Xperience This!

I was pleasantly surprise to have a packed room for my UPA International Conference presentation, Designing with a Service Perspective: A Bronx Tale. For details on the talk’s content, see Dave Roth’s post.

The attendance validates that the virtual buzz about service design carries over to the analog world.  User experience professionals wondering, “What is this new shiny object?” My presentation only scratched the surface of the potential impact the service design field can have on typical experience design work. I’m eager to continue the conversation with a focus on these aspects:

• What are effective service design methods and approaches?
• What does it really mean to “do” service design?
• Who should own service design?
• Given SD is still predominantly an academic endeavor, who is most equipped to be “practicing” it?
• How can practitioners effectively evangelize SD in organizations?
• SD is still aspirational for many, so when it’s time to put those methods into practice, how can you prevent it from failing before it begins?

These are among the topics I’ll be exploring in upcoming months, so please follow and contribute to the conversations:

• http://www.twitter.com/ServiceDesignLK
• UXMatters
• http://www.linkedin.com/pub/laura-keller/3/728/b6a
• http://www.servicexd.com/wordpress/

How to Give Your Audience a Voice in Their Ever-changing World

In 2004, in a Scientific American article titled The Tyranny of Choice,  Barry Shwartz  posited a counterintuitive argument about the effects of having too many choices (e.g. do we need 38 different kinds of milk?).  He questioned why “people are increasingly unhappy even as they experience greater material abundance and freedom of choice? Recent psychological research suggests that increased choice may itself be part of the problem.”

I count myself among those who struggle with choice.  I am virtually paralyzed when handed the phone book sized menu at The Cheesecake Factory.  The only place I find an easy time eating out is at a wedding (i.e. Meat, Chicken or Fish works great). 

This idea of the tyranny of choice got me thinking about a similar phenomenon that occurs with rapid innovation and change.  The speed at which new products, interfaces and services are introduced is generally something to admire and celebrate as “Good”.  But it is as daunting as it is impressive, and there’s not always a positive experience for the customers or employees faced with all this change. More »

It’s a story about how user experience professionals became finalists in an international urban planning competition by reframing the design challenge to be about the city-as-service. It’s a story about how UX is maturing as a discipline. It isn’t about “users” anymore, it’s about people. It’s about truly understanding who you are designing for, what they think is important and helping them help you design the solution.

Designing with a Service Perspective: A Bronx Tale 

On Thursday, June 23 at the UPA International Conference in Atlanta, MISI XD Account Director Laura Keller will be speaking about how MISI’s team of experience designers applied a holistic, service-oriented and community-centered approach to come up with a vision for the revitalization of NYC’s 4-mile long Bronx Grand Concourse. In the end, MISI’s approach – which did not include a specific architectural design recommendation – beat out 400 international architects and urban planners and landed a spot among the 7 finalists. Laura’s talk includes an overview of service design as an emerging field, MISI’s approach for the revitalization competition and the insights we gathered, as well as tips for applying a service perspective to design challenges organizations face every day.

A draft of Laura’s presentation is available here. If you’d like to learn more about why she believes UX professionals should care about service design, read her UXMatters article. For additional background on the Bronx Tale, you can read an earlier blog post on the experience.

More and more people are understanding that no single touch point in an experience is an island. In order to craft truly successful experiences, all touch points need to work together. Just ask the in-store Home Depot service rep who couldn’t even find the product I saw on their website on her system when I called from my car to make sure they had it in stock…I drove to Sears instead. Ask the Comcast online chat rep who wasn’t authorized to offer me the deal the outbound call rep offered me a week later…when I had already switched to Verizon FIOS. Call it integrated, end-to-end, 360, call it service design…whatever you call it, everyday a new case is made for taking a holistic approach to experience design. Laura’s Bronx Tale is a great example of how putting people (aka users) first just plain makes sense.

Wow!  What an incredible event MadPow’s Healthcare Experience Design Conference in Boston turned out to be.  I was there to present on the concept of Personal Healthcare Strategists.  To VizThink my presentation looked like this.

For those of you who know me, this idea of designing a better end to end patient experience rich with cross touch point collaboration and more open dialogue has been a real personal passion of mine. When it comes to serving our clients, I have to be careful not to think too big and go too far outside of the box that is our healthcare system today.  But at the conference we went as far outside that box as we all possibly could.  Our goal?  Change the conversation around healthcare as a way to improve the patient experience, create a culture of healthier people, and ultimately – lower the cost of healthcare. More »

Why don’t patients follow their doctor’s orders? Why do they fail to adhere to the prescribed behaviorial and/or medication regimens they know can help them maintain or regain their health?  

With so many questions, I think it’s time to start working collaboratively on answers. There are multiple disciplines currently looking at the changing face of the US healthcare system holistically as well as facet-by-facet. As experience designers, I and my colleagues at MISI are actively exploring and documenting what it means and feels like to be a part of this system, and what it should mean and feel like in the future.

FYI…There’s more to this blog post, but if you are interested in learning even more about today’s patient experience and why patient’s fail to follow their doctor’s orders, join MISI on 2/24/2011 in Philadelphia at the Patient Adherence Cocktail Convention hosted by MISI, WoolLabs, and Smart Brief. Visit Wool Labs for more information or to register

More »