Good morning. Almost noon.
It's exciting to be here today.
I want to hopefully convince you all to
quit what you're doing and start doing service design.
[LAUGHTER] This is some work
I've done with my colleague Jordi Forlizzi.
She and I have given this talk in different versions,
a couple of times and met with
much more hostile responses than we expected.
We keep trying to iterate, see and so on.
I'm curious about your reaction
and I want to encourage you,
if I say something you disagree with,
please shout out because
that's a big part of what I'm trying to understand,
is where is what we're saying upsetting people.
Because that either means we're making
progress or we're not
articulating our argument very well.
I want to just start with a claim that HCI today,
the people doing the work to design
interfaces for people to work with computers,
is fundamentally based on an identity that comes from
user-centered design and user experience design.
Hopefully, that's not too radical an idea.
HCI has a long history of evolving its methods and
practices to fit the kinds of things that it makes.
As we make new kinds of things
in interaction, there's a dialogue.
It's a dialogue between
the practice community and the research community.
From that emerges the identity of HCI as a field.
The problem as I see it is that,
today we're making things that fundamentally conflict
with what we mean by
user-centered design and user experience design,
and that we have to change
our identity or get rid of these things.
But these things we're making
are actually pretty exciting.
Of the three, the first is
that today we're making services,
we're not making products,
but user experience design and
user-centered design follow a product-centric process.
Social computing systems which are
super exciting and huge growth area in HCI,
are really about trying to shape people's behavior,
not meet their needs,
violate some of
the core principles of user-centered design.
There's some exciting new area around thinking of
computers and computing as
a potential source for social innovation.
There we're really actually trying to radically
change people's behavior by putting
systems in the world which really has nothing to do with
meeting their needs and desires,
and that if we really want to engage in these things,
we have to think about the identity we move forward with.
My colleague, Jordi and I,
really feel we need to add
a service design lens and expand the definition of HCI.
By doing that, these three areas of work
become much more central and fit with
how we might define HCI.
I just want to talk like how did we get to where we are?
How did HCI's identity get here?
These are what I see right now is
the three critical lenses
to which we want to add service design,
usability,
user-centered design, and user experience design.
If you step backwards in time to the '70s,
there were no interaction designers.
What we think of an interface was fundamentally done by
industrial designers and they took
their sense of form and aesthetic,
and applied it to sets of controls.
They did a good job and they made many beautiful things.
They weren't the only ones.
We had a lot of engineers doing this as
well and they were really
focused on giving controls for functional devices,
but there were just a lot of controls at the buttons.
I don't know if any of you recognize
the UVW deck from Sony for high-end video editing,
I learned to edit using one of
these controls for a nuclear power plant.
Things don't look like this anymore,
which is an improvement.
But what happened?
Well, what happened is the personal computer really,
that came out and it became a space that
industrial designers or engineers working separately on
different kinds of things suddenly
needed to think about things together.
The other force I see strongly was the programmable VCR,
onscreen programming, that actually moved
a very simple programming task into many people's homes.
Designers, thinking about interaction,
needed an entirely new way to think about this.
If you read Bill Moggridge's books,
he talks about, I came up
with the term interaction design.
When I was designing this grid computer,
they brought us this thing and asked us to
design the case and the keyboard.
He had the immediate reaction that you could
not separate the design of the software
from the design of the tools you're
using to control the software and that we
needed a new design practice
that brought these things together.
This is, I think the first lens,
the first definition of HCI where there was
design involved and there was a usability lens.
The goal was to really
make things that help users complete a task.
It was to understand
the model the user brought to the system and make sure
the system functioned in such a way that the common sense
the user brought was
fulfilled in the way the system worked.
The process at the time, so scenario-based design.
There was a lot of testing without users,
so heuristic evaluations and cognitive walkthroughs,
and then of course, think a lot.
At this time you didn't go out and
talk to users before making a thing.
You made early prototype versions and then you tested
people's cognitive abilities to see
if it was a good fit for what the product was.
A great example of this style of
thinking is the Apple's guides.
I'm guessing no one's ever actually seen this.
It's a really ridiculously old piece of work.
But the challenge was,
they were making multimedia databases
before the web and
they weren't really thinking hypertext.
They thought people would get lost when
navigating these large information spaces.
One of the design ideas they had
was to create these guides,
these little people who would lead you through a body of
work and let you know when you've
left one topic and move to another.
What was so interesting about this was,
people quit reading this as an encyclopedia and they
started to read it as this is
the opinion of this guide on this material,
was the unintended consequence.
It actually was one of the pieces of work that
raised this idea of interface agents.
