NORDICHI 2024 In-Person Tutorial – 15th of October 2024 on-site

Tutorials

Have you ever wondered how to introduce service design to your organisation? Have you ever had the feeling that one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to different service design tools? This tutorial answers these questions through the introduction of ‘organisational usability’ and ‘design maturity’ as frameworks to help organisations assess their readiness to adopt and use SD tools.

Customer journeys, service blueprints, and ecosystem mapping, among other SD tools, are perceived as straightforward by some organisations, however, organisations with low SD maturity can face challenges in how to utilise and leverage the potential of the tools. This tutorial introduces means of understanding how an organisation experience SD and the accompanying tools.

As participants you will be provided with insights and an assessment framework for successful organisational SD interventions and implementations. 

Objectives

The aim of the tutorial is to answer the questions:

• How can we assess organisational usability of SD tools?
• What are the tangible and intangible relations between SD tools’ usability and SD maturity?
• Do we have to adjust the SD tools or the organisational spaces and practices in which they fit, or both?

This tutorial will include:

1. Introduction to organisational usability and design maturity
2. Presentation of case studies and tutorials
3. Team work on practical exercises
4. Team presentations and discussions

Background

The relation between SD tools and methods and the user organisation’s maturity has not been discussed much. In our tutorial we argue that the introduction and evaluation of such tools and methods need to consider their usability in light of the maturity of the organisation. Furthermore, the SD maturity model helps assess at which stage of maturity the organisation is, but there is little guidance on how to move to the next level.

In our tutorial we demonstrate how to assess and improve the usability of tools of customer journeys and service blueprints in the context of the different stages of maturity, and how to progress to the next level. The core objective of user-centred approaches and methods, such as SD, is to help organisational staff build long-term capability for supporting users’ value creation” but how staff can be helped to do this is not clear

.

The tutorial offers conceptual and practical knowledge on how SD tools can be introduced and evaluated in organisations in terms of their usability [5], and the context of organisations’ design maturity. The SD toolbox can be perceived as straightforward by some organisations, however, for organisations with low Design Maturity such tools can pose challenges in how to utilize and leverage their potential. This tutorial illustrates how common SD tools are affected by organisational usability and design maturity.

Audience

The tutorial will be particularly useful to service designers, product managers and decision makers in charge of designing, innovating, and iterating services. In fact, anyone involved in any aspect of SD in organisations would benefit.

You will get

After the tutorial you will:

1. Understand the application and usefulness of the most common SD tools including customer journeys and service blueprints.
2. Understand the match between the user and the SD tools, between the organisation and SD tools, and between the organisational environment and SD tools.
3. Understand and demonstrate how an organisation can “use” SD tools in effective, efficient, and satisfactory ways.
4. Evaluate and assess how mature an organisation is in relation to their adoption and use of SD tools.
5. Demonstrate an understanding of the purposes and advantages of combining Organisational Usability and Design Maturity in a practitioners’ assessment framework to introduce and evaluate SD tools.

The main benefit of this tutorial is the know-how to assess maturity in connection to SD, and the corresponding Organisational Usability assessment of SD tools. The result is action plan of how SD tools can be adjusted or re-designed so they can thrive in the organisation. Furthermore, this tutorial will allow for an understanding of the Organisational Usability of the tools at different stages of a maturity model, such as the SD maturity model. In this tutorial we mainly focus on customer journeys and service blueprints, which are a key part of the SD toolkit.

Background

SD addresses the context of the service encounters, creates visions, proposes new services and business models, and engages stakeholders. SD focuses on enabling a holistic experience for users [6]. To design this experience different visualisations can create tangible representations [2], such as ecosystems maps, customer journey maps, and service blueprints. These helps explain business models and provide an overview of the complexity of the service and the service stakeholders [5, 9]. The ecosystem map creates an overview of stakeholders involved, the customer journey map visualises the experience that is being shaped during the interactions between the user and the service provider. The service blueprint illustrates the service’s journey and connects the underlying support processes.

The two main challenges in understanding how to use SD tools focus on 1) integrating the scope of non-design fields such as marketing, business, leadership, and systems development and 2) exploring and challenging new methods from other disciplines [7]. However, there is very little know-how on how to address the typical challenges and opportunities organisations face as ‘users’ of SD tools when introducing or evaluating tools in their own unique and local contexts.

Organisational Usability [3, 5] is defined as “the organisation’s ability to use” SD tools in effective, efficient, and satisfactory ways when implementing the service or designing the service. According to Elliott & Kling [5], Organisational Usability encompasses three levels: the user-system fit, the organisation-system fit, and the environment system fit. The use of Organisational Usability in other design contexts such as pilot implementations, technological change, and design-in-use has already been explored by Hertzum [8], concluding that including the organisational context in the evaluation process is much more insightful than studying the interaction between an individual and a tool or system. In our case, “the system” refers to the SD tools, and we are focusing on the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction dimensions of the organisation-system fit.

