Ira Glass on storytelling

By kimberley Published: January 18, 2012 | Leave a comment Posted in Musings

Basic curiosity is one reason why I love the radio programme This American Life, but it’s also because of the expert storytelling craft of the host, Ira Glass, and his fellow producers.

It was this storytelling craft that Ira Glass spoke of during his sold-out Sydney Festival shows in January of 2012. Ira does a lot of what we as designers seek to do in our everyday work lives: communicate meaning through storytelling. I was therefore very happy that he decided in Sydney to tell stories about how to tell stories. It was a great opportunity to learn some tips from a very talented and seasoned storyteller.

One man on stage with an iPad
Ira’s show began in complete darkness as he wanted us to get the feeling of what it’s like to listen to stories on the radio where you are not distracted by the visual. After the lights went on, Ira charmed the audience with background stories about the radio show, using an iPad to weave audio clips and soundtracks in and out of his dialogue. He told us many anecdotes which described his view on what makes a good story, I’ve captured some of them here. Continue reading “Ira Glass on storytelling” »

kimberley

5 useful concepts when practicing service design

By Santiago Ruiz Published: January 16, 2012 | Leave a comment Posted in Service design

Towards the end of last year, Jono and I attended the 3 day Intensive Service Design Course at UNSW (November 21–23) lead by Marc Stickdorn. It was a fun and insightful experience with lots of acting and performing and also a healthy amount of talking and discussion. There were a few topics that strongly resonated with us, and we would like to use this blogpost as an opportunity to elaborate and reflect on these topics.

1. Get beyond the “bad first draft”
This is about making people fail right at the beginning so they are not afraid to fail again. The “bad first draft” is a great way to get the members in a team to work together with greater confidence.

Do a quick exercise (in 10-15 minutes max) where everyone is likely to fail. In the workshop, in small groups we were then asked to come up with a mobile solution in 10 – 15 minutes that introduce online banking to preschool children. The solutions we came up with weren’t the best. But through this exercise, any form of unassigned leadership were removed, and we embraced the “bad first draft”, and celebrated the failure.

This 10 – 15 minute technique can be used on any other service design activity. It works great if you want to get results quickly, get people doing and not talking. You’ll be certain that people are going to come up with something.

2. Train the trainer
Service design as an iterative process it’s more than creating better prototypes each round. As service designers is also part of our “job” to help others express their ideas and accustomed to the way of thinking about service design. “Train the trainer” said Marc is about training our clients so they can practice service design by themselves once our involvement has ceased.

For service design to happen we need to adapt our language to the client’s language, use their language, their jargon. The initial buy-in from the client is essential for service design to happen.

3. Theatre
I (Santiago) took some improvisation classes a few years back in Chicago at Second City, and this came in very handy for this exercise. Marc showed us how theater and some improvisation techniques (such as say “yes, and…”) can be great tools when acting scenarios or situations to elicit deeper insights. But Marc disliked the term “theatre”. He preferred the term “investigative rehearsal” or “theatrical methods”. And clients generally dislikes any word to do with “acting”.

Theatre can create fast and cheap human interactions and emotions, plus it allows us the ability to put emotions together. As an example Mark said a lot of businesses are about creating really cool scripts, but you have to find the methods and how to implement it. Theatrical methods can accomplish just that.

But not everyone can jump on to the stage like that. For theatrical methods or investigative rehearsals to take place, people (actors) need to feel that they are in a safe space, where a level of trust has been ensured.

A quick activity to achieve this is by asking participants to share truth in small groups and to decide what can be shared back with everyone, then incrementally raise the level of honesty and trust. Don’t take yourselves (facilitators) seriously, but take everyone else (clients, customers) seriously. It’s important that your fail yourselves first. After all, if you’re precious and apprehensive about failing, how will you get everyone else to fail and learn from it?

We all had fun but after the exercise, we asked ourselves ‘What happens after the theater?’ Theatrical methods can then be turned into early prototypes, blueprints, or a service advertisement. It can also be used to feed into the presentation back to the client.

