Roles in the team

While the audience has a huge impact on the outcome of the prototyping activity, so too do the people who drive the prototyping process, who prepare and build the prototypes, run the sessions, and observe the reactions of the chosen audience. ²² Typical roles in prototyping activities include:

• → Concept owner: The concept owner is the person who came up with the concept you are prototyping.

• → Writer or (model) maker: The writer scripts or sketches out a starting point for the experiences, (inter)actions, or scenarios that you are going to prototype. The (model) maker builds all necessary (physical and digital) props, sets, and stages for the prototyping session. ²³

• → Facilitator: The facilitator is responsible for the process and guides the selected audience through a prototyping session. ²⁴

• → Actors and operators: Actors and operators assist the facilitator in creating an experience during the prototyping session. This involves people acting as staff or other customers during service simulations, or manually operating an interface that is tested. When preparing your prototyping sessions, always ask yourself: Who will be taking on which role during the prototyping process? What are the biases and motivations each person brings to the table?

• → Researcher: The researcher independently observes the audience during the prototyping session and records her insights.

• → Subject matter experts and key stakeholders: Subject matter experts and key stakeholders complete the prototyping team, adding special skills and in-depth knowledge about the subject matter and target contexts suggested by scope and prototyping questions.

Note that especially early in the project, one person can be concept owner, maker, facilitator, and researcher all rolled into one. Later, when you have a clearer picture of your service concept, you might make the decision to involve specialists for each necessary craft or discipline (e.g., model makers, UX specialists, experience directors, ethnographers, etc.).

Always be aware of your role, bias, and associated influence on the audience at every step of the prototyping process. For example, concept owners and makers often want their concept to survive – consciously or unconsciously – because they have already invested some time into the concept or prototype. This obviously has an influence on the audience, and the results become biased. ²⁵ One way to tackle this prototyper bias is to be open about your role and acknowledge that there is a bias. This lets you consciously put down your concept owner or maker hat and take a more objective position. Other options include inviting an independent facilitator or researcher for your testing sessions, or changing roles within the existing team between iterations.

Fidelity

Decide how refined your prototype needs to be. What level of detail is needed? What resolution does it make sense to achieve for your given scope and research question? How much effort do you need or want to put into this prototype? The question of fidelity is closely connected to the economic principle of prototyping by Lim, Stolterman, and Tenenberg: “The best prototype is one that, in the simplest and most efficient way, makes the possibilities and limitations of a design idea visible and measurable.” ²⁶

The economic principle seems to suggest starting with low-fidelity prototypes like paper or cardboard prototypes and then gradually increasing the level of detail as you get closer and closer to implementation. However, the world is slightly more complex than simply dividing the prototyping world into lo-fi or hi-fi.

While fidelity is often connected with visual fidelity (look and feel), you can also talk about fidelity in other dimensions, like fidelity of the implementation. ²⁷ You can even find those different levels within one single prototype. The prototype of a website can be low fidelity with respect to look and feel, but quite high fidelity with respect to content or information structure. Hence, try to be specific about which parts of your prototype are really needed at which level of fidelity. This will help you manage your prototyping resources efficiently. It also is a great tool to guide the attention of your audience.

It is important to understand that the fidelity of your prototype has an impact on the quality and type of feedback you get from your test audience. Low-fidelity prototypes tend to inspire more open discussions while high-fidelity prototypes seem to lead the discussion more to the details of a concept because the prototype looks finished – and therefore decided.

Low-fidelity prototypes usually allow you to work blazingly fast. However, if you put too much emphasis on speed and low fidelity, your prototypes become meaningless. Try to find the sweet spot – the lowest meaningful fidelity at any given time – and move to high fidelity when you really need it.

The right fidelity for your prototype also depends on where you are in the process and what your purpose is. Earlier in the process, especially during explorative prototyping you would lean toward lower fidelity, while later in the process or during evaluative and communicative prototyping you usually lean toward higher fidelity. However, this needs to be reassessed for each project on an individual basis. Value prototypes like a service advertisement – which can be done quite early in the process – can already show high fidelity in a few essential perspectives (e.g., the value propositions), even though the rest of the business model is still quite raw.

