Finally, approval from the IRB to distribute my survey. It’s here. Please take the survey! Here’s the link again!
A preview:
Finally, approval from the IRB to distribute my survey. It’s here. Please take the survey! Here’s the link again!
A preview:
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What’s the best illustration style for storyboards?
Lately, I’ve been struggling with how to depict service design scenarios, so that I can online-test them. I started by writing each scenario from the perspective of the customer, as well as the employee, then drew rough draft story boards for each:
Scenario 1, customer perspective:
Whenever she’s at Target, Ann checks to see if the Cascadian Farm Cinnamon Raisin Granola is on sale. Whenever it is, she buys one or two boxes. It’s her favorite cereal, but she feels that at the regular price it’s too expensive for her to justify as an everyday purchase.
This afternoon, Ann is at Target browsing for clothing. She’s looking at a rack of tights and socks when a Target employee walks by. He stops and says to Ann, “Hey there – just wanted to let you know that we are having a sale on Cascadian Farm stuff, like cereal and granola bars!”
Ann is happy to hear this, and when she’s done looking at clothing, she goes over to the grocery section to get a box of the cereal.
Scenario 1, employee perspective:
Jay is an employee at Target. Today he is tidying up the displays in the clothing department. He carries with him a mobile device that was given to him by the Target manager – the device has information that he can give to customers to help them have a better shopping experience.
He glances at the mobile device as he walks by the socks display. It shows that a customer who is currently browsing the socks display is a big fan and frequent buyer of Cascadian Farm Cinnamon Raisin Granola, but only when it is on sale. It prompts him to mention the current sale to her.
Jay says to the customer, “Hey there – just wanted to let you know that we are having a sale on Cascadian Farm stuff, like cereal and granola bars!” The customer smiles back.
What I’m struggling with is refining the drawings for my online test. I don’t want to make them too “finished” or “polished,” because to do so would not invite criticism as readily, and I want honest criticism of my concepts. (Furthermore, I want to de-emphasize the aesthetics here, and instead focus people’s attention on the service concepts.)
My first attempt at a more refined storyboard is all wrong:
I think they’re too busy and don’t fully emphasize the service.
What direction should I go in?
**Update: A classmate suggested a gray background to increase the attention on the characters:
I’ve decided to go in a new direction, focusing less strictly on travel and airports, and focusing more strictly on in-person interactions. (So, I won’t be pursuing those airline app newsfeed concepts. Instead, I’ve converted them into services that a human service agent can provide, instead of a mobile app.)
With my advisers’ help, I’ve decided to work along these categories:
After the poster review session, where faculty, students, and guests commented on our work thus far, I’ve decided to focus my concepts more strictly on service interaction designs that use customer data.
In the meantime, while I work on my more focused concepts, I thought I’d post some of my earliest concepts here.
For the past two weeks, I’ve been working on the way I communicate what I’ve done and where I’m going on this thesis. (I’m thinking about this now because on Friday, there will be a research expo where faculty give feedback on students’ work so far.)
It’s not easy to sum up several months’ of work, including the interesting false starts and abandoned concepts, into a quick spiel. Even just naming the concept space (personalizing in-person customer-employee interactions using technology and customer data) is a mouthful. And, it doesn’t cover the target audience (frequent air travelers) or why it’s a problem worth solving (improving customer experience as well as giving employees the tools to do their jobs better–and therefore increasing employees’ job satisfaction). On top of all that, I have a real desire to convey that my as-yet-undefined design concepts will be applicable to other contexts, from retail to government services or even medical provider interactions.
There are a lot of questions I’d like to preempt when I talk about my project:
What I’m realizing is that a 30-second elevator pitch can’t convey every bit of research and planning. I think anyone who devotes a lot of time to a project wants to make sure that their work doesn’t go unnoticed, even those less glamorous tasks like reading reports from the Airports Council International of North America about airport revenue sources and why they’re changing.
Therefore, maybe the real work in writing a pitch is to figure out what aspects can safely be left out.
The New York Times’s David Weinberg tried bribing airline employees and fellow customers to give him an upgrade.
On the plane, I could not persuade anyone in a seat with extra legroom to switch places for money. I was surprised; I said I was willing to go as high as $100 and told them I needed to sit close to the front to exit quickly once we landed.
Weinberg offers his own explanation for why his fellow customers were unwilling to engage in this unorthodox social practice:
I also ran my experiment by Tom Bunn, a former airline captain (whose employers included United) and a licensed therapist. … For many people, he said, the act of flying is incredibly stressful. It is not so much because of long security lines and cramped seats, but because of the psychological act of giving up control, of leaving solid ground. Settling into an assigned seat, he said, is part of the process of quieting their anxiety. “So any change they have to face, they would rather not face it,” Mr. Bunn said.
What would it take to make customers feel comfortable engaging in new interaction patterns—with employees, or even with one another, like Weinberg attempted? I hypothesize that if an airline employee, especially a flight attendant, were to initiate an “unusual” social behavior, customers might be more accepting of it than the people David Weinberg met were.
This afternoon, I came across a recent blog post by the product design “thought leader” Nir Eyal, which succinctly describes why loyalty programs are such an underdeveloped area of customer experience:
Marketing professors, store managers and executives are still not sure how effective these initiatives are. One puzzle is the link between participation and loyalty. It’s not that strong. Millions of Americans are enrolled in at least one loyalty program, but just a fraction of them are dedicated customers. Typically, loyalty programs work only to the extent that they reward customers who are already loyal.
Mr. Eyal then mentions research that shows that when customers think they’ve invested something in a service, they’re likely to stick with it:
[One group of customers] received a card with an offer to “buy eight car washes and get the ninth one free.” The second group of customers received a card with a slightly different offer. They were awarded one free wash for every ten purchases, but they were also gifted two free credits … twice as many people in the second condition completed the stamp card; having earned two credits, the feeling of progress nudged them to return. Nunes and Dreze term this tendency the endowed progress effect…
I feel like a lot of behavioral economics applications for product design focus on apps and digital services. But lately, with my advisers, I’ve been discussing ideas that strictly encompass customer-employee interactions. (If you’ll recall, that was my original research area when I began the thesis project in April.)
What if informing customers of their past interactions with these people (pilots, gate agents, flight attendants, ticketing agents, even baggage handlers) could engender loyalty by giving the customer a sense of investment in the company? What if acknowledging the customer’s past efforts could improve customer satisfaction?
I think behavioral economics research could provide inspiration for designing customer-employee interaction concepts that actually have a chance of providing some benefit to travel companies.
In this week’s New Yorker, Tim Wu writes about how the companies we buy from affect our quality of life in “Why I Left United Airlines”:
The quality of our day-to-day life has come, in large part, to depend on a few companies that are responsible for the service-intensive industries upon which we all rely. I’ve come to think that the ritualized abuse that we, as consumers, have become accustomed to in so many areas of life is a sad indictment of our civilization. So, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, I didn’t actually leave United Airlines: the airline left me.