4. Subtext
Subtext is a term burrowed from the theatre. On the stage, it is to find out the underlying plot of the play. In service design however, it can be used to make our thinking more concrete by questioning the view in front of us. It’s the “Don’t take it word-for-word” approach. This also adds a level of emotional input into the context, making the scenario richer and thorough. It helps us think in a step by step progression, dwelling deeper and deeper, unveiling the true intention and helping us to gain insight. For example, the statement may say ‘It’s concrete’, the subtext for this idea would be ‘Why is it concrete?’, which unveils the motivation for the action, and ultimately the purpose ‘Why is concrete important to the person?’

Subtext is highly accessible. Similar to the ‘five whys’ that we often ask in the design process. It is also highly comprehensible and people understand it instantly. Subtext is also more about the action of doing and showing the idea rather than just talking about it. Marc said in the workshop, “Doing gets more emotional results. It provides access to my guts rather than just the brain.” The use of subtext however does not reflect others outside of the workshop room. It only concerns what the person inside the room thinks.

5. Evidence of service
While it’s important to provide good service to customers, it’s also important to remind them of the great service you have provided. This is often achieved by producing and doing something that customers can touch and see. For example: the folding of the toilet paper in hotels. The folding is an evidence that a service was performed while you were out of your room. An evidence of service can also prolong customer touchpoint by reminding customers of their experience. For example: the sample of shampoo bottles that salons give you after your visit.

Virgin Australia actually created an artifact that does just this. Because Virgin know that customers often takes away the bottle openers provided on the flight, so they instead of engraving “stainless steel” on the bottle openers, they engraved “stainless steal” instead. This subtle gesture will remind the customers of the vibrant attitude that Virgin markets itself to be, as well as the (hopefully) pleasant flight experience.

Blog written by Jono and Santiago

Santiago Ruiz

Service design, interaction design & design thinking

By Steve Published: January 12, 2012 | 4 Comments Posted in Interaction design, Musings, Service design

I was recently in the position of needing to articulate for a group of people what it is I mean when I use certain phrases/terms – interaction design, service design, and design thinking in particular. For reference, here they are. They’re not particularly long, or exhaustive, but may tend towards the conversational. Comments welcome.

Service Design
Service design is the intentional and thoughtful design of internal and customer-facing activities needed to deliver a service. Where experience design concerns itself only with the customer-facing aspects, service design looks also at the experience of staff – both customer-facing – “front-line” – and back office.

Service design cares equally about the experience of all people involved in the delivery of the service.

Interaction Design
The history of interaction design is firmly rooted in the design of digital control interfaces for products with increasingly complex functions. At their most complex these ‘products’ might be computers, and the control interfaces are the software and operating systems that reside therein.

However, interaction design also plays an important role in ‘simple’ controls like those used on washing machines, TVs, microwave ovens and clock radios.

As the practice of interaction design has matured, our understanding of interaction design has broadened to encompass non-digital products, where our notion of the ‘interaction’ being designed has shifted to be more akin to a dialogue or conversation, rather than the more machine-like request-response paradigm originally in use.

This definition of interaction also caused a reassessment of the purpose of interaction design activities. It became clear – it is less about getting the device or machine to do something, and more about enabling or facilitating our own behaviour. That recognition also showed us that interaction design can be used as a way of shaping behaviour, opening up areas of exploration in social networks, social entrepreneurship and community-driven innovation, sustainability and much, much more.

A modern interaction design practice may be designing digital control interfaces, Web sites, software; they may also be designing services, product-service ecosystems, or products aimed at shifting people’s behaviour, or enabling a completely new behaviour.

What is common, here, is the practice of interaction design as the means by which we humanize technology both functionally and ethically. By that I mean: interaction design can look at designing for behaviours in a way that functionally addresses the needs of people. Humanizing technology, however, can also mean answering the question: should we support this behaviour at all?

Design Thinking
If design be seen as the integration of art and science, or applied arts, it can be broken into several distinct, but closely-integrated components. One of these is craft, and the tangibility of design – as a means of both exploring and communicating a concept.

These concepts have their origins in the intellectual components of design, to do with understanding the problem space, synthesising design ideas, and evaluating those ideas.

Clearly these ideas must be brought to life in a tangible form in order to share and evaluate. Craft is necessary for this to occur. And the quality of the execution of the concept – either as a prototype or the finished object.

The label of “Design Thinking” was coined as a way of describing the intellectual components of design; separate and distinct from the craft aspects.