In any case, always make sure the fidelity fits your audience. For example, people new to prototyping approaches usually need higher-fidelity prototypes together with clear guidance on purpose and scope. On the other hand, also make sure you are not over-promising. High-fidelity prototypes often are perceived as “finished” even if the underlying concept is still raw and basically untested.

Prototyping context

Choose the environment and context in which you run your prototyping sessions carefully. There are two major approaches:

• → Contextual prototyping: Contextual prototyping happens where the final service or product, whether physical or digital, would be used or be produced – for example, in the actual shop, tourism destination, or in one of your own offices where you run your consulting practice. By doing the prototyping session in context you can very efficiently assess whether or not a prototyped solution is a fit for that context or not. You also quickly learn what might work and, especially, what might not work. Just as in contextual research (e.g., contextual interviews, participant and non-participant observations, work-alongs, self-ethnography, etc.), you get a much better feel for the nuances that are needed to implement a working solution. ²⁸

• → Lab prototyping: Lab prototyping is done within the safe confines of a lab environment or any place that is out of context. Choose lab prototyping when the real context is not available to you, does not allow any changes, does not exist yet, or simply is too expensive to use.

Figure 7-4. DIFFERENT FLAVORS OF FIDELITY
Fidelity comes in different flavors depending on what you are prototyping. While it is often connected with visual fidelity (look and feel), you can also talk about fidelity in other dimensions, like fidelity of the implementation.

It is important to note that context can include not only the space or location but also the time when you are prototyping, the availability of key resources, or even environmental conditions. For example, prototyping new hospitality services for a winter sport destination in winter can be contextual, while to test the same activities in summer you will have to fall back on lab prototyping.

As a rule of thumb, the closer your prototyping environment and contexts are to the intended implementation contexts, the more reliable feedback you will get during evaluative prototyping. Similarly, during explorative prototyping, ideas generated in similar contexts tend to be more transferable from the prototype to the intended implementation context. ²⁹

Prototyping loops

Always plan prototyping as an iterative process with a sequence of prototyping loops. Each loop should have a clear purpose; a clear set of prototyping questions; and include (a) building or preparing a prototype, (b) running the prototyping session, as well as (c) at least a simple form of data synthesis and analysis. The first loops are often explorative and might only take a couple of hours or a day. Use them to open up and create a shared understanding of the opportunity space. After those first loops, you might want to validate the proposed value propositions before eventually moving toward systematically exploring and validating the different aspects and dimensions of the selected concepts further and further. Continually check whether the chosen methods deliver meaningful results and whether your hypothesis or research questions for the prototyping stage need adjustments.

Depending on the skill set of your prototyping teams, you might have to involve specialists and split the work into separate work streams to achieve higher fidelity – for example, UX designers working on improving an existing app, service designers prototyping human-to-human interactions or required business processes, and an architect redesigning the office space. Even though they will work at different iteration speeds, it is still important to plan in regular sessions (e.g., weekly or biweekly) to give feedback and to adjust the prototyping plan. Depending on the complexity of your prototypes, you might also want to consider establishing a first sprint-like structure. ³⁰

Keep iterating between the details of a single (inter)action, object, or app and the wider picture of the end-to-end experience.

Multitracking

Decide how many prototypes you want to work on in any given segment. Multitracking your efforts helps you to reduce risk by not putting all your eggs into one basket. It also allows you to strategically manage uncertainty in your concept portfolio and expectations of stakeholders:

• → How many of the prototypes seem to be in reach for a quick win?

• → How many of them seem to have potential mid/long term?

• → How many of them are lined up for a disruptive breakthrough?

• → How many of them are a shot from the hip? ³¹

Also, decide whether you want to have different teams working on individual prototypes or have one team sequentially work through them.

The prototyping stage consists of a number of exploratory or evaluative prototyping sessions that can be lined up in parallel or in sequence. At certain points, you might add communicative prototypes to involve external stakeholders.

Method selection

Reflect on your chosen scope (including which elements of the service need to be prototyped), fidelity, and target context and choose the methods for your prototyping activities accordingly.

A helpful starting point is to do a quick assessment of the resources you have at your disposal. Before spending too much effort on creating complex prototypes, you might want to do some quick desk research ³² to find existing prototypes or research on similar questions or an appropriate prototyping platform you can leverage. Are there any elements you can simply reuse? Ask your Innovation department if they have already done something similar.