Like we could have agents that are helping us and
you see it embodied the theme of that,
carried out and still in use in products today.
That was the usability lens.
The problem was the usability lens
didn't get us very far,
so it was very good at modeling the problem,
but there were still a number of breakdowns.
A big part of this was the idea that work is
social and it's not just about getting the task done,
but there's much more meaning going
on that determines people's behaviors and choices.
This is where the user-centered design lens comes from.
It didn't get rid of usability.
It's simply expanded the focus
of the work that was taking place.
Here the goal was to
understand the work process and the contexts,
contexts being that particularly new piece.
To understand users needs and goals,
not just their tasks,
and to envision how IT can be
automated to really improve workflow.
I would say this is also like,
where can we get rid of users
and replace them with computers.
This is our history.
But one of the nice focuses here
was this was also about skilling people.
Not just deskilling.
But how can I build skills by giving people new tools?
The major change in the process
was to go out and observe people,
to watch people do work,
and to bring that into
the design of computational systems,
to synthesize the information
that's collected with models,
that then drove the design process.
Participatory design, contextual design, personas,
these are all design methods that
came out of this shift from
a cognitive usability focus to
a much more social work focus.
One of my favorite pieces of
work at this time isn't a computer at all,
it's reprographics machine from Xerox.
This is work done by Fits Richardson Smith.
I mean, they did a bunch
of immersive ethnographic research,
watching people in offices use copiers.
They found this problem,
that the workers really needed to own their documents,
but there was a person called a key operator.
Anybody, remember the time of key operators?
The old folks. The key operator
was the person with the key,
who could operate the copier.
They control the order that jobs got done.
People would try to get
their job ahead of somebody else's job,
because this was a big bottleneck.
If vice president's job needed to get done,
suddenly your work was falling by the wayside.
At the time copiers were quite dangerous,
they were full of sharp metal pieces
and moving parts that could injure you.
Based on this insight of understanding work,
the designers came up with a radical idea for that time.
Not radical at all now, which is,
can we make a copier that
anyone can simply walk up and use?
Can we make a copier that if it has a problem,
anyone can fix it?
This has a bunch of advantages.
One is simply engineering at the time,
Xerox was spending hundreds of millions of dollars,
to make copiers that were very fast that never failed,
because the amount of time it took to
fix a problem was huge and that was like,
the determining factor for why you would buy a copier.
What it was doing was
creating this different way of thinking
about a copy that actually made
the engineering less important.
We could actually make copiers that worked worse.
They could have much worse performance,
because the end-user could fix the problem.
Xerox actually had to develop a demo,
where their product failed,
in order to show how easy it was to fix the product,
which is a crazy idea.
There's a Xerox vice president, "Oh,
my copier is broken," demoing how simple this was.
When they created this device,
they thought very strongly about extensibility.
This is earlier '80s when they're doing this work.
I don't know how many of you are familiar with
Chris Alexander's ideas of design patterns,
which are conventions that
grow over time as things are repeatedly built.
They turned that around to say,
designers can actually create this,
they can create a design language,
which is an intentional set of
patterns that make a product extensible.
The idea that the paper goes on the right,
and feeds to the left,
that where the paper go is marked in blue.
A lot of these patterns,
the way the toner cartridge goes in,
a lot of those patterns are still alive today,
even though it's 30 plus years
since these design aspects were put into copiers.
This style worked really well,
and then things changed again.
Mobile phones become really popular.
Lots more games going into
people's homes that have more complicated interfaces.
Personal music players.
But also the biggest one, the web.
The web created a bunch of interactive things.
They complicated the sense of purposefulness,
and this is an example of work by
Alban and Ferris Design from where they
had to design a website for the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
What does that even mean?
Well, you were supposed to have an aquarium
experience on the web,
but that didn't make you not want to go to the aquarium.
It wasn't replacing going into the aquarium experience,
but it was supposed to be its own thing.
The methods and processes of
user-centered design don't really map to this space,
because it's not about tasks,
it's not about work,
it's about something else.
This is where the user experience lens gets added.
Again, it's not like usability
and user-centered design go away,
simply the definition of HCI expands,
to incorporate this new set of
challenges because of the new things that are being made.
It's still about understanding people,
but in addition to their needs,
it's really trying to understand their desires.
It's looking at how people
construct meaning in their lives.
It's envisioning technology with the goal of how can I
enhance the user's experience
through their interaction with the product?
But from a commercial point of view, it's sort of,
how can I make a consumer take
this product off the shelf
and put it into their shopping cart?
It's a consumptive design process.
The process is okay,
we're still going to observe users
but now we're going to observe how they live,
not just how they work.