A “Design Thinking” project will typically focus on the early segments of the design process:

  • developing empathy for the customer;
  • develop design ideas through the process of synthesis
  • exploration and evaluation of these ideas through sketches and prototypes
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Steve

Out with the old, in with the new

By kimberley Published: January 6, 2012 | 2 Comments Posted in Presenting

Yesterday Steve and I presented some rough concepts to a client. Nothing new there, but the client’s reaction to them made me reflect on the difference between my old way of working (pre-Meld) and my new methods of creating work here at Meld Studios.

I used to be a graphic designer and used to produce work – as do most graphic designers – to a written brief created by the client. The usual process goes a little something like this:

  1. Client gives brief to designer
  2. Designer comes up with 3 concepts based on brief
  3. Designer presents 3 concepts to client
  4. Client asks for a combination of concepts 1 and 3.

Yesterday we presented just one concept, not three, and the client was very impressed that we got so close to what they wanted so quickly. The thing is, it was what we did before the presentation that made this possible, and it’s something that we do a lot here at Meld. The process goes a little something like this:

  1. Client discusses project with Meld
  2. Meld holds a creative workshop with all stakeholders
  3. Meld synthesises ideas from workshop
  4. Meld generates, refines and discards multiple concepts
  5. Meld presents single concept to client
  6. Client says “yep, pretty close, good work”.

Photo: Jono Yang

For me, Number 2 is the difference. Workshopping ideas with all client stakeholders early in the project means that we have a much more thorough idea of the problem space before embarking on concepting. Compare this to only receiving a written brief from a client (usually from a single stakeholder), where there’s no room for nuance or differences of opinion. This means that your concepts will be based on just one point of view and are bound to fail when presented to a larger group of stakeholders.

Now that we’ve presented these concepts we can embark on customer testing knowing that the client has a high degree of confidence in the prototypes. This is another key difference between my old way of working and my new way: the fact that we test our ideas with customers, but this deserves a post all of its own.


kimberley

Rigorous process does not equal great service experience

By Iain Published: December 19, 2011 | 1 Comment Posted in Customer experience, Service design

Overly rigorous processes are the enemy of meaningful customer experiences. Sounds counter-intuitive doesn’t it. Surely human delivery is the enemy of efficient processes, hence why so many organisations try to take the human out of service delivery altogether either by actually replacing them by machines, or by so tightly documenting their processes that they are asked to operate as little more than second-rate machines.

But the drive for consistent processes can leave services feeling sterile and those involved in the delivery of the service neutered. Exceptional service delivery requires us to empower those that deliver services by providing them with tools, decision frameworks and guidelines from which their human traits, such as warmth, engagement and empathy, can shine.

I was struck by two airline safety videos recently that embrace the kind of service delivery to which I refer:

It can be no coincidence that both airlines are bucking the financial trends within the airline industry. Their focus on service delivery and customer experience shows they are at a completely different level of organisational maturity when it comes to thinking about service.

These successes and approaches are not limited to airlines, but they do appear to be more prevalent in industries that are feeling the type of pain currently being felt by this sector.

“The computer says no”

By contrast, a recent stay at a hotel with my family revealed quite the opposite experience. We arrived early, as is my wont, and attempted to check-in to our room. Although the receptionist was able to inform us that our room was ready, she was unable to process us and provide us with an electronic key because the computer wouldn’t allow it to happen.

This “computer says no” customer service experience has been the norm for too many years. It is the embodiment of process over experience, of humans involved in service delivery being neutered of their powers to deliver good service.

Overly officious processes take all the personality out of a service experience and they make it impossible for staff to deal with customers who don’t play by the pre-defined rules.

Adapt

I have just finished reading Tim Harford’s excellent book, Adapt. In one of the chapters towards the end he talks about successful adaptive organisations – those that respond well to changing markets and circumstances. He uses the examples of Whole Foods Market (US), Timpson (UK) and Google as highly decentralised environments where much of the decision-making is taken on the shop floor rather than in the board room.

Frameworks, tools and guidelines for local decision-making and service delivery are crucial elements to future proof an organisation for the fluctuations of their market. Highly documented and regimented processes just aren’t adaptive enough to deal with the types of conditions occurring in many industries.