Desk research might quickly reveal similar services or products, whether physical or digital, which you can use as a basis to create your own prototypes so you do not have to start from scratch.

When you are selecting the “right” prototyping methods – ones that give you a lot of useful data, support your decisions, or communicate the concept well – you always face the question of how many methods you should use. Given a limited budget, you need to decide whether you should put all your budget into one method and do this rather well, or distribute our budget to use a variety of prototyping methods. Just like in research, you should also apply the concept of method triangulation during prototyping. ³³

As a rule of thumb, you might want to consider to including at least one method from each of the following categories:

• → An experience prototyping approach to validate the core value proposition.

• → Some methods that allow the exploration and assessment of a holistic/end-to-end perspective on the service, like desktop walk- throughs, contextual walkthroughs, Business Model Canvases, Business Origami, minimum viable services/products or service simulations, and so on.

• → Some methods that focus on key elements within the holistic perspective, like paper prototyping, cardboard prototyping, digital mock-ups, and so on.

Figure 7-5. OVERVIEW OF PLANNING COMPONENTS
The planning of prototyping includes making decisions about audience, authors, fidelity, prototyping context, prototyping loops, multitracking, and method selection.

Figure 7-6. Running prototyping sessions: preparation, use and research. The creation of the prototype is only the starting point, which allows us to focus on using and testing the prototype and learning from it.

Crafting a design thinking strategy and proving it in reality

Design thinking at Airbus emerged organically from different departments – workshops were conducted, training offered, and projects following human-centered approaches established, all labeled under the term design thinking. However, besides a core group of departments that formed a deep understanding of the power design thinking can have in product and service innovation, the majority of employees of Airbus have different understandings of design and design thinking, if they are acquainted with the concept at all. In July 2015, we crafted a strategy to infuse design thinking as part of the DNA of Airbus. One step on the ladder toward a broader understanding of design thinking was to engage in a grand challenge: we wanted to show, in an investment project of strategic importance, the potential of design thinking. Airbus is currently extending its production capacity of its successful Single Aisle Family, A319, A320, and A321. To enable this ramp-up, Airbus has created an additional final assembly line in Hamburg. Our value proposition in this project was to co-innovate with the workers at the shop floor.

The project started in September 2015 and focused on problem framing and need finding from the workers’ perspective. To ensure visibility and to reach the right level of awareness, it was important that design thinking was placed prominently in the project structure as one dedicated work stream. Being placed at this level gave us enough influence to push for creating real impact by achieving an end-to-end implementation.

“With design thinking, we are following a balanced approach that emphasizes early user engagement. The purpose is to make sure that we address the real needs and focus on doing the right things, which finally will make the difference to succeed with innovation in delivering added value to customers and users by going beyond the obvious.”

— Dr. Markus Durstewitz

Prototyping plays a prominent role in the design process as a tool to make assumptions tangible and to involve users. We applied prototyping for gaining user insights, and for ensuring employee engagement and management buy-in. Our prototypes were often quite simple, rough mock-ups such as cardboard prototypes or clickable user interfaces. In general, these are good enough to test functionalities and to continuously involve users in the evolution of the concepts. In addition, we used the prototypes to better understand goals and the rationale behind requirements from different departments. Here, interdisciplinary and cross-functional collaboration was essential to reach consensus between all stakeholders.

“Fast iterations in prototyping minimum viable solutions are a key asset for gathering user insights, for reducing the time to product, and for accelerating the innovation process.”

— Dr. Markus Durstewitz

By having tangible prototypes and the possibility to interact with and alter them, we were able to gain deep insights, tapping into the tacit knowledge of the different stakeholders. We used the prototypes to test early and fail fast and cheap, in order to iterate to a solution that would ultimately be valuable to the end users and approved by all stakeholders. The simple prototypes helped us to perform early user tests and to reach a good level of maturity and alignment before making bigger investments.

From need finding to prototyping: Finding opportunities beyond the obvious and prototyping in design thinking

We started out with user research to understand how the production environment is perceived from a worker’s point of view. We shadowed key people, going through their workdays with them, and we interviewed workers on the shop floor and other relevant stakeholders such as production support and manufacturing engineers. The need-finding stage lasted three months, in which time we can to understand the final assembly line from the workers’ point of view. We distilled our findings into four opportunity areas where design can make a change.