Experience prototyping.
Can we simulate this possible experience
to understand it?
Cultural probes and dream kits to get at
people's more hidden aspirations.
Then ideas like mood boards,
which is a super traditional design technique
from industrial design.
This was a shift,
but it was actually work industrial designers
and graphic designers and people in multimedia,
had always done, which was
making things that people would choose.
It's bringing a lot of very traditional design ideas,
into an HCI practice.
An example just to draw this idea out that I really like,
I used to work at Philips.
I'll promote them a little bit.
Although they did lay me off.
This is the living memory table.
It was done as part of a Y2K project,
right at the turn of the millennium.
The design team spent month
hanging out in a small town in Scotland,
trying to understand how people kept
alive the oral history of this town.
They hung out in a lot of cafes and pubs,
watching how people would share stories with each other.
They created this table,
which was a place for sharing stories.
It's a cafe table.
It's got a circular touchscreen.
You can share a story with it or you can also
listen to stories other town's people have had.
Then there are these radiofrequency tokens
that you can use to take a story with you.
It's a really lovely piece of work,
but it's really pushing the boundaries of what we
think of interactive technology.
It was transformative of this idea of the cafe table,
from a witness of the oral history to
an active participant in capturing,
and recording, and sharing oral history.
With each lens, HCI is growing.
I'm just trying to push this idea that
identity is constantly unfolding.
Are we ready for
another step forward and expansion of identity?
Some claims to ground the perspective I'm coming from,
I will claim and try to argue that user-centered design
and user experience design
follow a product-centric process.
It's about making a thing
that you want someone to purchase,
or making things that are so attractive,
lots and lots of people will purchase them.
It's very much focused on
user singular or users plural, and their needs.
If you talk to user experience design teams in industry,
they often refer to themselves as
worthy user advocate in the development process.
There's a very much strong focus
on making one application,
or one device, or one computer system.
With that, it's like the solution to
every problem is one computer.
It's a narrowness in definition.
HCI as it's currently
practicing and as it's currently defines itself,
never really talks about money.
It never talks about payments,
because that's marketing and business,
and so there's a definitional boundary that puts
that part of the work outside of HCI practice.
Now I want to talk about, where is this not working?
This is what HCI is and how we got there.
How are these new things we're making, creating problems?
So just a quick review of the things
I'm talking about: services,
social computing systems, and
systems with the intention of driving social change.
I just want to get
an agreement on what
products and services are and how they're different.
A cup of coffee product, Starbucks service.
They can be strongly connected.
Companies make products for consumers,
but they do for a customer.
Service becomes the do not make and
an exchange between a customer
and a product company, ownership is exchanged.
So when I buy this thing,
I own it and possess it and I've exchanged money for it.
But with a service, there's never
an exchange of ownership.
I may go into a Starbucks,
but I do not own
the Starbucks and I do
not own the employees that are there,
but I can still purchase a cup of coffee
and have ownership from it.
In a product sense, value is exchanged.
It's a money for a thing.
But in a service values experience is
the performance that's just in that moment.
It's not exchanged in the same way.
Another way to think of products is they're tangible.
It makes less sense with the cup of coffee.
I mean it's a tangible thing.
But the idea is you could warehouse it.
You could create a whole bunch.
But with a service, it can't. It's intangible.
It's this thing that is a performance
and has an ephemeral quality.
When we're thinking about what
is it we're trying to make,
it's actually really important to
know if you're making a product or a service.
Also, understand that products and
services work together in product-service systems.
But in general, the service is the glue that
holds the relationship between
the various products together.
In HCI, one of the ways service has really come in is in
the transition that's taking place from COTS.
I don't know if that's a familiar term,
but that's conventional off-the-shelf software
to software as a service.
There used to be a time you could go to a store and buy
software in a shrink-wrapped box and you owned it.
We don't live in that time
anymore and there's a lot of problems with that.
Software was very expensive.
But you have versioning issue.
You bought it and you own it,
but when a new version came out,
you had to buy the new version or at least
pay something for a new upgrade.
Particularly for industrial purchasers,
if I'm buying 200 computers and
copies of software for my employees,
I don't necessarily want to pay
for 200 upgrades all at the same time.
But if I add a new computer in,
I can't get the old software,
so I have to get the new software and suddenly I've got
a versioning problem because
some people have this version,
some people have that problem.
That version they don't go together.
Software as a service really changes
that because you move that ownership
back to the service provider and you're
just using the software.
It's about a pay-as-you-go model or
even a free model where you're using it for free.
Microsoft Office versus Google Docs is
a great example of
conventional off-the-shelf versus software as a service.