That isn’t to say that old school homogeneity is about to die out overnight, or is completely irrelevant. But organisations that have taken the person out of the personality of their service are likely to be in for some painful times.

Iain

Reflections on 2011

By Iain Published: December 19, 2011 | Leave a comment Posted in Musings

2011 has been an exciting year for Meld Studios. The following are some of the highlights of the year.

1) We are twice as big as we were last year

Not that size is everything and at this time of year this is generally the kind of reflection that initiates massive dietary correction for the new year, but in this case it is all good. We started the year as 4 and we end it as 8 (plus).

The arrivals of Jono, Kimberley, Alison and Santiago throughout the year have bolstered our numbers, and added breadth, depth and capacity to what we offer our clients.

Our full-time staff were augmented by our extended network of experienced designers and interns including Katie, Alex M, Alex C, Nick and Dom. Continue reading “Reflections on 2011” »

Iain

Service Design: A Twitter discussion with Dave Gray & friends

By Steve Published: December 2, 2011 | Leave a comment Posted in Musings, Service design

The following conversation took place via Twitter on Tuesday 29th November (late Monday 28th November in north america) between myself, Dave Gray, and a variety of other people. The topic was Service Design, with two main sub-topics: the main challenge for organisations contemplating service design/delivery; and the role of the service designer.

The conversation has been edited slightly for clarity – some comments have been reordered to better reflect the conceptual flow of the discussion; and some extraneous remarks have been removed.

Dave Gray: @docbaty do you agree w @breasy that the biggest challenge is not service design so much as getting companies to adapt so they can deliver?

Steve Baty: @davegray I suspect @breasy’s perspective is skewed based on the clients walking through their doors….

Steve Baty: @davegray so I agree that org change to enable service delivery is a major challenge, …

Steve Baty: @davegray but I also think many, many orgs still do not engage in the intentional activity of designing the services they deliver.

Steve Baty: @davegray In other words, my quibble with @breasy would be around the choice of the word ‘biggest’.

Dave Gray: @docbaty it seems to me that in many cases fundamental & difficult redesign of the org will be required b4 services can be delivered well.

[Dave Malouf (@daveixd): @docbaty I'm Sorry we won't be hearing you say any of that. :( ] (Referring to a conference presentation that was cancelled at the last minute.)

Steve Baty: @davegray This is very true, and org change needed is both structural and cultural in many cases. SD would provide a vision for that change.

Dave Gray: @docbaty well I am paraphrasing @breasy and probably not well.

Steve Baty: @davegray I think some industries more so than others; some markets/countries too. Not in violent disagreement, however.

Steve Baty: @davegray The folks at Live|Work certainly speak from a position of credibility in the SD space. I respect the perspective.

(Dave picks up on a separate conversation thread regarding the role of Service Designers…) Dave Gray: @docbaty and the role of the service designer? I do think facilitation is a huge part of it. Not only frontstage/backstage but customers too.

Elliot Felix (@elliotfelix): @docbaty @davegray @daveixd @enemel What about the argument that to facilitate well you have to know the content (design, in this case)?

Steve Baty: @davegray I agree that facilitation is important, but if a professional designer brings no more *design* capability to the table…?

(Commenting on designer-as-facilitator) Steve Baty: @elliotfelix @davegray @daveixd @enemel These felt more like process experts rather than content experts, if that makes sense.

Dave Gray: @docbaty design is critical. But is it possible that a service designer’s role is more as design educator than design practitioner?

Dave Gray: @docbaty @elliotfelix @daveixd @enemel I just saw a great article about service design facilitation challenges… Will look for the link.
(From UC Berkeley School of Information: Bridging the “Front Stage” and “Back Stage” in Service System Design by Glushko and Tabas, June 2007. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/999373q6)

Steve Baty: @davegray I’ve seen SD practiced that way – often by non-designers with a knowledge of design processes & methods.

Steve Baty: @davegray And they’re successful at it. I would hope, though, either as educator or practitioner, a Designer would be *better at it*

Dave Gray: @docbaty I’ve seen great designers who suck at teaching it, and great teachers who suck at doing it. The best of course are good at both.

Steve Baty: @davegray I guess that’s part of what I’m saying: that last part is implicitly lost if we focus only on the facilitation part.