“Although it is tempting to shortcut in the early phase, crucial for the success was to conduct deep need finding prior to prototyping. Only through going into the field, observing and shadowing users, was it possible to look beyond the obvious and to ensure we are doing the right things.”

— Thomas Abrell

After need finding, we selected two of the four opportunity areas to prototype in a timebox of eight weeks, from kickoff until the final prototypes were delivered. To master this tight timeline we built a team of internal and external experts with diverse skills, from industrial design and rapid prototyping to user research to coding.

We addressed two challenges in an iterative way, utilizing prototypes as a tool to co-create, to communicate, and to iterate: information system interfaces on the shop floor and material delivery.

In building the team, we relied on experienced service designers from Airbus to manage the overall design process, project and stakeholder management. For the information system side of the project, we chose an external partner with specialists in industrial design, design thinking, and user experience design. It was also important for us to bring in perspectives from a non-aerospace domain, bringing in diverse skillsets and design expertise.

1. Prototype in the final assembly line.

   

2. Sketch of the future system.

   

3. Information system interface feedback session.

   

4. Scale models as tools in the process.

   

Prototyping: Making things tangible on the shop floor

The project was set up in such a way that two teams worked in parallel, one focusing on the physical prototype, the other on the information interaction prototype. It was important to co-locate the teams in a creative space: we used an aircraft fuselage and built a workshop around it, so that our team had the possibility to continually build things.

Our experiment was to see how digital and physical prototyping could work in parallel, involving all stakeholders. Workers were involved continuously. In addition, we scheduled three co-creation workshops to engage a wider group of stakeholders, a demo day, and an intermediate management presentation. We used a build-measure-learn cycle, but instead of measuring, we relied on qualitative evaluations and direct feedback from the users. The co-creation workshops were used to iterate the prototypes, and we moved from lo-fi mock-ups to functional usability mock-ups.

“It was an interesting experiment to run physical prototyping in parallel to digital prototyping. Ultimately, we designed a service for the workers, involving digital and physical touchpoints. Our aim was clearly to improve the work experience for our employees.”

— Thomas Abrell

With the information system interfaces, we complemented our need finding by researching what information workers really need – and want to use – to perform their work, and which devices would be suitable for interacting with the information. We therefore enriched our findings from the need-finding phase, and observed and interviewed the workers specifically with respect to the information they need. We mapped the necessary information and prototyped it in rough concepts, showing screens on different devices such as tablets, smartwatches, smartphones, and large touchscreen displays.

In the first co-creation workshop, we got user feedback on the devices and the functions. We distilled the most important insights before going into the next prototype iteration, until a user interface was generated and a device concept was determined. Finally, we took the prototypes into one existing final assembly line, and let the users interact with them, simulating their very own workflow with the new prototypes in their current day-to-day working environment. These insights helped us to further iterate and refine them.

The material delivery units (MDUs) were addressed the same way. First, we went to the shop floor to see how material delivery works in practice – complementing the view we had from need finding, the planning documents, and internal logistics. Then, we conceptualized three material delivery units and built 1:5 scale models – in practice, three material trolleys for the same set of material, but with different conceptual considerations behind them – which were iterated in co-creation workshops.

One week later, we had the first 1:1 full-scale mock-up, which was brought to the final assembly line for feedback at the assembly station itself. With this feedback, and feedback gathered in the co-creation workshops, we built two more iterations of the full-scale mock-up. We added “smart” functionalities (connectivity) to the prototype, simulating how it would interact with its environment and the parts inside. The second prototype iteration got additional usability features such as a bumper and boxes for tools to make it more usable and more useful for the worker.

In the last co-creation workshop, we simulated a scenario incorporating both prototypes, the information system interface and the material delivery unit. Our project team simulated the situation together with the users, gathering feedback about the overall workflow, since material delivery and the information system interface are interrelated in their respective workflow.

At the editorial deadline of this book, we are doing a proof of concept of the material delivery unit, and integrating the information system interface into a larger project at Airbus changing the way our manufacturing environment is set up and operations are performed. The learnings of the project are being used to propose a holistic design thinking approach for Airbus.

Learnings

Crucial for success were not only user engagement and user acceptance, but also the involvement of the Workers’ Council as a key stakeholder. This entity, entitled to represent the workforce, can amplify a project’s results in positive or negative terms. Only through continuous deep involvement of the council did we create a sense of ownership, involving them as a strategic partner for employee engagement implementing user-centered solutions.

