The other reason for my disapproval is that I generally find name badges unappealing. I don’t want to put adhesive on or a pin through my clothes and I don’t care to wear something around my neck that is dangling from what looks like a shoe string. And yes, if I must choose I prefer the clip-ons.

My airline troubles started on my return leg. My connecting flight from London to Chicago was canceled. I had the option to either stay the night in London and arrive in Chicago really late the next day or continue on to NYC and arrive the next day in the morning. I opted for the NY leg. I was told that my luggage was on the NYC flight but when I landed my luggage was nowhere to found. The worst part was not understanding where to go and what to do after. I was accompanied by other passengers in the same boat and we circled the baggage claim area, stopping to ask airport employees, and each of us getting conflicting information. So I was told I couldn’t file a missing luggage until I got to my final destination. Then there was the incredibly long wait to get a hotel and meal voucher. When I say incredibly long, there were times I felt that I could just sit on the floor and sob. No one came out to say anything about the wait and there were only a few agents manning the desks. I flew out on Delta from NYC to Chicago. This was the itinerary that was arranged for me when my flight from London was canceled.

My five-day nightmare started when I opened a claim for my bag with Delta. Delta tried to contact AA, but there was no response. After the second day, I had to take matters into my own hands. While on the phone, I started to do some user research, asking questions about their systems, why they are unable to communicate with the other airline. I was told that my luggage was located and was coming on the last AA flight out of JFK. I went to O’Hare and my luggage was not there. I asked the service agent to look into my situation and he said that he could not. Yes, let me repeat this again. As an agent working at the AA baggage claim, he said that he could not help me to find out why my luggage did not make it on the plane and that I would have to call the baggage claim number.

The issues are plenty. There is a broken communication system between airlines.  There was no way for one airline to know if the message had even been looked at. And if they tried to call, no one would pick up. If I had entrusted either AA or Delta to locate my bag, it would not be in my possession. I was relentless, basically calling them phone day and night. The airline industry is not a lucrative one to say the least and airlines are trying to stay afloat by wrestling against the high costs of fuel and fleet maintenance. As the airline harangues us with a mountain of fees, service has gotten increasingly poor. In my situation, the customer experience was completely overlooked. The airline industry is ripe for new service innovation. I wanted to never, ever do business with AA again.

I’m more loyal to CVS than I am to Walgreen’s. There are two reasons for this: 1. I am from Boston where CVS has a major presence and 2. There is a 24-hour CVS where I currently live. I actually use my rewards and they’re great when I remember to use them. That’s another blog post topic. Today though I walk into CVS to use my 30% of-my-entire-purchase-coupon. When I’m at self-check out and proceed to swipe my coupon, my discount was less than what it should’ve been. It wasn’t the first time this has happened. I’ve become quite adept and calculating percentage discounts on the spot. What can I say, I like to shop sales. So I tell the store employee and she says “oh if you use “those” coupons you have to go to the register because the system doesn’t take off the right amount”. With the level of automation we have achieved, not to mention the complexity of these self-check out kiosks, I found her response completely incredulous and it left me confused. Certainly, these systems tally and track all of our purchases, but cannot calculate a simple discount?!?!. So there I was waiting in-line to scan all my items a second time. All is could think about was that there is a terrible design flaw that needs to be fixed and what horrible service I was receiving.

I reinstated my relationship with Zappos two weeks ago. I was heading to Portugal for a friend’s wedding and needed to buy some stylish walking shoes. Zappos had the Puma Zandy’s I wanted and on sale!  Zappos said it would take about 3-5 days to arrive but I got it in two. I’m wondering if I had not ordered them during the weekend if would’ve gotten them the next day. When my shoes arrived much earlier than anticipated, it was an OH SNAP moment!

I flirted with a couple of other online sites before settling with Piperlime. The experience of getting my shoes early made me stop and consider the two services and what service design means. The bottomline is that Zappos and Piperlime are online retailers who sell shoes and other merchandise. the content is pretty much the same, but their touchpoints are different. Touchpoints are like the engagement points that a customer interacts with during the service process.

Here’s the thing. With Piperlime, I have to wait longer for my shoes, but when I open the box and see how carefully they have been packed and the heavy card stock envelope containing my receipt, a short personal message, and my return label (small survey included), I am smitten. I love feeling like I’m opening up a gift and even more feeling like I have everything at my finger tips.  Zappos, on the other hand, well, there were my shoes and a thin piece of paper showing my order and where to go online to print out my return label. Pretty bland and no frills.

