Response to Live|Work Interview and Text

About the Authors

Live|Work, a Service Innovation Design Company, began in 2001 with 3 partners: Chris Downs, Ben Reason, and Lavrans Lovle.  They are interaction and web designers who are concerned with networks and service, which means they are promoting use over consumption.  Live|Work was one of the first service design agencies, so the founders found it necessary to develop dual-purpose language about service design that would appeal to both designers and academics alike.

Summary of the LiveWork Interview

Services exist over time and are experienced through multiple touch-points.  Service ecology maps the way actors would interact within a given system.  Services are intangible and don’t really exist, so Live|Work has had to find evidence of how such services would work – the service experience. (i.e. evidencing).  Evidence is about faking the experience by developing facts/artifacts that describe the impact of a service.  Actors and objects involved must be considered (who, what, when, where, how); time and community rules must be recorded.  Prototyping: how can you do it fast and cheap?

Summary of the Live|Work text (beginning on page 30)

The founders of Live|Work want to promote use over consumption, which means that they are interested in designing service or service experiences rather than products.  In order to do this, future service experiences must be better than the quality and desirability of products people own/consume.  In short, they ask how do you get someone to desire their banking service?

Designing services includes “…full service that takes into account all the stakeholders, thinking about what the bank-end system is having to do, what the motivations of the staff are, and the motivations of the competitors.  The customer experience is part of that” (Services p.417).

Service Design (p. 420-21)

  1. Design and development of intangible experiences

  2. Uses touch-points to reach people

  3. Should be crafted with same level of care and expertise as products, interactions, and interfaces

  4. Must learn how to inscribe cultural meaning into a service (we know how to do this with object/interfaces)

 

Service Equity
Image: Live|Work Service Equity = Service Design + Service Thinking

Service Ecologies (p. 421-422)

  1. Process used to establish a systemic view of a service and the context it will operate in

  2. Map service ecologies: map the actors affected by the service, relationships between actors, reveal new opportunities and inspire ideas, establish the overall service concept

  3. Create sustainable service ecologies where the actors exchange value in ways that are mutually beneficial over time

Services should be more sustainable since you pay for a value you receive/use, instead of a product you purchase/consume.  Service ecology is like a natural ecology in that it cannot be fully analyzed or understood, but it does help when making decisions.  Service ecology thinking acknowledges multiple partners over time, unlike product design, where value is exchanged. Value can be intrinsic such as value in trust and emotion. 

 

Touch-Points (p. 422-23)

  1. Tangibles that make up the total experience of using a service

  2. Can take many forms: advertising, web interactions, mobile phone & PC interface, bills, CSRs

  3. Should be crafted to create a clear and consistent unified customer experience

  4. Analogy: Journey through a service experience where there are important moments within the journey – want the experience to seem multi-dimensional

  5. Transitions between touch-points are on-ramps and off-ramps

“Every service has a bill. Every service has an interface. But the way you transition between those things is where the brand of the service can live: in-between experiences can be designed” (422).

 

Service Envy (p. 423)

Products serve two basic needs: 1) perform the function they are made to do and 2) confirm and communicate the owner’s personal values – we identify ourselves through a complex product and brand language.  Services must also communicate the owner’s personal values and this should be the ultimate goal of the service designer.

Free Oil Change for Life
Image: Nissan, Free Oil Change for Life

Evidencing (p. 423-24)

  1. Animated ideas that represent the mapped assumptions about future service

  2. Focus on design of service and its effects

  3. Examples of evidence: newspaper article describing service results and third-party responses

  4. Archeology of the future: allows designers to make early qualitative judgments about design implications

  5. Faking it: quick and informal techniques used to create evidence (ex: fake bills as evidence that a service exists)

Evidencing “allows customers and collaborators to ‘play back’ their own assumptions as concrete experiences rather than abstract evaluations” (423).

 

Experience Prototyping (p. 424)

  1. Prototypes of service experience are similar to prototypes of product

  2. Prototypes should be fast and as cheap as possible

  3. Include multiple service touch-points set the scene and determine place/time of service experience

  4. Participants must suspend their disbelief during the experience

The goal is to get an intimate and subjective idea about what the service experience would be like.

 

Service Experience Models (p. 425-26)

The model is an invaluable way to develop, refine, share, and present designs (425).  Service models represent or do the following:

  1. Represent intangible experiences

  2. Should use formats to convey the experience and the functions of the service in an immediate way

  3. SE models allow for easy evaluation of the viability of the services

  4. SE models allow for easy sharing of service experience concepts with potential users, colleagues, and decision makers

  5. SE models will be what is used to determine whether a service should go into development, needs further development, or should be ditched

New services require lots of new touch-points and it is easier to fake them than design them in full.  But you need more than just a prototype – it must be a believable prototype so that the conversation can be focused on the experience of the object instead of the unrealness of the prototype.

 

Service Blue-Printing (p. 426)

  1. Describes a service in enough detail to implement and maintain it

  2. Used during development by designers, developers, and business process managers

  3. Used as a daily guide by service managers to inform them of the features and quality of the service (technical specs & infrastructure, brand management)

Classic design principles, such as usability testing, will be used once the “Go-Live” date approaches.

 

Sources

Live Work Interview with Reason, Lovle, Downs

Live|Work Chapter, Services

Service Equity [Image]. http://www.livework.co.uk/

March 24th, 2009 in Visual Rhetoric/Doc Design