World in my eyes
Sometimes, and just sometimes, one encounters a service design as if taken out of a book. Everything looks so flawless and easy to breeze through, sit back and get things done in a jiffy.
I don’t know about you, but I seldom stumble upon a service which is empathic, guiding and responsive. In fact, I kind of believe that the bigger amount of businesses focus on a particular step of the service process and not really considering its entirety.
Service Design has been a field I wanted to dig in for a while. And the geek that I am, I was looking to a book to start… Well, apart from all the blog posts I read here and there. The book that Polaine, Løvlie and Reason wrote, indeed is a practical guide on how to start and march through this complex task of creating pleasant service design. In addition to the actionable advices there are many examples that put notions into perspective and create shared reference in the reader’s mind. And this certainly helps the newbie to start pondering on the topic.
This book is making constant references to the complexity of service interaction and the various touch points on different platforms/places. In the interconnected times we live in, it only makes sense to address design in a much more pervasive way than we used to a few years ago. Just going through the case studies presented in Service Design, one can get a few ideas on how to make the organization’s service offering better.
For an online only bank, such as Comdirect is, one would expect to get things done faster. In addition the user experience and the interaction design are expected to be close to what you get online with any other bank. And yet, I got nothing of that in my attempts to get a bank account in Comdirect.
In my last trip to Germany I decided to purchase finally a prepaid SIM card for my handheld. Since, I travel often to the country, it only sounded natural to me. So, I went in the first shop that was open on a Sunday (e-Plus was my luck) and got one. What I didn’t realize was that I was in for a trip, that if I knew in advance, I wouldn’t probably like to take.
