Prototyping and Work-Out of Your Service
Until this chapter, we have focused on the design of our service. We have learned a design thinking approach for the design of our service considering the needs of our society. You have got some knowledge and hopefully some experience on how to design your service. Now, we would like to move the next phase: prototyping and work-out.
In the real business world, this is the most important phase of your service. Your service needs to be prototyped and worked-out for real customers so that you can innovate in the real world. Even if your design is excellent, if you do not use it for real customers, it cannot have an impact on society.
Now, you have a design. Let us prototype it!
You may have a question, “But, how I can prototype it?” and the simple answer would be “just do it!,” which might not seem to be a helpful answer. However, what we have seen is that so many ideas about great services have not been executed because the person who had the idea had no direct or easy or instant approach for it. On the other hand, the same idea has been implemented with great success purely because the person had a passion to do it!
You must understand, or you may have already understood, that there is no universal solution about how to start prototyping your service. In other words, there are lots and lots of ways to prototype your service anyway. The only ingredients necessary to start prototyping are your passion, your determination, and your will to make it.
You may worry about the money, the people, or even the possible failure of your service, but nothing can really inhibit the initiation of your service. You can just try it and see what it looks like and observe how your customers respond.
Yet, there are some tips with the prototyping your service. Let us look at them and work on them.
How to Prototype Your Service
First, let us look back at what the prototype is compared to the real service, and examine why we have this prototyping phase instead of just implementing the service.
The prototyping phase is added in this book as an interim phase between the design and the work-out. You can, of course, jump into the working out of your service implementing your design. Please do not stay in a design phase unless your mission is only designing and you are not allowed to implement it.
There are two advantages in having this interim phase of prototyping: First, it will lower your stress in starting your own service. To start a new thing is always a challenge, and it does bring on quite a stress even if it seems to be an easy and trivial thing. Prototyping is quite different from the real endeavor and so can be free of any stress.
The second advantage is, of course, that the service can be improved through the experience of prototyping and its feedback. Even if you have made a perfect design, there will be many aspects that can be improved, many things that you did not even dream would be needed, and problems that you did not expect. Prototyping is a great way to communicate with your partners and possible customers, too.
One of the great things about prototyping is the timing, that is, it would not take a long time to make a prototype, and you could have a short-time feedback on the properties of the prototype. On the other hand, implementation of your real service is likely to take much longer time with more preparation time as well, and the feedback of your customer may take too much time so that you will not be able to revise your service quickly enough.
Thus, the first rule on prototyping your service is to make it quick. But how much time do we need to allocate to the prototype, how can we speed up building the prototype, and how fast can we get the feedback from it?
Generally speaking, it will depend on the size of your service and on the attributes of your target customers. If your service is local and your customers constitute a small group, you can try your prototype in a week, and try to get feedback within the next week or so. But, if your intention is global service on complicated settings, a prototype may take a few months to construct and the feedback may take a few more months to be gathered.
Yet, you need to understand the changing speed of the marketplace in the modern world. If you take a year to try a prototype, the conditions of your service may have changed quite a bit. You may need to redesign your service to accommodate new environments. And you must know the prototype is not a real service. You can just focus on the very essence of your service so that the time for prototyping can be made shorter to discard other details.
The second rule is to focus on the essence of your service. This might be a good chance to reconsider your service and its design before the delivery. As you proceed with your service design, you may have to revisit many times the most important elements of your service such as the unique property of your service.
Doing a prototype provides a good chance of reviewing the essential strength of your service, since the prototype will incorporate the very essence of your service. If you cannot prototype that essence, your intended service will be just an imaginary one for you to have. It is just like a plan to achieve something great that is there only in theory. Until you start to do it, it will remain a great dream.
The third rule is to get possible customers to help review the prototype. This is very important for the prototype. In the case of the prototype of a physical product, you may not need to consult the customer in the prototyping stage. The product may appeal to a new customer group that the designer may not have thought of. The same kind of situation is possible for service design; however if the service is intended for use by people, you definitely need the right set of customers to evaluate your prototype.
Asking possible customers to review the prototype would also be a good opportunity to inform customers of your intended service. People tend to be curious about what you are trying to do. In some cases, you may need to prepare the non-disclosure agreement for them to sign so that you can avoid any foreseeable troubles with your intellectual property rights (IPR) with regard to your new services. This is critical when you depend on somebody else’s IPR that is pending to be registered.
The prototype review session would also be a great opportunity to set up your user community, because this may become the birth place of your next great new service. And you must understand the importance of the customers group for your services.
The fourth and last rule is adaptability. You need to be adaptable, and your prototype must be adaptable to any situation, any response, and anything that may come into the scene of your service delivery. I do not say the prototype should have changeability. Of course, if the prototype is easily changeable, it might be adaptable. But, even if it is very difficult to change your prototype, it must be adaptable to many situations.
Here, the adaptability is, in a way, a flexibility that your service can present to any possible customer. The essence of your service may focus on the core customers who will highly appreciate your service. While you need to identify these core customers with your service’s strength, yet you cannot or should not reject customers other than those who are identified as your true customers. This is, in fact, the tricky part of a business in general. You need a focus, but also you need to be able to diverge, to a possible wider audience.
I can add one more point to this section on the prototype, that is, the most important and effective thing is to do prototyping. Do not just stay with the beautiful design, and do not jump into its implementation without prototyping at all. Well, you can make a great success without prototyping, but it is very risky. At least, you need to consider prototyping, and with these preparations it might be reasonable to expect that you can start to implement and deliver your service right away.
