Service Design – The End Users Role
Just had a very insightful meeting with Jeneanne Rae. Jeneanne has been in the Design Thinking field since before it was called Design Thinking. She was hired by David Kelley at IDEO to help grow the business integration part of that company as an MBA and a significant part of the growth into the company that they are today. Since leaving IDEO, she has been working as a consultant to fortune 500 companies in the area of Service Design.
She regularly speaks at conferences and is an ongoing contributor to BusinessWeek. She drinks dark roast coffee with both cream and sugar.
The majority of our time was focused on the best practices to involve End Users in the Service Design process. One of the hallmarks of Design Thinking is breaking away from the “stakeholders only” mentality where insiders decide what they believe is needed, and then create and roll out the service or product. To be truly effective, the process must include regular involvement and feedback from those who will actually use the services (Users).
There are 3 key times for End Users to be involved:
- When you are doing your initial research into the “problem” that you are solving (your service proposition)
- When you are prototyping your services – BEFORE you implement
- Immediately after implementation – to make sure that you are actually solving the problem.
Let’s go deeper into each of those. Read the rest of this entry »