Maturity models tend to indicate the organisation is supposed to move from one level to another, but there is little on how to move. Yu & Sangiorgi [10] write: “user-centered approaches and methods can help organisational staff build long-term capability for supporting users’ value creation”, but what are the methods to help staff do this?  In this tutorial, we show how by looking at the Organisational Usability of SD tools such as customer journeys and service blueprints, we also need to consider the stage of Design Maturity the organisation is in. Furthermore, this will allow for an understanding of the usability of the tools at different stages of a maturity model, such as the SD maturity model [4], and add nuance to practitioners who struggle to measure design outcomes corresponding to the various steps on the design ladder maturity model [1]. 

Organisers

José Abdelnour Nocera, University of West London and ITI/Larsys, abdejos@uwl.ac.uk

Christina Li, BP, Design and Management, christina.li@bp.com

Lene Nielsen, IT University of Copenhagen, lene@itu.dk

José Abdelnour Nocera is full professor of sociotechnical design and head of the Sociotechnical Group for Innovation and User Experience at the University of West London. In this and previous roles, he has been involved as an educator, researcher, and consultant in several projects involving service design in Europe and Latin America in different problem domains spanning health, enterprise, education, indigenous knowledge, agriculture, and the sharing economy. He holds roles in several professional communities including chair of the British Computer Society Sociotechnical Specialist Group and vice-chair for equity and diversity for IFIP Technical Committee 13 in Human Computer Interaction. His interests lie in the sociotechnical and cultural aspects of human-centred systems design.

Christina Li is a service designer with 20 years’ experience in the UK and China. She has worked for many of the world’s leading companies and organisations including the London Stock Exchange Group, Lloyds Banking Group, BBC, Lenovo and Orange, etc. She has designed customer experience and service styles for organisations in both private and public sectors on their customer facing products and services and led some challenging work such as the EU exit service design project for the Ministry of Housing, Community and Local Government. Christina works in bp as a Design Director, providing design leadership across Castrol and Air bp, overseeing the coordination and integration of Design Thinking within business and supporting all design discipline activities.

Associate Professor Lene Nielsen is a leading researcher in personas and has developed a specialisation in service design, management and implementation at the IT University, Copenhagen. Lene helps companies understand their customers and users and to integrate that knowledge into existing tools and methods. Before she became a researcher she worked as a consultant. She has published three books on personas and has a pending book chapter on Organisations as Material in a book on service design material to be published in December 2023. She has a pending chapter on personas and service design in a UX encyclopaedia to be published in the spring 2024.

Tutorial Schedule
Session 1: 50 min + 10 min. break.	Foundational concepts and tools in Organisational Usability and Design Maturity Models Introduction to Organisational Usability and design maturity.
Session 2: 50 min + 10 min. break.	Service Design Organisational Assessment Framework Understanding the maturing process of customer centric transformations in organisations and how to embed and manage Service Design in organisations using Design Maturity models. Work on the framework with a case study.
Session 3: 60 min.	How to implement OU and DMM – Presentation and discussion Present case work (30 minutes). Discuss own situation (30 minutes).

REFERENCES

[1]        Björklund, T.A., Hannukainen, P., Manninen, T., and others 2018. Measuring the impact of design, service design and design thinking in organizations on different maturity levels. ServDes2018-Service Design Proof of Concept Politecnico di Milano. 12, (2018).

[2]        Blomkvist, J., Clatworthy, S. and Holmlid, S. 2016. Ways of seeing the design material of service. Service Design Geographies. The ServDes. 2016 Conference, Copenhagen 24-26 May 2016 (2016), 1–13.

[3]        Bloomer, S., Croft, R. and Wolfe, S. 1998. Selling usability to organisations: strategies for convincing people of the value of usability. CHI 98 Conference Summary on Human Factors in Computing Systems (1998), 153–154.

[4]        Corsten, N. and Prick, J. 2019. The service design maturity model. Touchpoint. Serv. Des. J. 10, (2019), 72–77.

[5]        Elliott, M. and Kling, R. 1997. Organizational Usability of Digital Libraries: Case study of Legal Research in Civil and Criminal Courts. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 48, 11 (1997), 1023–1035. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199711)48:11<1023::AID-ASI5>3.0.CO;2-Y.

[6]        Grenha Teixeira, J., Patrício, L., Huang, K.-H., Fisk, R.P., Nóbrega, L. and Constantine, L. 2017. The MINDS method: integrating management and interaction design perspectives for service design. Journal of Service Research. 20, 3 (2017), 240–258.

[7]        Harre, O.T. and Nielsen, L. 2020. From product centricity to services: Design workshops and maps as tools in strategy articulation. ServDes. 2020: Tensions, Paradoxes, Plurality: Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 173 (2020), 311.

[8]        Hertzum, M. 2018. Three Contexts for Evaluating Organizational Usability. Journal of Usability Studies. 11, 1 (2018).

[9]        Simeone, L., Drabble, D., Iacopini, G., Van Dam, K., Morelli, N., De Götzen, A. and Cullen, J. 2019. Articulating a strategic approach to face complexity in design projects: The role of Theory of Change. Academy for Design Innovation Management 2019 London International Research Conference (2019), 938–948.

[10]      Yu, E. and Sangiorgi, D. 2018. Service design as an approach to implement the value cocreation perspective in new service development. Journal of Service Research. 21, 1 (2018), 40–58.