Real people are central to the idea of service design. Involving the user, co-creating and understanding their needs is key ensuring that service experience is optimised and mutually sustainable.
Increasingly services are being delivered online, which means that user experiences need to be designed to work seamlessly and consistently across multiple platforms and the physical world, offline. Service delivery is increasingly digitally-focused and understanding the behaviour of digital users is key to developing effecting business in this marketplace.
On September 15th we are launching a project exploring the extreme margins of digital users - the fake identities and manipulation that influence the social web and, inevitably, digital services. The implications of this activity affect everything from commercial brands to non-profit organisations, and there is still much to be learnt from online behaviour in its own right.
Online users are increasingly interacting with each other, and companies, in self-contained and designed environments. Where previously it was people’s offline life that influenced their consumption of services (and products) online, its more often the case that individuals discover, assess and buy into services without ever leaving their browsers. Increasingly people do their research, canvass the opinion of friends and relate to service providers through precisely the same channel, the internet.
Exploring the extreme margins of online identity and users enables us to consider influence and engagement in their most subversive forms and, ultimately, this will lead to a much clearer understanding of how digital service design and delivery should develop in an increasingly connected world.
From Products to Services
Marketing Services Development
I think this is not just a great project, but an essential one too. I think we are still treating online and offline in isolation and as if they were two different entities. That is not the case, they are closely related and interdependent.
The big shift nowadays is that we are spending a larger amount of time online than offline and, as you say, that is influencing the decision making process significantly. We are still relying too much on traditional demographics when designing services, when in fact, technographics are equally if not more important, especially if they are being used subversively.
We are already seeing the social web get ugly! What will be interesting is how this is controlled, monitored and contained, if at all. And, do brands actually care, as long as people are still buying their products?
By Ann Holman on 2011 09 15