels, mobile phone service, or even a government. The touchpoints you design as part of your service are critical to the user's understanding of your brand. Increasingly, many touchpoints are interactive systems rather than human contact, so paying careful attention to the design of these things from the user's goals is vital.