CHAPTER 7
Prototyping Service Experiences
Expectations versus Experiences
Considering Time as an Object of Design
Service Experience Prototyping
When Ben’s six-year-old daughter (Figure 7.1) fell off her bike and bit through half her tongue, he and his wife took her to the local hospital, where the staff did not have the skills to stitch it up, then to the University College London Hospital, where there is a specialist facial injuries team.
FIGURE 7.1
Ben’s daughter experiencing a swing.
At first, the registrar suggested that the operation could be done under local anesthetic, which seemed crazy to Ben, his wife, and the nurse, who clearly had more experience with small children. They then waited for 10 hours while the surgery team worked on a more serious car accident patient before Ben’s daughter finally went into the operating room.
It was a short procedure (20 minutes) and the nurse promised to call Ben and his wife when their daughter was out of surgery so they could be there as she came out of the anaesthetic. This did not happen, and they spent an hour or more worrying that something had gone seriously wrong. What had actually happened was that the nurse was on her own and had to stay with Ben’s daughter in recovery and was not able to call. Ben’s daughter was distraught over the absence of her parents, and all the while they were anxiously pacing nearby. The final happy outcome is that they all went home that night and now there is not even a scar on their daughter’s tongue.
Stories like this are common in healthcare, which helps to explain our ambivalence about the word “experience.” The experience was terrible but the medical outcome was excellent, and Ben and his wife know which they would prefer. In situations like this, a short-term bad experience is offset by long-term benefit or value. The real problem is in the management of the experience and expectations, and here is where service design can help iron out the kinks.
Defining Experience
The word “experience,” and the way it dominates the discussion of service design, feels somewhat unsatisfactory. It may be that the association with such manufactured experiences as a Disney vacation feels like service design is all about entertainment. The idea that we live in an experience economy where we are elevated above the basic needs of food, shelter, and health seems rather too focused on those who are so lucky.
It may also be that “experience” is a somewhat soft term that is difficult to defend against hard factors in services such as economics, operations, or policy. When one thinks about experience as a factor in a hospital, for example, it can be hard to argue for quality of experience when other significant medical matters must take priority.
Working with experiences is to service design what working with communications is to graphic design. The current and future experiences of people—customers, clients, users, patients, consumers—are the context in which service design works. Services can be promoted through positive experiences by ensuring that they meet or exceed users’ expectations. The reason experience is important is that, by telling the stories of the people who use or are affected by services, it is possible to either identify opportunities for innovation and improvement or describe future experiences as a way to communicate designs.
Service design is not just about the soft factors, however, such as making people feel good when they enter their hotel room or have a nice chat with someone in a call center. Service design has the ability to contribute to the effectiveness of a service in terms of the hard factors, too—positive economic results, successful operations, or beneficial policy outcomes. Many service design projects have created new revenue streams or boosted existing businesses.
Getting the experience right means gaining customer loyalty so that people are less likely to switch to another company. They are also more likely to recommend your service to someone else, doing your promotion work for you. In noncommercial contexts, people often have no option but to use a particular service, such as the tax office or unemployment services. The fact that users are locked in to using a service is not a reason to neglect their experiences, but all the more reason to make sure they experience something positive and engaging because they cannot escape it. This can make all the difference in a patient’s recovery of health or the uptake of a public policy.
There is some contention about whether one can even design an experience because it is obviously something that happens inside someone else’s mind and body. Of course, designers cannot really dictate people’s exact experiences, but anyone who has been absorbed in a film, novel, or amusement park experience, or who has been bullied or tried to make someone laugh, knows that experiences can be created in people by other people.
Designers can design the conditions for an experience, and one can see the importance of experience in many aspects of design, ranging from the UX design of digital interfaces to the broader context of design employed by the National Health Service in their experience-based design toolkit.1
Although experiences are a crucial element to understand and consider in service design, they are one of a number of factors alongside economics, operations, and domain expertise. It is the combination of all of these that comprise the entire service proposition, with the service user as an organizing “common ground” around whom all aspects of the service can focus.
Types of Experience
In a service design context, it helps to ask questions about what kinds of experiences we are talking about. Are we talking about task experiences—the experience of trying to get something done? Are we talking about commercial experiences—the experience and how it reflects our perception of value? Or are we talking about life experiences—the experience that shapes our wider quality of life?
