Electronic Ink | Experience Clarity

Service Design Improves the Customer Experience

An airport knows exactly how many tickets are sold on any given day. But passengers still clog the security lines – sometimes thousands deep for one or two open lanes.

The data are there. The airport could conceivably open and staff its security lanes commensurate to tickets sold, scaling up when the majority of passengers moves through the system, and back down when volume decreases.

But it doesn’t happen. Reams of data pile up somewhere – and go unnoticed, never translated into the insight that could drive better design of this experience.

A new discipline is evolving to address exactly these types of problems: Service Design. It’s the analysis, design and build of customer experiences in complex environments – like airports.

Electronic Ink is helping to define the practice of Service Design. Company CEO and Founder Harold Hambrose is a frequent speaker on the topic at international conferences. While other design firms are still discussing their early ideas and forming philosophies, Hambrose presents groundbreaking projects Electronic Ink has been conducting in places such as prison systems, hospitals, retail chains, and professional sports stadiums – everywhere that people move through spaces and interact with each other, systems, and technologies.

Recently, Electronic Ink’s Design Research and Design Exploration specialists have found themselves:

• Moving through a criminal justice system as would a convict, to discover new opportunities to leverage technology to tighten security
• Shadowing nurses in an intensive care unit, to analyze tools used in treatment, from the traditional to the technological
• Following customers throughout a retail experience, studying the placement of staff, signage and product and observing shopping behavior
• Tracking operations at a large corporation, determining systems that are working well – as well as systems that are avoided by users

In every one of these endeavors, Electronic Ink translates findings into insight that drives better design. Sometimes it’s a subtle process improvement. Sometimes it’s a new solution satisfying an unmet need. All of the time, it’s the injection of design into new dimensions to dramatically improve the customer experience.

Myriad forms of return on investment are gained; greater efficiencies, heightened productivity, improved accuracy – and perhaps most important, greater trust in the service provider and the brand.

Electronic Ink leverages the varied skill sets of specialists in user experience design to assemble multidisciplinary Service Design team that includes anthropologists, cognitive psychologists, information architects, interaction designers, software designers and systems engineers (to name just a few) who:

• Perform analysis of existing service cycles within organizations
• Observe roles actions, timing, dialogue, and the emotional state of humans within the system
• Analyze existing technology and evaluate its ability to enable the achievement of business objectives
• Create a moment-to-moment record of all actors as they travel through service cycles
• Construct models of service events that show the perspectives of key stakeholders – such as customers, employees, even company leadership
• Use those models to drive design improvements