Service Design – Guardian Supplement

There was a Service Design Supplement in the Guardian this morning!

It’s great to see some publicity being given to Service Design, with the Guardian (my favourite paper) creating a ten page supplement. Customer Journey Mapping is one of the tools used by service designers, and to me it is the link between Web 1.0 usability and customer experience, and a more rounded multi-channel view of online as part of a Customer Journey delivering system with synchronised and coordinated channels.

Go to the Guardian website here, or download your PDF from the Service Design Network website.

Different Customer Journeys for Fridges, Flowers and Frocks

The idea that there might be a standardised, genericised customer journey is frustrating and exasperating! If we could in actuality apply a standard sales process to e-commerce, wouldn’t it have been done it by now?

It’s not as easy as that. And this is a good thing because it means that a well designed customer journey that really fits the buying process can make significantly more sales for the business and satisfaction for the customer.

I think the real world customer journey critically depends on:

• The type of product, and what is attractive about it
• The customers motivation
• The customers mindset and context

Let’s test this. Let’s take a standardised, genericised view of the world, as embodied in Jakob Neilsen’s Top Ten Homepage Guidelines and look to see if they are useful or not. And let’s take a hard one, on that looks obvious, like:

Usability guideline No. 5 “Include a Search Input Box”

Obviously true? Not  necessarily. Not when you look harder. Different customers buying different products take different customer journeys. When you think about it, it is not obvious that a simple search box is always appropriate.

If you are a retailer (or designing for a retailer), you might consider these questions, for starters:

• Why a search box at all, when would my customer use it?
• What would my customer type in?
• What would my customer expect the results to look like?

The answers to these questions will inform a retailers strategy to support your particular customers journey, support their buying process, their needs. It is not just about the simple presence or absence of a widget on a website. To illustrate, let’s take three examples…

Frocks

Different Frock sellers might have quite different views of search, depending on their product sales strategy. One view might be to embrace search and develop it using knowledge of what customers were searching for. Next prioritise search in a very visible box, white out of black, at the top of very colourful page, with results being presented in a ‘boxy’ visual style.

But a different view might be to have a preference for navigation and browse over search, believing that the emotional impact of seeing the right item in the best possible presentation is the key to making a sale. This sales strategy might include a deprioritised search box, out of sight at the top right blind spot, like net-a-porter . The pages of frocks here are beautifully presented as if on a rail, and the navigation includes items like ‘designers’, ’boutiques’, as opposed to Next‘s ‘Women’, ‘Men’, ‘Shoes’, ‘Sports’ …

Which is right? Well, both, because they are both thought-through sales strategies that target different markets using different designed experiences to sell to different customers with different intents.

Fridges

Fridges are different to Frocks, and have little emotional connection for most of us, so filter down search is an excellent option over browse. And this time it must be search with all the possible bells, whistles and comparison data, like Currys provide. Size, capacity, eco-rating, etc… all contribute to our purchase decision.

Fridges are a rational purchase, which are made logically and driven by data. Fridges are not frocks, and the customer journey and decision criteria are just not the same.

Flowers

And Flowers, would anyone search for flowers? I’d say it was unlikely. The key difference for flowers is that it is a purchase for someone else and the decision will likely be decided by budget, availability and delivery. In fact, size, shape, and even colour might not be important.

The browse bias of flowersdirect provides a great support for this customer journey with an effective backup deprioritised search for those needing something specific.

To Search or Not to Search?

Where does this leave Jakob’s No.5 – “Include a Search Input Box”? It seems this is not as straightforward as it initially seemed.

Search should be included if it supports the customer journey, and your sales strategy. But access can be controlled by visually prioritising and deprioritising, and presenting results that fit the way you want to sell.

This is good for those involved in designing, improving and optimising the customer journey because it gives us an opportunity to use creativity, colour, copy and customer insight to make more sales for businesses and better experiences for customers.

Broken Customer Journey – HM Revenue and Customs

This relates a real experience I had with the HM Revenue and Customs Online Tax and NI customer journey.

It started with great design, but ended in a disastrous customer journey.

I was very successfully persuaded with a very clever piece of offline design to sign up! But when I tried, the rest of the journey was uninspiring and unpersuasive in the extreme, so I decided to stick with the cheque-stamp-and-post I currently use.

The business results for HM Revenue are clear – they made a big investment in a piece of very good offline design and associated print costs, but did not follow through and design the whole journey.

This is a common mistake made by many business that are in ‘offline’ and ‘online’ silos.

The customer journey spans online and offline they need to be designed together. Leaving parts of customer journey to chance will result almost always in a fail.

How To Create a Buzz By Moving Chairs Around

If we think of designing experiences like theatre shows or films are designed, then it is clear that nothing must be left to chance. But people aren’t actors, so we can’t give them lines, we can’t determine what they do. Can we?

Well we can, within limits, and an easy way to do this is by restricting choice. If we know what we want to achieve, we can restrict choice so that our desired outcome is much more likely. This isn’t horrible or nasty or even obvious. But it is designed.

A simple example of this came across quite strongly in a very practical and simple way at a conference I attended recently.