We can break these down into the following four categories:
- User experience: interactions with technologies
- Customer experience: experiences with retail brands
- Service provider experience: what it is like on the other side
- Human experience: the emotional effect of services (e.g., healthcare) that impact quality of life and well-being
This is not an exhaustive list, but these are the main ones we want to take into account when designing services. Together they cover almost all of the aspects and interactions in services that are important to be aware of and consider in design. We have made a distinction between “user” and “customer” experiences because there are many situations in which users are not customers. Nurses are an obvious example because they are using services but are not paying customers. Nurses are also service providers, so roles frequently overlap, which is why the frontstage/backstage metaphor does not always work well. In many situations, such as someone browsing a website for research, people are users but not customers. In self-service scenarios, users and customers are the same thing, as we will describe below.
User Experience
UX design is a subject we expect many readers to be familiar with, so we do not try to redefine it here. We relate it mainly to task-based experiences, although in many situations these affect the commercial and life quality experiences, too.
An individual’s ability to complete tasks within a service can be crucial to the success of a service. The way that tasks are designed can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of the service as a whole, and tasks within a service are commonly redesigned in ways that increase service performance or revenue. In many situations, confusing wording, layout, or basic user interface design causes users to give up and try a different touchpoint channel or even a different service all together.2
Web-based services have pioneered a focus on user experience as an essential component of the way they operate. Google are able to evaluate how different shades of blue in links influence click-through rates on search results. This usability approach, based on understanding how well people can achieve their goals, is valuable and is applied by designers to a range of contexts, from shopping to city navigation.
In the context of a task-based activity, the experience of using a service is manifested in the sense of using a tool. Individuals are generally trying to use the tangible elements of a service, such as signage, interfaces, and communications, as they attempt to complete everyday tasks such as finding a train platform, buying tickets, or understanding the fare choices.
We suggest that user experience in this context is primarily concerned with tasks, short time frames, and interactions with nonhuman touchpoints.
Customer Experience
You may have clients whose main goal is to improve the experience their customers have when using services. This goal would seem to be an obvious thing for companies to want to achieve, but they are often more engaged in trying to make internal efficiencies and savings. To many companies, customers are just like any other part of the business, a resource to be managed.
Companies that do want to improve customer experience are not just dealing with soft factors. They calculate that such changes will increase the amount customers use and pay for their services in the first place, as well as reduce the number of customers who choose to take their custom elsewhere. Churn, as the turnover of customers between competing service providers is called, is a costly business. New customers must be persuaded to replace those who leave, which is generally more expensive than retaining existing ones.
Customer experience is in some senses the sum of the task experiences involved in using a service. If users are constantly frustrated when trying to complete goals and tasks, then they may leave and go elsewhere, and it only takes one or two poorly considered touchpoints for this to happen. This much is obvious, but customer experience is something more than a happy/unhappy binary dynamic.
As customers, we have expectations of a service in terms of quality and value that overarch the day-to-day tasks we undertake. These expectations are set by the brand and our experience of other services, and are closely tied to the amount we are paying. Consider budget airlines compared to premium air travel—the brand promise of each sets our service expectations. If our experience does not match our expectations, we are disappointed and become more likely to switch next time. In this case, the emotion of bad service is not just frustration but also a reflection on the quality we are getting for our money. We might hate the service on a budget flight (most people do), but it is exactly what we were promised when we booked the cheap ticket. Obviously, the ideal situation is for even cheap services, such as a budget airline, to have good service. The danger in cutting service quality as a cost-saving measure is that the race to the bottom is very quick indeed. Many other businesses can structure themselves to compete on price, in which case quality of service becomes the point of difference. Quality of service tends to be part of a company’s culture, and culture is much harder to restructure once it has been set.
In many respects, the management of customer experience is about managing the delivery of the service and customer expectations against what is actually delivered. “Customer experience” feels like an odd term to apply to public sector services such as education or healthcare, however. Nevertheless, it is a term more and more in use in public organizations as they find that they are compared to their commercial counterparts and that expectations have been set by politicians or others not directly engaged in having to provide the service.
Customer experiences are longer term than user experiences but generally have some limits to them, such as contractual limits on car rentals, phone plans, and insurance. You might have a positive or negative user experience when trying to enter credit card details for payment on Amazon, for example, but your customer experience encompasses a range of such smaller, task-based interactions. The customer experience is the total sum of a customer’s interactions with a service.
