Prototyping

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

Harold’s Fried Chicken Service Model

Ok. I have something to admit. My favorite “fast food” is fried chicken – chicken wings to be more exact. I also LOVE  Jamaican jerk chicken. I could eat this everyday…no joke! It’s not fried but roasted over pimento wood. When I go home to Jamaica, my family already knows what I’ll be having for dinner the first night. After a visit to the duSable and SMART museums in Hyde Park, I made a stop at Harold’s fried chicken to indulge my fast food craving. I actually first learned of Harold’s when I moved to Chicago and heard Kanye West shot his first music video at one of these franchises. I’ve been to just a few and the bare bones set up is pretty much the same: red and white interior, a counter, an overhead menu, and eating booths. But this one in Hyde Park was particularly worthy of a blog entry because it was really different from the others I had been to.

Défilé de mode (Fashion Show)

I am not new to fashion or fashion shows. I grew up around fashion and loved watching Fashion Files on Saturdays as a kid. And when I had cable, I was loyal to Project Runway. My fondest memories of shows I went to are John Varvatos (men’s line) in Boston at Saks Fifth Avenue. I went alone but managed to piggyback into the VIP section with some guys I struck up a conversation with. Hey sometimes you just gotta do you what you gotta do! And the other one was in Bangkok, Thailand. A work colleague asked if I wanted to go to this huge event for a new mall opening with one of his clients. It was an offer I simply couldn’t refuse. And the event, the fashion show, was simply monumental. The experience is still vividly colorful in my memories. Just last week, I went to another fashion show for J. Cheikh, a men’s line designed by a talented wife-and-husband duo.

Service innovation: Groupon

My design nose is sniffing out a service innovation platform with Groupon. I love Groupon because it’s simple, quick and it gives me a chance to go out for a really good meal without breaking the bank, which is huge when you are a graduate student! I have been fascinated with Groupon’s growth and the strong burgeoning marketplace of new competitors like You’ve Gotta Get It, Buy With Me, and Living Social. Now Yelp.com has jumped on the bandwagon. I usually buy groupon’s for restaurant deals. Even though Groupon adds some reviews, I always go to Yelp to check the collective feeling about the restaurant before securing the deal. So it was funny, but not surprising to see that Yelp.com is also offering deals based on collective buying power. Their deals won’t be daily like Groupon’s, but only when they have something to share. While Groupon works great for me as the end user, I often wonder how the service compares when you are the participating service provider offering the deal. The other thing is that Groupon has either recently or will be issuing an IPO. I’m also wondering how the service will change when it becomes a public company. It is often said that when this happens, value shifts from the user to the shareholders.

When communities change

I recently found out that the Hi-Lo supermarket  in my old Jamaica Plain neighborhood in Boston is closing its doors after having served the community for nearly 50 years. This deserves repeating: nearly 50 years of service to a community! In its place, they are saying that Whole Foods will likely move in. The Hi-Lo supermarket was a pillar in the community serving mainly the Latino and immigrant population. It was where people could stretch their dollars but still buy healthy, nutritious, ethnic foods. I lived in Jamaica Plain for about three years and I loved the neighborhood’s cultural heterogeneity, the beautiful Victorian homes, dining scene and its large pond. Years ago, parts of Jamaica Plain was a wretched place to live suffering from gang violence and drugs. But those parts cleaned up its act and thus began the process of gentrification.  In fact, the house at the end of the street where I lived was a known and reputable crackhouse. When I moved to the neighborhood, that house was worth $500,000. Around the corner from me was an organic community store called City Feed which offered fair trade coffee, sandwiches and all sorts of natural foods. In its previous life, I was told it was a run-down smelly convenience store with sparse shelves selling stale bread and dusty canned goods. Even with all these changes, there was always Hi-Lo.