Conundrum. I couldn’t decide which service was better. I liked them both. I really liked the fact that I got my shoes from Zappos quickly. I was leaving for Portugal in less than a week. But even that experience didn’t affect my loyalty for Piperlime. I think it will come down to my specific needs in different situations. I’m definitely up for trying Zappos again. I went back to the site just yesterday looking to buy the same pair of shoes for my mom. Those Zandy’s are the bomb. They make you feel like you are walking on pillows!

They warned me to be careful…very careful. It’s a beautiful country, but it can be dangerous. Don’t wear any jewelry, always wear a money pouch and exercise common sense. I walked down to the busy market in downtown Pelourinho in Salvador Brazil and stood in front of a woman. I needed help. The only thing that connected us was the dark color of our skin and her son with whom I had a very brief encounter days before in this same market. During our brief encounter when he spoke to me in broken English, he was fascinated by my hairstyle and couldn’t believe that I didn’t speak Portuguese and was not Afro-Brazilian. After nearly two weeks of traveling along the coast of Brazil with my Brazilian friend and her family, my lifeline to communicate in Portuguese was severed.  They had already left to return to Sao Paulo. As I wrestled myself through the market to find his stall, I worried about how I was going to communicate the help I needed.

Not knowing how to speak Portuguese left me feeling completely exposed, helpless, and vulnerable. And there was the constant whisper in my head “be careful…very careful”. I tried to quell my fears by telling myself that it’ll be okay. I speak French and know some Spanish. I can surely manage. My friend was an excellent guide and gave me a unique Brazilian experience that I would not have otherwise gotten if I had traveled through a traditional tourist travel package. At that moment, I realized I didn’t get much of a chance to practice any Portuguese. She spoke English to me and was basically my translator.

The woman in the market smiled at me and I knew she remembered me. I first tried to speak in English in hopes that she would understand just a little, but this quickly proved to be futile.. I then used the Spanish word “ayuda” to tell her that I needed help and that got her undivided attention. There was a lot of back and forth to explain to her that I needed to get to a bank and it had to be Citibank. Being able to get to the airport and back to the states both hinged upon finding a Citibank branch in the city and I didn’t know where it was located or how to get there. I kept on repeating Citibank and maybe after the fifth time, she exclaimed with arms fully extended “Ah, Citchi-Bank“. The right pronunciation made a world of difference. Through gestures, I asked if I could walk, take a bus or a taxi. She said taxi, but told me to wait. She went off and then she motioned me to approach. She arranged for a taxi to drop me at the bank, wait for me, and bring me back to her stall. I was deeply moved by what she had done for me.

We were two strangers from different countries struggling to communicate, yet she was empathetic enough to stop, listen and help. When I got back to the stall, her son was there and had already been filled in with the day’s events. I told him that I was hungry and wanted to try a lot of the Afro-Brazilian delicacies I saw in the market. For the rest of the afternoon, he took me on a culinary tour where I got to meet a lot of his fellow market sellers and immersed myself in the amazing rhythm, colors, smells and sounds of market life. Sometimes a little bit of trust will take you a long way.

During our discussions, one thing stood out to me and that is we often heavily rely on technology for our design solutions. Technology is completely relevant and its pervasiveness is seen across different domains. But technology is not always the end-all-be-all and in these cases we need to consider alternatives. Smartphones, social networking, twittering etc work for certain demographics but not for all. We had an engaging discussion about if our service would make sense for an ethnic community in Chicago. Questions such as “would the needs be the same”, “would the role of technology be key to the solution”? The discussion was great because it underscored a key criterion of design thinking — understanding the needs of the people for whom we are designing. We even started to compare and contrast these neighborhoods to probe ourselves more how we may be able to serve both communities.

In my quest to understand service design, I have come up with four components that moves along a continuum of tangibility to intangibility. You may consider it a framework, but I can’t call it a framework (yet) since my ideas are still in progress, but I am getting somewhere. The first two components are more tangible. You have people (or users). These people are not only the end users of the service, but are also apart of the service provider. Second are interactions. These interactions can be people-to-people or people-technology or people-to-thing. Multiple interactions create a journey. As one goes through this journey, the process creates an experience. This is the third component. Now we’re moving from tangible to intangible because experience is largely subjective. The emotional response from the experience can be different from individual to individual. On a meta level, what affects our experience is what we bring from a cultural/environmental perspective. It leads to me to question, how do we best represent or define experience and culture in the design of a service.