Service Provider Experience
Although they have shorter time spans, user experience and customer experience are still important aspects of any service design. In many cases, service experiences are co-produced by the customer and their interactions with a touchpoint, such as using a ticketing machine or speaking to a staff member. In these scenarios, the user experience and customer experience may be the same thing. If someone cannot operate a self-service check-in machine in an airport but no staff are available at the check-in counters, then the poor kiosk touchpoint user experience is also a poor customer and service experience.
One of the ways in which service design differs from UX design or customer experience design is that it is not just focused in one direction. Although the backstage/frontstage metaphor is often used in service design projects and blueprints, this metaphor can fall apart in many situations because it focuses on front-end, customer-facing experiences only.
A useful way of thinking about people’s roles in services is to think of every exit “off stage” as an entrance somewhere else. This is particularly true in situations in which the staff involved in delivering the service are service users and service providers at the same time.
To expand on our previous example, a nurse provides a service in at least two directions—to the patient and to the doctors. She may also provide services to the hospital administration and health insurance companies. At the same time, she is using internal hospital services (e.g., IT systems, catering, and security services), commercial laboratory services, and other sources of information (e.g., ambulance drivers, other nurses, literature, flyers, and databases).
In addition, the patient and the relatives or carers of the patient also provide information and, in some cases, services for nurses. When Andy’s two-year-old daughter broke her arm during a family vacation in Italy (our daughters do seem rather accident prone), the nurses made ample use of Andy’s friend who could speak Italian instead of calling on the services of an interpreter.
Here is where the customer/user nomenclature starts to fall apart. What do we call a nurse? She is not a customer, nor is she a user—these words and ways of thinking about how to design for her needs do not go far enough. Actor-network theory would have us call her an actor, or we could refer to her as an agent, but perhaps to think of her simply as a person in a role who has interactions in both directions is the easiest way to design for her.
Human Experience
Our experience with examining and designing service interactions between staff and customers has shown us that people see straight through things that are meant to be personal in a customer service contact if they are not really personal. A personalized mailing that is clearly a form letter is one obvious example that we mentioned in Chapter 1. Less obvious is someone reading through a script while pretending to be interested in and engaged with the customer, but without any emotional investment in the exchange. If staff do not really care, but just go through the motions of doing so, we feel a disconnect on a human level.
As Ben and Andy’s hospital stories illustrate, some service experiences are not primarily about tasks or customers but go much deeper and touch our emotions much more significantly. Most people experience this in longterm public services such as education or healthcare. When we interact with them, we feel there are tasks to be completed successfully, of course, but we also have a sense of the right to feel that there should be value in the delivery of these services because they impact who we are and our sense of ourselves. When teaching is reduced to cost savings on a per pupil basis, it misses the point of education. Human experience contains a huge range of emotions—pride, embarrassment, shame, euphoria, despair, joy, depression, love, hate—as well as the feelings elicted by smaller, everyday experiences, such as a child’s first word, a promotion at work, or even just a friendly interaction with a stranger.
As service designers start to apply their skills in personal, public, and social projects, it is essential that they consider the impact the service has on people and their sense of who they are. If things go wrong at the level of the human experience, the result is not just frustration or a simple economic equation—damage to a brand image or a missed sale—but something that affects the development of people’s lives.
These kinds of human experiences are often longer term, but they may comprise short experiences that stay with people for a lifetime. Education is again a good example. Most people have some memory of being either finally understood or unfairly misunderstood by a particular teacher. These are experiences that continue to affect people positively or negatively into their adult lives.
The human impact of services is also important to the brand experience and the bottom line in commercial services. A bad experience during a hotel stay or a conversation with a phone company’s call center is irritating and likely to lead to customers shopping elsewhere in future. In public services, such as healthcare, transportation, welfare, or energy, the human experience is essential because often no alternatives are available to the users of that service. Sadly, many of those services operate as a government-run monopoly in which there is little incentive to improve service and great pressure to cut costs. Service designers cannot single-handedly change the world, but they can offer a set of methods and approaches to help bridge the gap between service systems and human value.
Though the task of stitching up Ben’s daughter’s tongue was completed successfully and Andy’s daughter leaving the hospital in Genoa with her arm in plaster meant her stay there was over, clearly the impact on both families was long lasting. Going home with patched-up daughters helped us put the trauma behind us, but it showed us how, in other cases, a lack of attention to the human experience could be much more damaging and permanent.