“It’s important to have a good balance between internal and external project team members. Only with a small internal core team is it possible to maintain continuity during the project, while external team members bring in specific expertise.”

— Thomas Abrell

For the future, we will need a small internal core team with a wide array of skills to anchor the approach and leverage the expertise until implementation. In practice, it will be an interdisciplinary team consisting of aircraft manufacturing domain experts from Airbus, designers, method experts, and specialists for end-to-end support of the innovation project. We believe that collaboration with external partners from the design community (e.g., with freelancers and design agencies) will be necessary to keep up a high level of momentum and creativity.

“People are at the heart of our company. Let’s complement the diversity of our employees and introduce a new way of working in cross-functional teams to deliver outstanding results. Let’s team up for innovation! This may include all actors along the value chain, suppliers, customers, and users.”

— Dr. Markus Durstewitz

Now, the next step is to go further in our endeavor to make design thinking part of the DNA of Airbus, by creating a specific design center to coordinate and steer the activities and to give creatives a home within the organization. In this organization-to-be, we want to educate service designers inside Airbus, and build up a strong network spanning Airbus.

Service thinking and co-creation

The project group and the designers facilitated a workshop with 40 employees across different departments within the hospital to map out a typical patient journey from their point of view. Afterwards, the patient journey was visualized in a detailed diagram demonstrating all the steps a patient goes through. This diagram was a valuable tool that enabled a common understanding across different departments of the complexity of a patient’s journey.

After the workshop, in-depth interviews were conducted with patients. The designers used image cards to help the patients express emotional aspects of their journey, which are just as important as the logical steps. In order to gain deeper understanding of the staff’s work process, the designers conducted contextual inquiry with the staff, role-play with general practitioners (GPs), and phone interviews with stakeholders. Designit talked to a number of different actors that were involved in the patient’s process, including oncologists, radiologists, radio technicians, nurses, patient coordinators, secretaries, private clinics, and GPs.

There was a lot of information gathered through these activities. This was used to identify the right opportunities for optimizing the process, ultimately reducing patient waiting time. The findings had to be inspiring and actionable. The key insight from all of this was that patients felt that they were patients from the day a lump was discovered, while the hospital considered them patients from the day the diagnostic work started.

The Oslo University Hospital decided to rethink the process. The ideal user journey was mapped out, completely removed from today’s process and its challenges, and they worked backward from that. Together with the designers, the staff came up with solutions on how they could work differently with new routines that reduced the diagnosis period. The team then ran co-creation workshops with staff members where they developed prototypes, mainly in the form of scenarios and user stories. The scenarios were tested by presenting them to patients and staff. The designers did some alterations based on the test results in collaboration with the project team until they had a solution that was both feasible and met user needs (both backend and frontend). As a result, the team defined what the radiologist, the nurse, the pathologist, and the patient coordinator had to do to deliver this experience.

The solution aimed to improve cancer patients’ lives by rethinking behind-the-scenes processes from a patient’s point of view. The hospital staff played an important role in their patients’ lives, and this had to be acknowledged. A large part of this included the hospital recognizing, accepting, and working on improving the customer service experience for the time leading to diagnosis.

The new Breast Diagnostics Centre (BDS)

The new process at the BDS was officially inaugurated at the Oslo University Hospital on November 4, 2013, with the Norwegian Minister of Health and the Norwegian Design Council attending the event.

With the new process, patients should feel confident that they are in the care of the hospital from the moment they leave their general practitioner’s office. The goal was to create a straightforward path from the GP to diagnosis, getting the patient an answer as soon as possible

The journey toward a diagnosis has been radically reduced down to a total of seven days, a previously unthinkable goal. On day one, patients receive a brochure from their GP with information detailing the steps they will go through to diagnosis. They are also equipped with a direct phone number they can call in case they have any questions. On the backend, the hospital now assesses the referrals daily, ensuring timely reviews. If the practitioner reports a suspicious lump, the patient in question now gets an appointment within seven days. In the cases that are not as alarming, the patient may wait longer, but never more than four weeks.

On the day of the examination, the patient is greeted at the center by a radiographer. The patient then meets the radiologist and is given a preliminary diagnosis. The patient receives a follow-up appointment the next day where the diagnosis is confirmed and, in the case of a positive diagnosis, a treatment plan is outlined.