How to Evaluate Your Service
After prototyping, it is time to test your service as you drive it down to the customer! Since you have already prototyped and checked with your customers, there would be not many things to add at the time of the delivery of your service.
However, in this section, I would like to emphasize the importance of evaluation of your service because the quick feedback loop of your service will be the key to success with your start-up service. You cannot update your service without the precise evaluation of what is good and what is bad. And you need some system for the evaluation, which should be detailed and prompt.
When you design the evaluation system for your service, you need to take the people who are customers and partners, and the sensors which are sometimes mechanical and sometimes in the form of statistical data, and other factors into account. Let us take a detailed view of these evaluation elements.
Evaluation Systems––People and Sensors
First of all, when people start thinking of evaluation systems, they tend to work with just the system without any human beings. It might be okay with a mechanical system such as automobile engine system, but in the area of service, you must think of your customers, human beings, to evaluate your service.
So, the very primitive evaluation system is to listen to your customers. However, as an evaluation system, it is not enough. Why? In a sense, it is because they are human beings.
- There might be an unconscious bias both on the part of the person who reports the evaluation and the person who receives it.
- The customer today is not the customer tomorrow.
- You also need the evaluation from the noncustomer.
- You need to have consistent evaluation for the lifetime of your service.
If you are system person, you tend to think of the automatic system to gather data for evaluation. Web-based service is, in this sense, an ideal environment for automation such as the number of hits, visitor’s history, response and what part of your page gets attention and so on.
However, as we have seen so many times with those web-based marketing case studies, this kind of data gathering and analysis cannot replace your service. The pitfall in these web-based services is that the data analysis is so easy and interesting that you tend to forget that real service is your target and real activities are the source of your business, not the analysis.
For systematic evaluation, you must pick up a small number of indexes so that the result of evaluation is simple and intuitive. The process and result of the evaluation is also the communication tool for your partners and your customers.
It would be a good idea to have a community, which will take the burden of evaluation with people and data. The evaluation group may differ a little bit from the user group since it may have other features and people as well.
Evaluation Timings––Overheads and Preparation for Emergency
It is important to remember that evaluation and monitoring take some time and resources. They do not come free of charge. Yet, especially in the case of emergency, the monitoring information can play a critical role in preventing or recovering from disaster.
In your service system, especially when it comes with web-based facilities, it is not so difficult to accommodate some monitoring capabilities to evaluate the performance and status of your system. You may prepare a mechanical sensor system to capture some features of your system such as counting the visitors to your store or taking videos of the customers you serve.
You can also utilize customer sessions, such as claims to your call center, for the evaluation of your service today. A response card with your service may provide very valuable, sometimes critical, evaluation of your service. Even direct contact with your customer “What do you think of our service?” can become a powerful device for evaluation.
So why do you have to continually monitor your service’s heartbeat?
- These evaluations must be periodic and cover the total life of your service, so that it can monitor the heartbeat of your system, and assure you of the soundness of the service.
- As mentioned at the beginning, the cost of evaluation must be low, and the cost of summarizing the evaluation or visualization of the result must also be low.
- It is very important that these evaluation or monitoring systems can sense an emergency and can work in a very critical environment.
As with the health of the human body, you need to check the status of your service in an ordinary situation to understand when something is wrong with your system. However, it is also very important to monitor the situation at any critical time. For example, when you have the web interface for your service delivery, it is critical that you have an alternative delivery system other than the web, because there may be situations when the web system may not be available for your service.
I have seen an airline counter where they need to work with paper since the airline system for the passengers was down at that time. It was a tedious process and we needed to wait in a long queue, yet it worked and I got to the plane without any delay.
On the other hand, I have also experienced a situation when the counter operation was shut down due to system trouble, and the flight canceled because of this failure of the computer system. I doubt whether that airport and that airline had been prepared for this kind of trouble and had any alternative solutions for this kind of emergency.
As with the human body, it is better to detect the problem beforehand. So, you need a good alarm system to warn you that something is wrong with your service. It is also important to handle the emergency, and you should recover from the crisis using the know-how learned from these troubles. Your service will become more robust and reliable after overcoming these problems.
Revising the Evaluation Systems
Your service needs to update as you develop your service in its quality and quantity, as well as when you expand the customers who receive your service. It is the due process as your service evolves. The evaluation and monitoring system for your service need to accommodate the evolution of your service. However, you need to be careful in designing the revision of your evaluation system so that the data and information that the revised system produces are compatible with the data you have gathered with the older system.
Of course, the easiest option is to just add the monitoring items upon the data items you have collected, but this is not the best solution. As we have discussed, the evaluation system and data cannot come free. For example, if you are asking the user community for evaluation feedback, adding reporting items may discourage them from responding. Adding another monitoring device for new features may require some money and work.
It is very important in these evolutionary processes that you understand well the existing feature and the changed, deleted, or added characteristics. The revised evaluation system must cover both the unchanged core capabilities and the evolved features. Of course, you may revise the system to gather data more often, or more detailed data rather than changing the data item itself. Yet, you must recognize the difference in these data and differences with the cost for the revised system.
The other part of the argument is, of course, the frequency of the revision. Revisions of the evaluation and monitoring system may not need to synchronize with the evolution of your service. I recommend not to do them at the same time. It would be better to have some differences with the revision timings so that you can understand the effect of the change of your services against the data you gather from the old monitoring system.