The roles in these service scenarios are also much less clear cut because the service participant is much more involved in the service, unlike the clarity of being a customer. This is why thinking in terms of time spans—short term and long term—as well as the personal and global context of a service are critical to the service designer’s mindset when designing service experiences.
Expectations versus Experiences
Product experience is about the quality of tangibility. The fundamental concept to embrace when you design a service is that perceived quality is defined by the gap between what people expect and what they actually experience.3 Therefore, the primary focus for a service designer is to make sure that every interaction with the service sets the right level of expectation for the next interaction. It means that the level of quality and the nature of the experience need to be the same over time and across touchpoints.
This idea that the curve of the experience should be flat often runs contrary to conventional marketing wisdom that tends to look for “moments of truth,” and to the ideals of designers who constantly strive to create the ultimate experience. In fact, when you exceed expectations at a certain point, you have already set yourself up to disappoint at the next interaction if you cannot deliver at the same level. Sometimes, you may need to consider reducing the quality of a certain touchpoint to enhance the overall experience of quality in the service. When you set consistent expectations in each interaction and fulfill them in the next, people will feel quality.
If the way people accessed services was completely linear and predictable, the ups and downs could be managed like in a movie or a theme park ride, but this is tricky to achieve in a service. Customers choose their own speed and path through a service, so you can only minimize the gap between expectation and experience by securing consistency. This goes for language, visual design, interaction design, and product design.
Even more important, backstage consistency is crucial to success. CRM systems must be designed so call center staff can feel reassured that they are using the same language that website customers have in front of them. The mobile plan must look the same when customers buy it online and when they receive the first bill. Billboard ads for a bank must tell the same story that people experience when they use the bank’s mobile app.
Great service experiences happen when all touchpoints play in harmony, and when people get what they expect day after day. This is the baseline and it may sound a bit boring and joyless when described this way. What we are arguing, though, is that even this baseline level of designing and delivering services that “just work” is challenging, which is why so many services are awful experiences. Almost no company or organization achieves this level, which is why it needs to be measured and modified over time (see Chapter 8).
Keeping a minimal gap between expectations and experiences, rather like tram lines tracking closely next to each other, does not mean that there is no scope for surprise and delight. But things surprise and delight us because they are unexpected.
The smallest expectation-experience mismatch with a touchpoint can ruin any overblown efforts to pump up the experience artificially. Imagine a luxurious hotel stay with a big basket of fruit in your room and friendly and efficient staff. Now imagine you see a lipstick mark on the glass in the bathroom or dust on the bedside table. You immediately assume all the other “luxury” elements are just window dressing for a flawed backstage process, and that corners are being cut on these services. The magic spell is broken and everything else comes across as a cynical attempt to get you to pay more than you should, like the $10 bottle of water on the sideboard. It no longer feels personal, and it would have been better for the hotel to offer a low-key but clean and honest experience. Yet, something simple, such as a handwritten welcome note or a genuine communication, can provide unexpected delight because it not only feels, but is, personal.
Considering Time as an Object of Design
For service designers, the objects of design are experiences over time, although describing it this way may seem rather disingenuous because service design is not an abstract activity. It is very grounded in the materials that make up a service, including chairs, posters, buildings, machines, and interfaces. There is a serious, if subtle, point of difference to take account of, though. The shift in mindset is that these objects are no longer the subject of design, they are the features. They may or may not be used by the customer, and they will change in independent and interdependent ways as the service evolves. The service designer needs to focus on how these elements come together over short or long periods of time, and the designer needs to help orchestrate or direct their assembly.
There are two different ways to look at time when you want to design a better experience: relationship time and frequency.
Relationship time is what is represented in the customer journey. It means that you want to design the experience to be relevant to people who are at different stages in their relationship with the service. Although this is an obvious point, in many services people’s expectations are mismanaged because the provider does not consider the fact that some people have had more time to become familiar with the service than others.
For instance, when Oslo University Hospital wanted to develop better patient information, they initially completely underestimated what a challenge it was for patients to figure out where to park the first time they came to the hospital. Finding parking created more uncertainty and irritation for people than not understanding exactly what was in a drug they were prescribed. Long-term patients had exactly the opposite concern. This is why the customer journey and service blueprint are such important tools for integrating the experience over time in a service.