1. Today’s patient journey.

   

2. Conducting in-depth interviews with patients.

   

3. Analyzing all the data gathered from the insight phase.

   

4. Ideation workshop with employees at the hospital.

   

5. Developing analogue scenarios to lower the threshold for patients and employees to give feedback.

   

6. Patient flow with the new service.

   

7. 90% waiting time reduction with the new Breast Diagnostic Center.

   

Instead of meeting once a week, all the specialists involved meet every morning to discuss the patients. The test results are ready four days after the examination, and are evaluated in this meeting. This ensures that all patient cases are discussed in a timely manner and the waiting time doesn’t accrue.

Prior to this, it could take up to 12 weeks before patients received a letter scheduling an examination at the hospital. Now, patients are contacted, either by phone or letter, just a few days after receiving their referral from their GP. All in all, the time from referral to diagnosis is now between 7 and 28 days, depending on the severity of the case. The new process represents a 90% reduction in waiting time.

Service design proved to be a valuable method in starting up this project and contributed to creating a real change. After the design phase, hospital staff drove the new process through implementation.

This combination enabled an ambition within the groups that led to the project’s realization and impacted patients’ lives. As a result of this success, it has now become the precursor to the national standardized procedures for breast cancer, introduced in January 2015.

Complex services need evolutionary improvements

Doberman was engaged by the healthcare innovation hub Experio Lab to redesign the different points of contact between people with chronic diseases and primary care clinics. Early in the process it became clear that smaller evolutionary improvements in the interface between patients and staff would have the most impact, as opposed to making one radical service innovation. And even more important, the improvements needed to be in constant evolution to be adapted to constantly changing needs, systems, and restricted resources. Enter infinite prototyping.

“I wish I had access to these tools when I got my diagnosis.”

— Sally Hjert, a participant in the design process living with chronic pain

Collaborative insights

Through a collaborative insight and discovery approach, the design process identified five service improvement tracks that spanned events, artifacts, interactions, and organization:

• — Holistic responsibility

• — Empowerment in meetings

• — Empowerment in the process

• — Meeting equals

• — Service overview

“A primary care center will never be ‘ready’ or ‘final.’ Instead, we must see it as an ever-evolving service.”

— Erik Almenberg, Strategist, Doberman

All tracks needed prototyping, not just to evaluate ideas, but to establish viable and framed concepts that could be cultivated and evolved by the organization over time. The service will never be “done.”

Staff taking over the prototypes

The design team developed a wide range of lo-fi prototypes that were tested and refined by staff and patients, in up to five iterations. As all prototypes were made in simple formats, like Word documents, so the staff could gradually adapt the process of prototyping, with no need for in-depth designer skills. As a side effect, the staff involved have embraced the concept of the complete service as an infinite prototype, and are now capable of approaching further challenges through design together with the patients.

“As we worked with lo-fi prototypes, we could iterate quickly, together with the staff and patients.”

— Therese Björkqvist, Service Designer, Doberman

“As we see and spread the solutions as prototypes, they are easy to pick up, adjust, and integrate in other parts of the healthcare system. They also inspire staff to generate and prototype other solutions. Spreading the prototypes helps build courage and nourish a more innovative culture.”

— Thomas Edman, Experio Lab

Scaling the prototypes

The innovation hub Experio Lab helps to distribute the solutions within Swedish healthcare, still in an open, prototyping-friendly format. Therefore, the solutions can be continuously tested, refined, and adjusted to different contexts within the Swedish healthcare system.

Building a team of stakeholders

Looking beyond the online space, a combined team of ATO and Fjord staff visited tax partners to conduct contextual research and gather in-depth knowledge of their goals, pain points, and opportunities, as well as the way they work with taxpayers and businesses across Australia (e.g., such as how the ATO communicated with them and their clients, the status of queries to the tax office, keeping track of deadlines, and maintaining an overview of their clients’ situations).

Additionally, tax software providers were involved in the research to ensure the ATO can support them to deliver a consistent experience for tax partners. We co-designed activities with ATO stakeholders and combined insights with internal data to ideate initial concepts.