But you can see it complicates this in a sense.
Here the user is the customer.
Here I understand who the user is,
but who's the customer?
Because the customer is
the person that's paying the money.
There's something else going on there.
The other place that HCI is really getting into
services is they are
making digital tools that are
used in the performance of service delivery.
This is Cartwheel.
I don't know if any of you have used this.
It's a mobile app recently created by
Target for customers to use when they're in the store,
when they're having an in-store experience.
It's this crossing of
a digital-physical divide in
the way that people are interacting with things.
Services raise a bunch of challenges.
When you have free mobile apps or 99 cents
mobile apps or free online services,
you're really complicating this idea
that the user is the customer,
which is fundamentally where
user-centered design and user
experience design come from.
The design goal shifts from this desire to
buy to either the idea of,
I want to maximize your use or minimize your use.
With Facebook, they always want you to use Facebook
more because you are consuming
more ads, that's more revenue.
With Netflix, they would really
rather that you kept paying but watch
fewer movies because that helps their bottom line.
Those become determinants of how you set up a service.
Notice here, with all of these,
the financial model is fundamental to the design.
It can't be done in isolation.
You don't make the thing and then
figure out how to make money out of it.
The design of the financial model
has to be in the way that people use it.
Finally, in thinking particularly of
the products meant to work in
a brick and mortar service environment,
they're crossing a digital-physical divide
but often the teams are working separately.
I was just working with some folks from Walgreens,
their digital team was doing the website,
which is this entirely separate experience,
and then they had their in-store team.
Now they're making an app for
their in-store experience but it's being
done by the digital team who never
thinks about the store.
They're running into all kinds of problems because they
work in entirely different divisions.
It's that's problematic.
But in the definitional boundary
of human-computer interaction,
we stop as soon as people quit using a computer.
That's the boundary that we run into.
I just want to pull out the example of Waze.
Think about this user customer model.
Are people familiar with Waze?
They've been in the news lately.
They were in the news a while ago when Google
paid a billion dollars for them.
This is a navigation service that's free.
What happens is when you use
this navigation service with your mobile phone,
you're uploading your location data
which is used to model traffic.
So if I have enough people using this,
I can see what the flow of traffic is.
That's what Waze does,
and then Waze resells it.
The users are doing labor,
that's value for this service company who
can then resell it to make the revenue.
But it's a more complicated model
than just saying what the users want.
You can't get there from a user-centered point of view.
So services create a lot of challenges.
They need design teams to really
consider a whole bunch of stakeholders, not just users.
They often follow a disruptive innovation model.
It's about making something that sells for a lot
less but then delivers less too,
which is great from a business point of view.
You're stealing some conventional industry
sort of worst customers they're not going to fight for,
but from a user experience design point of view,
HCI people are taught to always make something more.
Keep adding, don't start removing,
don't make things worse.
User experience design and
user-centered design never considered
the financial model but it's completely
critical to the design of these things.
When you start to look at
particularly the physical service
and the digital in support of that,
there's a real need to cross
this digital-physical divide to do it well.
Social computing, it's been around forever.
It's a strong tradition
of computer-supported cooperative work,
so it's like how can this not fit HCI?
It's been around since almost the beginning of HCI?
But it's transforming. At first,
it was very much collaboration tools for workers,
looking at things like bulletin boards.
But then as it moved into a consumer space,
it started to change.
So rating systems and reviewing
systems, collective information systems,
crowdworking systems, peer-economy systems all began to
complicate and conflict with
user-centered design and user experience design.
The goal with all of these systems is
really not to make something that lots
of people want to buy but to make
a sustainable social ecology of exchange.
We're trying to make a little life form
of exchange among different entities.
Social computing starts to break down that.
Just like with services,
you have many stakeholders now,
not just a singular user.
You have customers and
you have to think about how does that
fit with this user or provider.
You have disruptive innovation.
It works the same way.
Systems like Waze, like Uber,
are very much in
this social computing sense
but they're disruptive innovation.
You still have to address the financial model because
that's fundamentally how many of these systems work.
It's not necessarily money.
But gamification, which is big in social computing,
is fundamentally about a type of reward to drive
behavior which pushes us towards economics.
There's definitely an intention
to shape people's behavior.
I want them to behave like this
because that makes my ecology work.
That's not really about fundamentally meeting
the needs and desires of users.
The problem gets even murkier when
you add social innovation, so this is,
I think one of the most exciting areas
of current HCI research.
There's not a lot of practice there,
and so there's a tradition of
that mostly around accessibility,
making it easier for people with
disabilities to use computers.
There's a tradition of using computers in
education that still works
very much with a user-centered design focus.