Frequency of interaction is a different consideration when you design services. Some service experiences, such as news services or train schedules, work well with a high frequency of interactions. Other services, such as paying tax, are best when they interact with people with low frequency and visibility. The frequency of communication with a service is something that needs to be described in detailed design specifications and will vary from service to service and touchpoint to touchpoint. We have all experienced services that steal our time by getting in touch with us when we least need them, as well as services that we wish responded faster and when it was most relevant. Designing the appropriate frequency is a task that requires subtlety, testing, and monitoring over time.
Service Experience Prototyping
Why Prototype?
When developing a service, you can save the organization large amounts of time and money if you design and test the experience before resources are spent on designing the processes and technology needed to eventually run the service. Therefore, it is important to create an environment in which you can involve real people with trying the service as early as possible in the development process.
Service providers will tell you that the devil is in the details when it comes to delivering successful services in an efficient way. Sometimes, seemingly small problems can have a huge effect on the customer experience. Unclear instructions or inconsistent language on interfaces can cause unintended problems or complete failure to use the service, for example, but even small irritations can be enough of a barrier to prevent people from bothering to switch from their old way of doing things to using a new service. The challenge is that experiences are often hard to rationalize and explain in the abstract. People need to experience a service or touchpoint before they can tell you what does not work and what really makes a difference.
Because a new service can provide people with an experience they have never had before, it is important to make it real and tangible. If you ask people to imagine a new service, they tend to become analytical and problem-oriented. On the other hand, when people are allowed to experience a working prototype—something tangible that contains the key elements of the touchpoints and flow of the service interactions—they may react to the performance rather than the abstract concept.
Prototyping is the Willing Suspension of Disbelief
Unlike a product prototype, which is an object people can hold in their hands to get a sense of how it feels, service prototypes need to be experiences of interacting with multiple touchpoints as well as taking into account how those experiences unfold over time and in context.
Because service designing uses theatrical metaphors for blueprinting, it makes sense to think of experience prototyping as theater. In a theater, one typically finds a stage, some actors with different roles and goals, some props, and a script. The combination of these allows people to act out situations that are not necessarily real, but the result is a believable (and often, enjoyable) experience.
You can use experience prototyping to co-design a new service. This means the prototype exists both as a “live sketching tool” used to conceive concepts, details, and ideas, but also as a way to verify or disprove any theories you have while creating the service.
Here are some questions to consider while experience prototyping, which expand on the three questions asked in Chapter 6. You should always look for ways to improve each of these during the prototyping phase.
- Do people understand the service—what the new service is or does?
- Do people see the value of the service in their life?
- Do people understand how to use it?
- Which touchpoints are central to providing the service?
- Are the visual elements of the service working?
- Does the language and terminology work?
- Which ideas do the experience prototype testers have for improvement?
Experience prototypes enable you to gain a level of insight that is deeper than you could possibly achieve by observing and interviewing people alone. It gives you feedback on the details of the proposition and touchpoints that sometimes lead directly into the final detailing and build of the design.
Four Levels of Experience Prototyping
Experience prototypes can range from quick and dirty to elaborate stagings over longer periods of time. We generally divide these levels into four types of prototyping: an inexpensive, semistructured discussion; a walkthrough participation; a more elaborate simulation; and a full-scale pilot (Figure 7.2). Usually, a mix of elements from the four types creates an effective level of prototype testing. Of course, the budget increases with the increasing detail of each level, so you may find each stage of prototyping allows the client to sign off on the next step.
FIGURE 7.2
The four levels of experience prototyping.
Discussion
A discussion prototype is very similar to a user insight interview, and is usually the most affordable option. You can bring a series of touchpoint mock-ups to a one-hour interview and discuss them according to your planned user journey. The role of the people you are interviewing is to be themselves, react to the touchpoints, and offer feedback as if the interactions were real.
The effect of discussion is to iron out the most obvious issues or problems with the service proposition and to avoid major pitfalls. A typical discussion prototype involves between 5 and 10 customers and delivers insights that will help you refine the design. This can be extremely useful when trying to work out what the service proposition should be. You can mock up different website pages or marketing materials, for example, to see how people react to the different propositions. They may react to pricing, particular service elements, or not understand what you are trying to pitch at all. All of this input is useful during the concept development.