Matt Ridings (@techguerilla) : @davegray @docbaty not to dive off the deep end here, but doesn’t the line between SD & org design eventually gray ?

Dave Gray: @docbaty @elliotfelix @daveixd @enemel article made some great points about frontstage language eg personas and backstage eg process maps

Steve Baty: @techguerilla @davegray Short answer is Yes. Longer answer goes something like: “How dare you!? Step outside.”

Dave Gray: @techguerilla I believe it does. Design never met a boundary it didn’t want to cross :) @docbaty

Steve Baty: @davegray We produce fairly detailed service maps showing front & backstage interactions, underlying processes, systems etc…

Elliot Felix: @davegray @docbaty @daveixd @enemel Thanks Dave. Design educator vs. practitioner is a good pt (I have a design with – not for – bias tho)

Steve Baty: @davegray … and then as a discussion point with the broad project team.

Steve Baty: @davegray Yes, those too. Revenue & cost modelling; profitability forecasts and sensitivity analysis to changes in R & C.

Elliot Felix: @davegray @docbaty @daveixd @enemel there were a few talks at #sdnc11 on “toolkits don’t turn people into designers” too (my paraphrase).

Steve Baty: @davegray My last design project brief read: “We’d like you to help us design a new business.”

Dave Gray: @docbaty so I’m imagining a lot of facilitation & negotiation then. The role sounds a lot like a broker.

Dave Gray: @docbaty well that definitely crosses the line @techguerilla was drawing there.

Steve Baty: @davegray @techguerilla I try not to let definitions stop me :)

Steve Baty: @davegray There is (the role of Broker), but there’s also deconstruction and critical analysis. Identifying & questioning constraints. Asking “What if”…

Steve Baty: @davegray We operate essentially as a design-led business/management consultancy

Matt Ridings: @docbaty @davegray Wondering if there’s a distinction between ‘design’ and ‘structure’ in there somewhere.

Dave Gray: @docbaty a new business is by definition a design problem. All entrepreneurs are designers in that sense.

Dave Gray: @techguerilla well there is a difference between design and engineering. Although many engineers fancy themselves designers @docbaty

Steve Baty: @davegray I agree with the first part; disagree with the second (re: new businesses). There’s an intentionality & thoughtfulness needed.

Dave Gray: @techguerilla … And the best architects have a deep understanding of materials and construction techniques @docbaty

Dave Gray: @docbaty I’ve never met a [successful] entrepreneur who lacked thoughtfulness and intent.

Matt Ridings: @docbaty @davegray Biz Design in isolation of impetus = Startup, Design inclusive of evolutionary needs = Enterprise :)

Dave Gray: @techguerilla sentence with equal signs = me confused @docbaty

Dave Gray: @elliotfelix @docbaty I think g+ is better for this kind of convo. Not very mobile-friendly. But better and easier to include more people.

Matt Ridings: @davegray @docbaty i.e. it’s a hell of a lot harder to design something that has to get from point A than to just build point A from scratch

Steve Baty: @davegray True, but you slipped an important qualifier in there. Successful

Steve Baty: @davegray But the graveyard of businesses is also littered with many well-designed concepts. No guarantees there either.

Matt Ridings: @davegray @docbaty Same reason best consultants are polymaths.

Steve Baty: @davegray Coming back a little – SD projects tend to cut across silos, so facilitation & negotiation are important…

Matt Ridings: @docbaty now *that* would be interesting exercise. great biz designs from the annals of failed corps. Plenty of them I would think.

Dave Gray: @docbaty hahaha lol. Yes I assume success. Apologies. But unsuccessful entrepreneurs to me are just so many buzzing flies, easily ignored :)

Steve Baty: @davegray … and making the case for the org change needed to execute is a change management issue of some magnitude (as discussed).

Dave Gray: @docbaty that’s exactly what I mean. True service design necessarily affects the whole business in one way or another. It’s business design.

Steve Baty: @davegray I’d just like to think that years of design education and practice are worth something when it comes to, well, design projects.

(At this point the conversation split off into several different threads – an article of Dave’s published recently: http://www.dachisgroup.com/2011/11/everything-is-a-service/ well worth a read; and the upcoming IA Summit in New Orleans in March.)