But when you start to take on
problems like sustainability,
or getting people to eat healthy to reduce rates of
obesity or HCI for the developing world,
user-centered design,
user experience design start to break down.
This whole thing is triggered by
the perception that social computing can't create
a new collective action that can drive change.
Many of the same breakdowns,
but the big one here is that,
now you're actually trying to
radically change people's behavior,
not meet their needs and desires.
In general, when you're looking at social innovation,
you're saying that collective good is
much more important than the individual good,
which is not at all an idea that comes from
user-centered design and user experience design.
That's about what's not working.
Let me give you
a brief breakdown of what
service is and why I think it can
help to span this identity breakdown,
and then talk about some of the problems with it as well.
Here's a nice graphic from New York Times
just showing over the last 40 years how
our country has shifted
from a products country to a services country.
The yellow ones are product focus,
blue are services you're just seeing
this giant shift in time.
Service design is really emerges out of
this shift and it comes from two places,
operations research, and we were just talking about this
earlier like do those people
even exist that do this work?
What happen to those operations research?
They had to change because the idea
of making production of things more
efficient becomes less meaningful
as there's less production of things,
and so they switched to
starting to look at service delivery,
and then suddenly realized, "Oh,
there's this thing called customers",
and they need to have an experience.
Because operations research never
worried about the consumer,
they were only worried about making efficiencies and
making the things that then consumers would buy.
Was also a huge change in marketing,
you're not selling things you're selling experiences.
These two groups generally found in business schools,
started service designed to address
the idea that the things they're working on,
the ground that's underneath
them is fundamentally changing,
and what's fascinating is this is driven by
the fact that communication technology changed.
To some degree, HCI is largely responsible for
this change in the world that now it needs to react to.
There's four critical service concepts
that I think make it particularly
valuable for these three types of things HCI makes.
A service concept is the goal of making a new service.
You're looking for the intersection
of a customer's need and desire,
and of a services strategic intent.
You're looking both ways,
where can I get value for
both sides not just value for one side.
There's the concept of customer competence,
which means instead of just saying,
"What can I do for users?
What can users do that's valuable for me?"
It's a different way of thinking,
I just use the example of recapture here.
I'm guessing most of you know this.
It's like people have a competency to recognize
words that weren't scanned well by
an OCR machine and can't be identified.
People need a Turing test or people don't need it,
services need a Turing test to authenticate new accounts.
We can put these two things
together and the labor that people are
already doing can be recaptured to create new value.
It's a different type of
discovery that's not going to come out of
a user-centered design or user experience design process.
The idea that customers have
their own customers and that needs to
be part of the design consideration,
and then service design is fundamentally systemic.
It thinks of everything as a system,
that's how it operates.
The work is to see a system,
envision a new system,
and develop a strategy to get
from where we are to where we want to be.
You don't do this strategy in a product design,
you simply make the new product and
put it on the shelves for people to buy.
I just want to break down
this idea of customers having customers,
and talk about Google Search,
I'm guessing everybody's has searched on Google.
A traditional user-centered design,
user experience design looks like this.
You have Google, they're service provider,
you have the searcher, they're customer,
and you have the thing the results,
and it's a one-way flow,
and it works and everybody knows what their role is.
From a service design point of view,
it looks much more complicated.
You have Google and they're
definitely a service provider to the searcher,
they're making those search results which are consumed,
and that's a very clear relationship.
But you have ad firms,
and Google is a service provider to the ad firm also,
and Google's providing a space
for the ad firm to put ads.
The ad firm is a service provider
to product and service companies.
The product and service companies hope to be
a service provider to
the searchers to have a whole ecology works.
One of the invisible parts is,
the searchers is also a service provider to Google,
because when they search,
they're providing terms that
make the search engine better,
that value can be recaptured.
What you're seeing is the flow of
value among all the stakeholders,
to understand how can I just wrapped it and change it.
It's going to take you to a really different place,
but it's not so different from what we already do.
The work in service design is really
to represent the service.
You want to see it, record it,
and communicate it, and you're capturing
the relationship between the elements and a service.
You're capturing how services unfold and change,
and you're capturing how services
interact with other services,
that's flow of value among the stakeholders.
This is generally expressed in models,
or shared representations and some of the common one,
stakeholder model, service blueprints,
experience journey, and value flow model.
They're making models, they're working in
the space of systems design.
I just took some screen snapshots of
a website called the Service Design Tools,
and what I want to point out is,
they're using HCI tools.
You will see things like affinity diagram,
storytelling, role playing, rough prototyping.