Participation
For participation prototypes, an interview similar to the discussion prototype is carried out, but it is done in the environment where the service is expected to take place. You provide the customer with tangibles at physical locations, and involve staff from the service provider to deliver service. For instance, you could involve a call center, sales division, help desk, or office and shop staff using mock-up print materials or screens to see how they react to them.
The aim of participation prototypes is to improve how the touchpoints work together when you add to the equation the elements of the service unfolding over time and in a real location. You can learn more about which interactions are critical for the service and also understand what people actually do, rather than what they say they do. A typical participation prototype involves between two and six customers and enables you to define detailed insights and improvements to the design.
Simulation
A simulation prototype is a combination of the first two types of prototyping above, but in more detail. For a simulation, you might recruit fewer customers but provide them with a full-scale prototype of the service with more finished-looking touchpoints than the mock-ups used in a participation prototype. This requires more preparation, and depending on the service, you might need some sort of controlled environment for running the prototype. This means you can prepare touchpoints for the real locations in which they will be used, such as a department store, a customer information center, or inside a bus or a train, for example.
In a simulation, you add a longer period of time to the mix. You may work with customers over a period of days or weeks to see how people’s experience develops as they go through a series of interactions. You can test how the experience builds when people move between touchpoints and develop familiarity with the service offering.
The effect of a simulation prototype is to understand how to improve touchpoints, and the way they work over time. Instructional elements might be useful at first, for example, but then soon become annoying if users cannot bypass them easily once they are familiar with the service. In addition, you are likely to discover one or more “X factors” that were impossible to know about before the design got to this level of detail. Sometimes these can be critical to the success of the service, such as the wording of a button or an awkward physical placement of a touchpoint.
A typical simulation prototype involves between two and six customers. Two or three is more common because of the budget involved, but if you can afford it, go for more. The simulation prototype enables you to share detailed insights with the development team and define improvements and key success factors for the service experience.
Pilot
If the service you are working with is at a level where infrastructure and manpower is available, you can launch a pilot. This level of prototyping is not simulating the experience but actually delivering it to the end users. Through sustained delivery of a near-finished service, you can learn what works and what does not when trying to meet the needs of real customers. A pilot prototype is a beta service and needs to support iterative improvements throughout its life span so that you are able to try new approaches to problem solving.
The aim of a pilot is to learn what works for a larger group of customers, over a longer period of time, and what sort of resources need to be allocated for the service. Public services, such as employment schemes, often affect end users over months and years (see the Make It Work case study in Chapter 9, for example). A pilot can generate systematic evidence for a new service design and can gather proof that a good business case exists for the solution and that customers or users gain sustained and improved value from the service.
Preparing for Experience Prototyping
Obviously, the exact level of detail you will require in terms of mock-ups, props, locations, and people will vary from project to project due to time and budget considerations, but three key steps are necessary at every level.
Step 1—The Customer Journey
Develop one or more customer journeys that describe the situations you would like to act out with customers. It can be valuable to consider every step from “Aware” to “Leave” (Figure 7.3). This provides you with feedback on parts of the whole life cycle of the new service. Is it easy to understand the new service and how people buy into it? If they need to change something or stop using the service, how does that work?
FIGURE 7.3
A basic text blueprint with key touchpoints highlighted, ready to be mocked up for prototyping.
The user journey acts as the manuscript for the prototype and should describe the different actors and which tangibles are needed. Here you can return to your blueprint of the entire service and combine it with the insights into the users that you gained in the research phase. You can then decide to take a particular kind of user through a journey using specific touchpoints you have created for the experience prototype.
Step 2—People
Participants
When recruiting people to participate in a prototype, first consider whether you need any help from the service provider, your client. Do you need staff with specific skills or knowledge about the company, product, or service?
Next, you need to recruit potential customers. Do this the same way you would recruit for a user insight interview. Recruit people with relevant demographics or people at different stages in the service journey so that they can play roles in the different phases of the customer journey (Figure 7.4).
FIGURE 7.4
Prototyping for a Transport for Oslo project: hand sketches on an iPad for a new ticket machine (left) and signage posters (right).
Roles
To enable participants to act out the prototype, you need to define their roles clearly. You should ask them to play themselves, but it helps to give them some detail on their role in terms of context. For example, ask a hospital patient to play herself before she fell ill, or ask a customer of a bank to imagine he has used the service for years.