In our discussion it was clear to me that the majority of people couldn’t connect with the ethnic community. And it’s okay. If one hasn’t had exposure it’s very hard to relate. The more pressing questioning for me is how do we get people to relate and understand at this fuzzier level. Still reflecting.

On Friday March 11, Chicago participated with nearly 50 cities around the world for the first ever Global Service Jam.  We worked for 48 hours to design new services over a shared theme “Super Heroes”. This was an event to learn more about service design and service design techniques. The Chicago team jammed hard, long, and proud at Conifer Research. I was a Design Coach at the event and was happy to see the level of involvement that went into designing  our new service Swoop!

Check it out!

http://vimeo.com/20989842

Swoop! a service platform empowering people to better their communities one deed at a time.  People would like to contribute to the community but often can’t commit to a set schedule. The Swoop! platform allows community members to identify and address local challenges,engages members of the community to solve those challenges, and reap the rewards. Using either their smart phone or home computer, Swoop! users can record social ills such as,trash in the neighborhood, graffiti or snow build up. These needs are posted as ‘missions’ for other members of the community to tackle. Each mission is assigned a point value based on the urgency. Missions can grow in urgency as other people also mark them as an issue. People can then accept the mission, complete the task, and win the points. Points are used toward acquiring community awards like neighborhood beautification, school improvements, or additional resources.

Swoop! helps people work together to create super communities.

In its environment

Wow, wow, and wow! It has been well over a month since I’ve made a post. School is in full swing and time management still proves to be an unwieldy beast. But I promised myself I’d get back to my blog since there are a lot of updates. I finished out the first session of my semester and wanted to return to a subject of a previous post. Prototyping. In my prototyping methods class, I decided to use lighting as my topic and specifically desk lighting that was integrated directly on the desk. After getting some rough idea sketches, it was time to franken-prototype. I realize that when I like to “test” things out, I like to start small, really small. I could put my head around doing a full scale or even a half-scale prototype for the first round. Working with my “miniature” prototype still helped me to understand the functionality of my desk. The one functionality that caused me the most headache was the movement of the lamp. How would I get the joints to move? And how was I going to keep the lamp up? Is this even possible? I became frustrated quickly but I realized the prototype was doing what it was intended to do: ask a lot questions and show where the weak points are. That franken prototype led to an inspiration mood board and a final full scale mock-up that eventually removed the movement functionality. I had to chose my battles wisely!

sketch

Small prototype

Full scale prototype

That was a primer for our final full scale environmental prototype for a space within our school.  I worked as a teamwith two other classmates (Youngjin & Jodi). We decided to focus on a space where students get coffee. The space is in a round room, but the space for the coffee felt boxy, awkward, and incongruous to the layout of the room. Another insight about building a prototype is that it can take a long time. Even after deciding the location, it was then about the design, measurements (lots of math), more franken prototyping to test out physical human factors. After 4 hours of discussion and nearly 8 hours in the workshop, we presented our hexagonal columns for the new coffee space. We were delighted and also very tired. They were also well received by students at school. They seem to be interacting with them by changing the sequence of the different heights. Here’s the evolution.

Sketches

In progress

Hexagonal shape

At the end of a long day in the workshop

In its environment

Why? The service was purely a transactional one that had very little personable experience. The interior was like those old bank teller stations with thick bullet resistant plexiglass and a “drive-through” exchange window where money and your food was passed through a rotating window limiting any real contact with the cashier. It felt like security was on complete lock down that created a you-and-them scenario. Displayed around the counter area there were all sorts of signs of things that you would not do for you, which I thought was interesting and also uninviting. So I decided to sit and eat and noticed that drinks were provided only by four large vending machines. On one of the machines, I found this note scribbled on a guest check.

If you cannot read it, it says: We are not responsible for lost money, call the number on the machine. It was another hands-on approach to providing service. The vending machines  felt like casino slot machines at this point. You win some, you lose some and if you lose then try again at your own discretion.

Here’s the thing. I’m not trying to make Harold’s into something it’s not intended to be. It’s not intended to be a mid to upscale restaurant by any means. The value proposition, from my vantage point, is that you can get good fried chicken, for a really good price without the frills. My sense is also that they service more take-out orders than they do dining in. Keeping the place bare bones helps to keep the price point low. I totally get that. But I feel that there are little things that can be done to make the experience better. I’m sure for lost money, they can pay their customers and call the vendor for reimbursement. And change the service communication from what they won’t do to what they provide puts a more positive spin on things. Needless to say, my chicken dinner was really, really good.