The service design community is
simply cherry picking methods from HCI,
ignoring any revenue that might go to
people that are doing HCI and moving into this space.
They're envisioning space, they're
using tools like story-boarding,
mood boards, mock-up, experience, prototype,
personas, things that are super familiar
with common HCI practice everyday,
but then adding to it things like activity maps,
service blueprints, customer journey maps.
They are building on an HCI knowledge set,
but extending it to really work in
the space of services and not giving
any credit to the people
that did the work to develop these things.
Service design provides a number of benefits.
One of the most important is that it's systemic,
and it lets a design team really think
about the needs of multiple stakeholders,
and the role switching.
How you go from being a customer
at one to being a service provider and another,
that's easy to capture so that
your design solution can address that role switch.
It investigates what customers can do
that are valuable for a service,
allowing an entirely new way
to think of value production,
that's not simply selling
more and more things.
It designs what the service agent does,
not just the tools.
This is a benefit,
but it's a really hard one to cross for HCI.
It's designing a job and it's
designing the steps someone does in their job,
not just the screens that they use,
which starts to feel very much not like HCI.
It definitely crosses the physical digital divide,
so service design has to do with
choosing the drapes in a hotel room.
That seems very far from
interacting with a computer, but holistically,
it's all part of a customer's experience and the way that
they're engaging with that service.
It plays with business models as a design material.
It's just part of the consideration.
Don't make the thing and then
figure out how to pay for it.
Figuring out how it's paid for is simply a part of
the making and it's part of
the dialogue to figure out the better future.
Finally, one of the best values
that supplies this idea of coming
up with a plan of getting
from the current state to the future state,
not just envisioning the thing that exists in the future.
The plan really helps make it operationalizable.
There are some limitations to this.
Service design is really oriented strongly,
oriented towards redesigning an innovation
of existing services and very traditional services.
It is a process that
developed around looking at banking and finance,
looking at health care,
looking at hospitality like hotels,
very big traditional services.
It has a very slow plotting pace,
because of the scale of
things that it generally works on.
It has no sense of creating new services
of radical innovation and invention.
HCI employs a really simplistic idea of user,
slightly better with service design,
but it's still fairly simplistic to think only of
customers and service providers.
There's an opportunity for
work that can begin to address it and come up
with a richer set of rules for entities to play.
Service design, if you look at how it's really done,
there's very much a timidness with using new technology.
They just want to use stuff they know works,
and there's no sense of technology as invention.
With HCI moving, if we
decide to move into service design,
I think this is a real benefit.
The sense of radical invention
and the creation of the new,
would push service design in an entirely new direction.
What I see is these current limitations
are benefits for HCI.
It's a chance to take a step towards
service design and actually own a big chunk of it,
because it's the space that
HCI is very comfortable working in that
current services and service design
are in no way ready to take on.
It's great for me to stand here and say, yes,
go do service design,
but that's not really giving a plan.
If I want to say, I'm doing
service design, I need a plan,
how do we get from here to there?
I'm going to suggest a first small step
is to simply teach service designed to HCI students.
Replace current user-centered design
and user experience design
that's being taught with the service design.
Which doesn't actually get rid of those things,
there's still a core part,
but it adds a few additional dimensions on top of that.
Add simple things like making a stakeholder map,
doing a service blueprint as a process of both
processing the current state of the world
and envisioning a future.
By just teaching service design as a part of HCI,
the researchers doing HCI will naturally begin to see
opportunities where HCI research can have a benefit.
I don't have a big research agenda,
but I know it will emerge in
the same way it did for usability,
the same way it did for user-centered design and
the same way that it did for user experience design.
I want to stress it's not at all
about abandoning the current lenses,
the current thing we consider core to HCI.
Right now we teach
students that are training to be practitioners,
to focus on the interaction,
focus on the context and understand those
together and you can propose solutions that will work.
We're just adding an additional dimension of saying,
and you also need to consider
the larger system this exist in.
The easiest way that I do this with my students,
is I say, how does this make money?
How is it profitable?
But how does your idea simply make enough money to exist?
It's interesting like the feedback
I often get back from my students.
You mean it's not a good idea if it doesn't make money?
It's like, yeah, why would you want to spend
your time designing things that couldn't actually exist?
They're not actually solving the problem,
but it's a hard step for them to get over.
Most of them are either coming from engineering school or
design school and this
conflicts with what they
think it is they should be doing.
Another simple example of how I think
this can be integrated into teaching.
[NOISE] A very common teaching experience
in teaching HCI is asking
students to design a mobile app.
Well, a mobile app is for someone,
there's a service that's providing it.
Can you also design a dashboard that the service
is using to understand how their app is being used.