After refining these concepts, we ran a special prototyping workshop ⁶⁰ with tax partners, ATO staff, and the project team. Such collaborative co-design workshops are used to discuss and develop initial concepts with a focus on making ideas tangible by building simple prototypes on the spot.

Creating a minimum lovable product

Developing the prototyping workshop outputs further, the team mapped out what a “minimum lovable product” would look like in terms of features and user journeys. We use “lovable” instead of “viable” because this shifts the focus from the functional to the experiential. A bare-bones service that nobody likes using is not going to gain traction out in the world in its fragile early days.

Apart from the usual research and concept outputs at the end of this stage of a project, we created giant journey maps and roadmaps for the development of Partner Space. Since a focal point was a portal, Fjord’s Creative Technologist built a living prototype. This was a case in which it was quicker to build something in HTML, CSS, and JSON than to design mock-up screens and annotate them. The prototype was created over the course of a couple of weeks. It used a pseudo-dataset that could be queried and filtered by a mocked-up frontend. Within the bounds of the fake data, we could demo filtering, searching, notifications, and responsive layouts and give a much greater sense of the power of the design than with just clickable pages. This provides an easier segue from concept to UX to delivery.

The fundamental ideas and needs for the portal had already been gathered and synthesized and concepts refined and iterated in workshops and in the weeks following. These were shared with the client team and external partner stakeholders – tax agents and software developers. The roadmap for the rollout of the features of the big picture experience was done based on a scoring system. The final scores from each group determined, more or less, which features were to be developed in phase one, which in phase two, and so on. The portal prototype was only part of a broader set of concepts, since it was a portal view onto several other deeper and more complex features. The prototype was intended more to explain how such a portal might work than to be a final design – a high-fidelity sketch in code rather than an end state.

Spreading the service design practice

The prototype was only part of a larger project involving several other features. The project has since moved into full design, development, and delivery. Alongside the design activities, Fjord held service design learning sessions at the ATO as part of the knowledge transfer process. These sessions covered topics that were part of the design process in advance, so project members from the ATO could be aware of what was about to happen, and enabled them to collaborate effectively in the co-design exercises that took place throughout the project. Not only does this approach make working with our clients significantly more collaborative, it also ensures the impact of service design has long-term sustainability within the ATO by creating cultural change.

1. Workshop participants selecting and giving feedback on concepts.

   

2. A territory map of tools and software used every day by agents and whether they love them or they’re heartbreaking.

   

3. Participants were given content elements in a co-design session to help define the information architecture and features.

   

4. During the Makeshop, we quickly made our sketched ideas interactive in order to elicit immediate feedback and develop iterations.

   

5. Taking over a public space in the ATO helped communicate the process. Here, the research and concepts are all on the wall and eventually covered by the minimum lovable product journey map poster and the roadmap poster.

   

6. A prototype of the portal was the quickest way to describe the concepts in action.

   

ATO staff who worked with Fjord have gained the confidence to drive internal projects as they continue the design learning experience, and those who worked on Partner Space have become joint guardians of the design vision as it heads into the delivery phase. The project has been extremely well received in the ATO, and it is exciting to work on a project with large-scale societal impact from conception right through to delivery as well as helping to shift the design culture within a large government enterprise.

Learning by doing

The ambitious timeline demanded an iterative, hands-on approach from the get-go. After putting ourselves into the shoes of passengers and crew, and diving into what luxury means for today’s traveler, we immediately began to prototype. The team mocked up a section of an airplane cabin in the IDEO Munich studio which was used for regular role-plays, helping us draft the initial service concept.

“Our goal was to improve service in these private moments so that the guest receives a totally new flying experience with much more quality time – time which they can use to work, relax, or be pampered.”

— Dorothea von Boxberg, Head of Customer Experience, Lufthansa

Designing the personal experience

Based on our insights, we created a more personal service experience, focusing on the interaction between crew and passenger. Crew should think of themselves as a traveler’s trusted, knowing hosts, like at top-notch restaurants.

“Only if flight attendants understand and live the new service philosophy – being a host – will passengers feel the difference in the long run.”

— Stefan Wendland, Project Manager, Lufthansa

Prototyping, at scale

We then moved to a large-scale, 1:1 prototype – 92 seats, 3 galleys. Over four weeks IDEO and Lufthansa stakeholders, including crew, catering, and management, prototyped several versions of the new service, focusing on the feasibility and desirability of individual service steps, interactions, and the overall service flow from a passenger and flight attendant point of view.