Prototyping a new supermarket service

The start of the semester is underway and one of my classes is Prototyping Methods taught by the renown Marty Thaler. Although I’ve had exposure to prototyping in my Foundation year, I didn’t practice it as much because I was so hung up on the skills I didn’t have like drawing and sketching. But now that I’m in my last year and have had time to warm up to the ID way, I don’t get bogged by the details anymore. Well kinda sorta not. So I feel like I’m approaching prototyping methods with a new sets of eyes, mindset and goals.

The service experience of coffee shops

J’adore coffee shops and I could spend hours if not days in them. They are one of my favorite places to hang out.  I just started reading the Experience Economy by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore and the premise of the book is that businesses need to look past commodities, goods, and services as drivers of value and look to creating personable and memorable experiences for the customers. Business value will be sustained as a result of creating experiences around those goods and services. I haven’t gotten very far in the book, maybe only about twenty pages. But even these first twenty pages made me think of the changing experience of coffee shops.

The retail experience and the played out sales pitch

I worked in retail for the very first time in 2007. What I thought would be a temporary holiday position turned into a year long part-time job. I had moved to a new city and found doing this an outlet to meet new people. While I love shopping and fashion, I never thought of myself as someone meant for retail so I was a bit nervous going in, but fully committed to trying something new.

As a new employee, I had to go through training to learn how things were done in the store, e.g., how to call the back room to replenish items on the floor, how to use the walkie-talkies, etc. There is training about how to approach customers what to say, what not say, how often you should circle back to ask if they need anything. And of course, there was the hard sell of the store’s credit card.

Flo

There’s an awesome restaurant down the street from me named Flo that’s known for its brunch. I went there today with a friend. It’s a relatively small restaurant and though I have only been a handful of times, the restaurant is always packed and there is normally a wait. While you are waiting, they offer free hot coffee for their patrons and when it is below freezing and you are hungry, you can’t ask for anything more. Now that’s service.

Service Design: An exploration (part I)

So what is service design? I first heard the term service design at the 2007 Design Research Conference in Chicago. Shelley Evenson was the presenter and I remember clearly being fully engaged in what she was saying. Since then, I’ve been hearing more about this evolving area and I’ve been reading a lot to understand what service design is so that I can articulate it in my own words. The funny thing is I believe I have my own definition of service design. Perhaps it’s because I don’t see myself as a professional service design practitioner (uh um, yet) that I feel the need to anchor my beliefs on someone else’s expertise. The thing is that I, too, have expert hands-on knowledge as a user of service systems. You see, I have only worked in service organizations. My ten years of professional experience are in the financial services industry.  I worked in the marketing department helping to market and sell investment “products”, a misnomer for  investment management services.

Working within a global division of a large French bank gave me an up close view of the complexity of service organizations especially those that operate on a global basis. From my experience, there are a few things you need to consider about service design. the internal ‘clients’–employees who work within service organizations, the external clients  (or users) themselves, and the different touchpoints in which one must go through to deliver the service for both the user and the provider. These touchpoints maybe interactions with different people within the same or across different department or the tools and resources people rely on. This is the nucleus. Around that nucleus there are contextual elements to consider such as social, cultural and environmental factors. A lot of what I’ve read thus far definitely focuses on service between the end user and the provider. There is a dearth of coverage on the design of services behind the scenes of a service organization. This too plays a significant role in how a service organization delivers a service. I know this all too well because I worked behind the scenes in the trenches.

When an RFP came in, depending on its type, there were multiple ways to handle that RFP. There was a qualification process which required notification of the right people. There was a legal process to confirm if there were any legal constraints precluding us from responding, there was the response process undertaken by the RFP writer and that process usually entailed collaborating with people in different departments. And then there is the production process..the time to print, package and mail out. The steps go on and on, but you get the point. Getting the information out of the door does not happen in a linear fashion. Each of these processes entails a dynamic level of engagement and interaction with people and technology technology.

So I’ve been trying to sketch this out. These are my first prototypes. More iterations to come.