Goals
The other thing to remember when briefing participants is to give them a goal or an outcome for their interactions with the service. For example, ask them to get through town using the bus and a new map, or get a doctor to prescribe a new medicine. As in theater, the character’s goals are essential to creating an interesting drama. As such, you should ensure that the goals you set participants will show up potential problems with the service.
Step 3—Tangibles
Create tangible artifacts for the central interactions you want to stage, and decide on the level of quality and realism you need them to have. For some prototypes, it is sufficient to have hand-drawn sketches or computer printouts; for others you might need click-throughs or live mock-ups running on a computer. Design the tangibles and test them as part of a journey internally among the project team before you prototype in a live context. The participants are spending their time testing your work, and even if they are being paid, it is tedious if your prototypes are too unreliable.
It is important to remember the purpose of the prototypes. There is little point in prototyping something that you know will work. A Web service registration that uses a standard sign-up form and confirmation e-mail format probably does not warrant prototyping, unless some aspect of it has come up in the insights research that suggests it is a service-critical problem.
You should aim to prototype elements that are critical to the service experience or are unknowns and hard to gauge as experiences until you try them out. These elements warrant being prototyped in higher fidelity than other parts of the service (Figure 7.5). For example, if you are prototyping a ticket machine and the on-screen flow is the most important thing, then mocking this up on an iPad and holding it in front of someone will give you a good idea of how well it works in context. On the other hand, perhaps the physical redesign of the ticket machine is more important to increase accessibility, in which case you may want to spend more time on a foam-core mock-up of the kiosk itself and try it out on location with a participant in a wheelchair.
FIGURE 7.5
High-fidelity mock-ups of forms, letters, and brochures that customers engaged with over a week to simulate the process of buying a new insurance policy.
Experience Prototyping Practicalities
Consider the tools you will need to document and run the prototype. You will typically want to take pictures, or use mobile phones to send messages or set up phone conversations. Here are some useful tricks for designing quick and effective prototypes.
Listening In on Call Center Prototyping
Design a script and materials for the customer. Place one researcher with the customer and one with the call center staff member (Figure 7.6). Observing how the conversation develops from both sides will help you understand what the customer needs as well as what staff need to deliver good service. Make sure you give the customer the direct number of the call center staff member your researcher is sitting with.
FIGURE 7.6
A researcher with a customer and another with a call center staff member listen in and observe both sides of a sales call to see how users respond to the prototyped tools and materials.
Make Websites in Microsoft Excel
If you need to test website forms, you can easily build formulas and visualize data in Excel. Dress it up as a website and paste a browser frame around it, and you have an advanced Web prototype built in a few hours.
Cheap Modular Furniture
If you need to test the dynamics of a physical environment, stores like IKEA can provide most of the components you would need to try out different layouts of physical environments with a realistic level of detail. If you build up a collection of props and reuse them, it can be cheaper than building mock-up elements from foam core each time. For very rough mock-ups acted out within the project team, you can use cardboard boxes rescued from local stores.
Online Prototyping Blogs
Blogging platforms such as Wordpress, Textpattern, and MovableType are a quick and easy way to put together insights material for everyone to access and comment upon (see “Insights Blogs” in Chapter 4), but they are also useful for setting up quick Web prototypes and/or capturing feedback on a service. If you have good in-house Web talent, you might want to put something together quickly from scratch, but it is often easier to modify a basic blog template if you just want to get across the overall service proposition rather than the specific user interface or usability (Figure 7.7). Of course, a prototype might become as refined as a nearly finished beta website, which would be a properly crafted affair.
FIGURE 7.7
A website for Surebox using a blogging platform to run the prototype.
For beta phases, users are recruited and given access to a service at an early stage of its final development for a specified period of time, say six weeks. They are asked to use the service and provide feedback through a blog on how it performs.
Online prototyping provides fresh input beyond the original insights research from users, which helps inform designers about usability, clarity, and desirability. Once the improvements are carried out, users are again asked to provide feedback in an iterative process.
Keep in touch with users at regular intervals throughout the process to encourage them to participate and provide support if required. An incentive such as cash or a voucher can be offered for each piece of feedback recorded.
This technique is useful for uncovering usability problems, and a heavily Web-based service would need proper usability testing and expertise on board, but in the early stages a quick prototype can clarify what the service is and what additional uses it may have other than those anticipated.