Building for buy-in

The mock-up allowed us to run four- to five-hour simulations with real crew, watched by passengers and board members. The early involvement of key stakeholders created a sense of ownership and increased their confidence in shaping the design toward a common goal. During rollout, heightened awareness and buy-in from crew members helped ensured more willing adoption across all 18,000 flight attendants.

“We chose this holistic approach to trigger a new way of thinking about service quality and passenger experience at Lufthansa.”

— Dorothea von Boxberg, Head of Customer Experience, Lufthansa

1. The team mocked up a section of the airplane in IDEO’s Munich studio.

   

2. IDEO and Lufthansa prototyped the entire experience in a 1:1 model of a business class cabin.

   

3. Flight attendants were among the key stakeholders. Involving crew in the design helped ensure adoption during the rollout.

   

4. The experience was a more personal interaction between the crew and the passengers.

   

How can we assure proper system installation?

Since we are all trained as engineers, we did the system installation ourselves in the beginning – but quickly grasped that this would not be feasible for a commercial rollout.

Our first move was to develop a plug-and-play kit that customers could install themselves, and in co-creative sessions with real customers, we even managed to draft an accompanying manual that works. But we came to realize that even though our customers were now able to do the installation themselves, they simply did not want to.

People wanted someone knowledgeable to do the job. Our second iteration was the development of the “Mobisol Akademie,” a two-week program through which technicians from the village (until then repairing houses, bikes, or phones) got trained and certified as Mobisol Installation Technicians.

And with that, we not only arrived at a feasible solution for us, but also made our customers even happier (because they know and trust their local technicians) – and created jobs in the village.

What is the business model behind this?

Initially, we thought that Mobisol could become a manufacturer or maybe wholesaler, with local distributors buying in bulk and acting as the point of contact for the end users. But in our field test, we learned that there was neither a distribution nor a financing infrastructure to build on, and if we wanted this to work, we would have to build up our own structures and adapt our value proposition:

• — We needed to take on the role of a micro-lender. This meant that on the one hand we had to borrow money from somewhere to bridge the three-year repayment period, and on the other, we had to carefully assess the creditworthiness of interested households. While the “switch off” mechanism helped us to get the necessary pre-finance more easily than we had thought, it took several iterations to come up with a credit survey that allowed us to find suitable customers.

1. Cofounders Thomas and Klara meeting with village leaders in rural Kenya to better understand the role of energy in their village.

   

2. We evaluated our pilot phase and gained insights for further development through home visits and focus group discussions.

   

3. A Mobisol sales outlet right next to the regional market square.

   

4. A screenshot of our web app remotely monitoring all systems installed.

   

• — We needed to make sure that our customers could gain access, no matter how remote their homes were.

To come up with a cost-efficient distribution strategy, we looked into informal markets for inspiration: when a Tanzanian family build their new home, they go to the nearest market, buy the bricks, and find a means for transporting all the materials home – sometimes a bus with the right route, sometimes a car, sometimes a boat. Every village has a mason, who is hired to build the house.

We already had the local technicians, so we started to build up a decentrally organized network of sales outlets. Today, we have our “market hubs” at marketplaces that our customers regularly visit. We make sure the packaging is optimized for easy transport, and as soon as the papers are signed our customers handle transport over the final stretch, bringing the system components home, where a village technician is waiting to do the installation for them.

“Side effects” of our pilot research

Through close interaction with our first 200 customers, we found out that some of them were using the system productively and making quite a bit of money. We wanted to foster that and started to develop small business kits, so-called “business out of the box.” In essence, these are electric appliances suited to our system together with entrepreneur-training materials and marketing materials for the customer to use. At the moment, we have a phone-charging kit and a barber shop.

Evolution of the business

Through our iterative process and being very close to our customers, we gained confidence about a business/service model that others considered pretty radical. As we pre-finance our technology for three years, we could only grow if we borrowed money. This confidence plus our “proof from the field” helped to make sure we found people who believe in it.

As I write this, Mobisol is about four years into the business and around three into commercial sales. We’ve grown to 500+ employees and provided access to electricity to more than 50,000 households. Having started in Tanzania, we went to Rwanda in 2014 and later started operations in a third country, Kenya.