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Steve

Some of the ideas you won’t hear from me this week…

By Steve Published: November 28, 2011 | 1 Comment Posted in Musings, Presenting

I’m very frustrated right now, having just received an email telling me that my presentation at a conference on customer self-service has to be cancelled due to a contractual conflict with the conference sponsor.

I had been asked at short notice – last Monday – to stand in for another presenter, and have worked to put together a presentation looking at the principles to be applied to customer experiences to maintain their human-centredness, and avoid technology being the sole driver. Those ideas will no longer get a voice at the conference, but I thought I would share at least some of them here.

So, here’s a really high-level outline of what I was going to talk about…

Technologies shaping customer experiences
1. Mobile & mobility (inc. GPS)
2. Social
3. Internet access & use
4. RFID
5. Contactless cards
6. Mobile payments

Implications for customer experiences
1. Customers expect access 24/7, real-time
2. Expect customers to be informed, but don’t assume it. Information asymmetry will still exist, but it will be a question of desire, not capability.
3. If they can’t ask you they’ll ask someone; and probably first. The power of social networks for product/service research, customer servicing, and loyalty.
4. Information needs to flow, and follow the customer
5. Expect customers to jump between channels, but don’t force them to do so

Design principles
1. Use technology to do the heavy lifting – automate and streamline as much as possible
2. Understand your brand, and the power of interactions with a ‘real person’. Use them where they’ll have the most impact.
3. Don’t lock information into a specific channel
4. Look for analogs in other industries, and look at how they might be transferred and adapted
5. Use technology where there’s a clear value to the customer and to the business. It doesn’t make sense otherwise.

 

 

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Steve

Spatial Seduction by figure3

By Jono Published: November 28, 2011 | Leave a comment Posted in Service design

I was fortunate to have attended the wonderful and exciting Service Design Global Conference 2011 in San Francisco in late October, where Meld Studios also presented two presentations. The weather was lovely in San Francisco and I got to see a lot of the city which I haven’t seen before when I visited two years ago.

The theme of the conference was ‘From sketch book to spread sheet’. It focused on the exploration and discussion of what happens when service design meets business and how this relationship can be developed and grown into the future. Many speakers generously shared how they have implemented service design in an organisation including the struggles, ups and downs and solutions. Many also shared new tools and methods in how to approach future challenges in service design.

With my background in interior design, one of the presentations that resonated with me was ‘Spatial Seduction: Using Service Design to Rekindle Customer Loyalty’, presented by Jennifer Young and Andrew Gallici from figure3, an interior design firm focused on designing innovative spaces based in Toronto, Canada. It was exciting to see service design principles being used in the interior design industry where it is fairly unrepresented, and I hope that in the near future we will get to hear more about the use of service design in the built environment.

The process

Similar with service design firms, figure3 deploys a process that starts with a DISCOVERY phase, which involves scoping out the project as well as client and customer engagement and research. This phase is followed by a TRANSLATION phase where the findings, facts and stories are translated into insights and possible strategies that then inform the next stage of the process, IDEATION or design. The process ends with the REALISATION of the design, where the space is built and occupied by both the service provider and the customers.

In the presentation, Young and Gallici suggested that the environment is formed by the cultural, the behavioural and the spatial, and in the middle of the three lies the ideal user experience. This identification of the placement of the user experience is what makes figure3’s practice unique. Being an interior design firm, their design is not limited to the digital or the two dimensional, it is multi-sensory by nature. They are essentially creating an ecosystem that is inhabitable and three dimensional, and which also houses both services, customers, and the mechanisms that allows the service to be performed. As said by Young, it is to ‘Create an immersive customer experience’.

Case study 1 – Rogers Plus

In the two case studies that were presented in the presentation, Young and Gallici demonstrated how figure3 has used interior design and spatial planning to facilitate the service in the space. The first was Rogers Plus, a telecommunication provider in Canada, where the organisation has focused too much on the front end image and expectation to the customers through advertising and media, neglecting to match it to the service and physical store they were providing to the customers. The display cabinets that displayed cellphones and artifacts were locked and presented as artifacts similar to what we would see in a museum. This conveyed the perception that the products were too precious for customers to touch and interact. Through the creation of persona, fugure3 mapped out the environments that customers would be drawn to first and what kind of personal experience they would be expected to be welcomed by accordingly.