I enjoyed the conference, there were good speakers and an attentive audience. But sitting there in the audience, I was aware of a large number of empty chairs dotted around, and lots of people were isolated.

So it didn’t look full, and, maybe, this wasn’t so encouraging for audience and speakers. But I knew the event was sold out and if I were the organisers I would want to make a ‘wow, it’s full’ experience for participants to make a great event feel superlative.

make the conference experience feel sold out, full, exclusive, buzzy

So I got to thinking what you might do to make the conference experience feel sold out, full, exclusive, buzzy.When you think about seating arragements, there are three options:

1. Put loads of chairs out and hope everyone sat at the front
2. Put loads of chairs out and when people didn’t sit at the front, ask them if they would
3. Put exactly the right amount of chairs out – one per ticket sold.

To get the ‘sold out’ feel  you’d obviousy do 3. And by simply restricting choice – of seat in this case -  you can make people feel “Wow, what an event, it was packed out, no room to move, and guess what I was sat next to this really interesting guy…”.

Just by taking away a few chairs … so that the experience is properly staged.

Just Five Seconds To Decide

Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Blink : The Power of Thinking without Thinking’, is a great book. Gladwell has an easy style and big ideas. Here he talks about the way that we make decisions ‘in the blink of an eye’. This is a pre-cognitive activity, not available for introspection. Or in other words, we get an impression, make an opinion, but we don’t know why.

He calls this magic moment ‘thin-slicing’ and proves through the book with anecdotal and experimental evidence that this effect is real and frequently deployed by individuals, knowingly or unknowingly. It’s an unconscious process, quick and often righter than a slower more conscious and more logical processes.

We do a hell of a lot more with our unconscious than we currently accept

What does this mean? Well, it means that ‘sensible and logical’ ideas might easily fail if they do not stand up to the blink test. It means that we do a hell of a lot more with our unconscious than we currently accept. It means that we judge more quickly than we admit. There has been a recent study from Carleton University in Canada, reported by the BBC that says that we made judgments about whether we ‘like’ or ‘don’t like’ websites in very short times. It seems to me that much web activity is carried out in the blink of an eye.

We did some research on the choice of Google search listings for a major high street bank a little time ago using what we rather grandly called a Blink Usability Protocol based on flashing up different manipulations of SERPS listings and we got some fascinating results, but now I see that that idea has been taken to a logical conclusion – crowdsourcing the research. Fivesecondtest now provides a way to do this just like that, in five seconds. I suggest you take a look. Quickly. See what you think.

Usability Driven Off Track by Jakob Nielsen

Its interesting to think, as I did the other day when putting together a short introduction to usability for the IMRG, how different perspectives on an idea can drive it away from its initial trajectory and lose its richness.

The first concepts of HCI (Human Computer Interaction) from many years ago (yes, pre-internet) was very broad. It encompassed a rich picture of all user experiences and all aspects of people interacting with computers.

Hawdale Associates current concept is again a broad, rich and business focussed Customer Journey view, and inclusive of usability.

But between these, and still very prevalent, exists a concept of usability that I think of as nitpicking, guidelines based, opinionated, fiddly and big brother. We lost the richness of HCI. How did it come to this?

How? Bloody Jakob Nielsen that how.

Lets think back to my formative years and my favourite reads. First out of the bag, the Don himself.

Don Norman wrote ‘User-Centred System Design’ in 1984 when the term usability did not exist, but issues were perceived as being about the understanding of systems, the communication of instructions and how it might be better if psychologists designed the interface.

This was a heavyweight principled user view. The stuff that Norman was writing about was based on Participatory Design originally out of Scandinavia in the 70’s. Hard socialist stuff. Users partipate in design, design is good, work is fun. Big user focus, all centred around the user.

Around the same time, Brenda Laurel’s ‘Computers as Theatre’ invented the term ‘User Experience’ and stressed narrative, context and psychological flow. And this is when software was NOT the web! A golden era was being unveiled about how it would be when the user interface was transparent and precisely revealed the system model.

But the book that made a practical difference was Jakob Neilsen’s ‘Usability Engineering’ in 1993 which established the term ‘usability’ and put it in the mainstream. We all read the book, gasped at the risky guerilla tactics and realised that if we did HCI in this way then people would listen to us (as they didn’t before this, however worthy we were!). And, consequently, we all made sites and software on hell of a lot better and easier to use. So whatever we think of him, Nielsen made a big splash, that cannot be denied.

But alongside all of that, the major HCI / Computers as Theatre plot line about communication, flow, narrative, psychology and customer centricity heralded by Norman and Laurel got lost in Nielsen’s gray view of the world, and designers were set against usability engineers rather than working together.

Finally, I got fed up of being tarred by Nielsens 1001 guidelines brush, he’s a ‘distinguished engineer’, I’m a psychologist doing HCI.

Customer Journey gets us back to Norman and Laurel (and Pine and Gilmore, and Godin) to deliver good customer journey for both users and businesses.

Let’s get back and centre on the customer and finally leave Nielsens one-size-fits-all 1001 guidelines behind.