Can you think of it from
the other perspective and
does that change the way this works?
It's capturing the information
needed to produce the dashboard,
so you're beginning to think more of a system,
more of an ecology and it's a slight change.
I'm just going to alter
this assignment a little bit by saying,
in addition, make a dashboard.
Small steps, I think,
move us in this direction.
So why change?
I don't think there's a major harm if we don't switch.
I want to stress, I'm not saying it's
going to be the end of HCI at all.
We can be just fine if we don't embrace service design,
but I think we can be better if we do.
I think it increases
the influence of HCI in the enterprise.
Right now, our students go out and they practice
HCI in companies and they don't
get listened to very much,
because it's not clear how what they
do adds value to the company.
By taking over the financial model,
you move the HCI work much more
centrally into what companies do.
It opens up new spaces for research
without getting rid of any of
the old ones so it expands it.
It helps better integrate current threads of research,
particularly in social computing,
which are often around,
how do we motivate people to do something
with rewards or intrinsic motivation?
It stops a potential territorial war
that's going to happen between
service design in business schools and
HCI and information and computer science programs,
as the territory that they're working on
has an increasing overlap.
There are definitely risks.
It means going well beyond
the interaction with computers and obviously,
human computer interaction that computer is
core to the name of HCI.
It's not without risks to say,
do we want to go past just thinking
about the thing and the person at the thing,
to think of all of the other forces that then
play at how this interaction takes place.
It means thinking about things like
print design, media campaigns,
the environments people are in and is that
a step too far for our field?
It means designing work and workers and jobs,
not just the tools that they use.
It means thinking about money and
motivation as a core way that we work.
That's all for me. Go service design,
I'm very curious to hear
your reaction and if
you think this is something HCI should do.
[APPLAUSE]
Is there any particular reason you didn't slide
the name system design as
opposed or why you
chose service design as opposed to system.
Yes.
Yes. There are many reasons.
System design has a terrible history,
and I'm going to make a strong link of system design,
particularly to the design
of inner-city housing towers for low-income people.
It's a very top-down view
that repeatedly failed and did a lot of societal harm.
So I don't want to grab on to that legacy.
Systems design and systems theory, if you read it,
is really abstract and
complex and it's hard to make it actionable,
particularly to my students.
We are already designing services even though we're
not following a service design process.
It's like, to me,
it's the next step,
but I'm not saying that that isn't the end goal.
I'm just trying to say what's
our next reasonable step and how far can
I take the students
that I'm working with. How far will they go?
It feels like it's approaching everything
as a holistic [inaudible].
Yes.
So systems are supposed to service.
Service is a very small subset of systems,
but it gives us a framing,
there's already a method.
People already know how to do it.
In the same way like user experience design seem to
radical change from the work focus of HCI,
that style of design already existed.
It happened in multimedia and film,
it happened in industrial design,
it happened in graphic design.
So they were, in the same way,
pulling from those and creating something like how
do we integrate that to the design of technology.
I'm trying to say I do the same thing.
Service design already exists.
People don't really know how to do
systems design effectively,
but they know how to design services effectively.
So let's pull in what we know works,
we can make actionable,
we can figure out how it fits,
and then bring our invention skills,
our radical technology transformation skills
to take service design in a different direction.
Systems design, it just seems too big and dangerous,
but I might just be being too timid.
As you said, UCD and HCI,
people often end up [inaudible] company.
This design is more wholistic,
multi-stakeholder approach.
How do you protect
the smallest stakeholders when there's going to
be a lot of weight on the side of let's
look at your search engine model, your Google model?
The advertisers, the sellers, Google itself,
they've got a lot more weight than
any individual user in that equation.
So how do you protect the end-user in
that equation by prioritizing their needs without just
getting swamped by the needs
of the deep-pocket stakeholders?
The whole ecology doesn't work if
every entity isn't receiving
more value than they feel they're giving up.
Right now, if I'm a UX designer at Google,
I'm really focused on
saying we need to focus on user experience because that's
going to be good for Google without actually being able
to demonstrate how is it good for Google.
When you talk to design teams,
and I've talked to a lot of UX design teams,
the first question I always ask them is,
how does your company make money?
Most of them have no idea how their company makes money.
Then it becomes very hard for them to
fight for what users needs because they
can't put it into a frame of
reference that makes sense for the customer,
in a sense, that they're surveying.
I actually think we will do more for users by
understanding the value that's produced by
all of the entities and simply saying,
but I just want to help these people,
without being able to articulate why that might be
good other than just for altruistic reasons;
isn't effective and it's been shown to
repeatedly not be effective.