The outcome was a space where the the front of the store became the initiation point for conversations and engagement, where customers are free to touch and interact with the artifact and the back of the store provided privacy for more intimate and personal engagement between the staff and customer where personal product consultation can take place.


Redesigned Rogers Plus store. Image credit: figure3

Case study 2 – BMO

The second case studies was BMO (Bank of Montreal) where currently the tellers and customers are divided by a wall, which denotes the idea of ‘them and us’. The personal bankers, financial advisers and bank managers are enclosed and isolated in their personal offices with frosted glass. The overall atmosphere was unwelcoming and unfriendly.

The redesigned space aligned the space with the service. Young and Gallici described this interplay like dance choreography, ‘It’s about activating interaction in that space’. figure3 removed the physical obstructions to allow customer service to take place. Rather than dividing teller and customers with dividing screens or partitions, the partitions now casually divides each individual tellers, creating essentially an intimate and private teller station. The offices of each personal banker, financial adviser and bank manager is now fitted with clear glass with the staff all facing the entry into the space. The design not only changes the customers perception of the space and of the brand, but also changed how staff behaves in the space. As Young described ‘Everyone in this bank is a greeter’. Staff were not forced and going out of their way to provide the service, but rather they are naturally encouraged and facilitated by the environment to provide a welcoming experience and service.


Redesigned BMO branch. Image credit: figure3

Both design projects realised a change in the perception of spaces as well as change in behaviour in the space. This renewal provided an alignment of the space to the service they provide. With this in mind, if we look at it from another perspective, it’s to support the service, by creating an environment to optimise the service and consequently elevating the overall experiences. If anything these examples demonstrate how the unrealised potential within existing services can be changed through careful attention to the spatial interactivity of the business environment, without altering the essential service being provided.

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Jono

The progress of interaction design

By Steve Published: November 23, 2011 | Leave a comment Posted in Interaction design

(Republished from interaction.ixda.org)

As the focus of the work of Interaction Designers has shifted from direct control-response interfaces to the design for behaviour and activity, the nature of our work has also shifted away from the design of discrete interactions to the consideration of complete, integrated systems.

These systems are comprised of many discrete pieces, with the object of design being the behaviour of the system as a whole. That system includes, necessarily and intentionally, the people engaged in those discrete interactions; and must – also necessarily – take into account the variability inherent in people.

At this scale, the impact of a change in one individual component or element of the system can have a disproportionate effect on the operation of the system as a whole. To use a scientific phrase, the system is non-linear. To address the design challenge inherent in such systems our approach must also be non-linear. The complexity of the behaviour of the system in response to changes in individual pieces cannot be fully anticipated or predicted using an incremental, linear approach. Direct causality is difficult, if not impossible to trace; and the impact of a change may not become apparent until long after the trigger event.

The introduction of Design methods, with an inherent non-linearity in the form of multiple, concurrent streams of concept definition, evaluation and refinement, appropriately addresses the uncertainty that exists when designing such systems.

In his recent post to Johnny Holland – Designerly ways of working in UX – Jonas Löwgren explores some of these Design methods, and how they manifest in the design of digital systems when merged with the more engineering-centric tradition of human-computer interaction and usability.

The applicability of these design methods, and the interaction designer’s understanding of designing systems that channel and shape human behaviour, can be seen well beyond the digital interfaces discussed by Jonas. These same basic principles are embedded in the educational program at theAustin Center for Design, founded by Jon Kolko. Now in its second year, AC4D is teaching students a form of interaction design that is more akin to social change, innovation and entrepreneurship than it does to the software and interface design of the mid- to late 80’s from whence Interaction Design was born.

The discipline is the same; the process is the same; the philosophy is the same. What we’re seeing in Austin is a more explicit recognition of the power of interaction design to humanise technology and truly embed people – both functionally and ethically – at the centre of the design process.

Interaction Design is maturing into an exciting, diverse, and rich design discipline with its own challenges, burning questions, and purpose. As we approach Interaction12 in Dublin in February 2012, I’m personally excited by the speed with which our discipline is burgeoning, and how the diversity of our practice manifests itself in the people and ideas on show.

 

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Steve