Google is a really interesting example
of why user-centered design,
user experience design doesn't work.
The design team's goal is to discover
something 100 million people
want to do every day for free.
Doing ethnographic fieldwork is
not going to get me there.
I can't go watch 100 million people and say,
''Oh, they all want to do this.''
We need different methods if we're going to
try to design those kinds of things
and not just have them randomly appear by fluke.
Can we more intentionally create those kinds of things?
Other questions? Yeah.
IT service management has been
promoting this service design for a little while,
how do you think about those?
You are beyond the scope of what I know.
I'm not familiar with
IT service management and how they'd been engaging
in service design, but to me,
it's not surprising that anybody that's
at the intersection of service and
electronic tools isn't running into this because of
this transition to software as a service.
We just need to think in a different way.
It makes sense to me thinking more like IT within
a company generally needed
to do it as soon as people started to say,
well, how does the IT group generate revenue?
What's the value that you're adding?
To some degree, I think they've been
thinking about it longer,
but I'm not familiar with the literature at all. Yeah.
How does a silo UX team advocate for service design?
Does this have to come [inaudible]?
Excellent question.
I think they do it in the exact same way that
user experience design and user-centered design started.
I have a number of former students at Adaptive Path,
which is no longer,
but they just got purchased by Capital One.
But the way they did it was they would get hired to do
user experience design and they would
do service design and not tell their client.
Then you're producing these additional
artifacts and people are like,
wow, that's really valuable,
and then suddenly you're doing it.
You don't ask for permission,
just do it, build it.
You don't say, can we have permission to
think about the financial model. Just do it.
Produce the artifacts, call yourselves whatever,
the name doesn't matter.
But by producing the different thing,
the value that you're producing
becomes immediately apparent.
That's been super successful at Adaptive Path
with companies that weren't ready to go there.
You ease the people that you're working with into it.
That's also like IDEO Talks.
Traditionally, we don't let
our clients into the back until they've worked with us.
We stage bringing them
in because they're not ready to think this is valuable,
they just think it's craziness.
To me, it's like let's follow the same pattern that
we've used traditionally in HCI to expand our definition.
I'm just pointing let's go this way.
In academia, we have the fortunate thing of
department and discipline that
puts a really big wall between.
What one or two courses would you
recommend for a junior/senior in
computing to open their minds to this so that they
don't graduate to [inaudible]?
I teach a course with Jim Morris.
I don't know if any of you guys know Jim Morris,
he's an old-timer in transactional computing,
former dean of
the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.
We teach a course on mobile service innovation,
and I think it's a nice model
for getting students just to think about it,
where we say to the teams,
you have to come up with a business model,
you have to come up with a justification
for desirability.
Who wants to do this?
You have to come up with
a software architecture simultaneously, not sequentially.
We do mobile service because mobile services are tiny,
so it's something like a small team could do,
and say think like a startup.
What can you make that people want?
Then we encourage the students to pivot.
One great example that worked really well,
we had a team, they wanted to do translation,
so I'm an international traveler and I see
a sign and I don't know what it means and I can
point my phone and translate it.
So as they're investigating this,
they quickly learned nobody
uses their phones when they travel
internationally because it's ridiculously
expensive to use international data.
It's like, boom, idea's dead.
But it's like follow the money, think differently.
Don't think of the money later.
Yes, people want this,
but people don't want it enough to pay for it.
So by following the money,
what they eventually came up with,
their end design was a vending machine,
which is a really funny outcome for
a mobile service design class.
But it was going to vend Mi-Fis at
international airports so when you
landed you could pick up a Mi-Fi.
The team said we're going to buy
two-year contracts at about $30 a month,
and we're going to sell them three dollars a day.
So we're getting 200 percent markup on our product,
and for three dollars a day,
you're getting Internet for all
of your devices everywhere you go.
Look at hotels, they're charging $10 or $15,
and it only works in a hotel.
It's like the business part of it is not hard,
and the business people can't do it because they
don't actually understand the technology,
and so their idea was like Redbox.
These devices were just sitting in there,
you charging and you just get
one when you get to the airport
and you drop it off on your flight out.
It was like that's the thinking that I want
you to incorporate in
the way you think about computation.
We had a lot of really horrible ideas,
don't get me wrong [LAUGHTER].
They don't all get there.
But sometimes you see these things come
up and it's like that's a startup idea.
Not that I need you to go do that,
but I want you to be able to think like that.
The students immediately saw
the value of the service approach
over pre-select the users
you think matter and go find out about them.
Any other questions?
Concerns? No anger?
I was looking for pushback.
[BACKGROUND] [APPLAUSE]