Book: What is Service Design?
By: Daniele Catalanotto
Tags: Customer Experience, Services, Book, UX, Service Design

5.1 Tools for the research task:

We have seen in chapter 3, that service designers do research i to better understand what people want or need.

For the research task a Service Designer needs to perform the highlighted tools:

Interviews Mystery shopping Observation Shadowing

Interviews

Interviews are a one-to-one conversation between a researcher and a person the research is interested in.

Service designers use interviews to uncover how users, customers, and employees feel when involved in a service. They use these interviews to discover the frustrations and joys that these people have in the interaction with the service. Furthermore, they try to go more in depth and try to determine why these frustrations happen, how often, and in which context.

In a way, interviews are part of the detective work that service designers conduct when doing research tasks.

Interviews are one of the research methods most used by qualitative researchers; this not only in the field of service design. The art of a good interview is tricky as you don’t want to influence the person and discover their personal feelings and opinions,which is often much more complicated than it sounds.

Mystery Shopping

Another way to better understand people is to put yourself in their shoes. By doing so, you can empathize on how it feels to be a user, employee, or partner involved in a service.

A specific method to do this is called Mystery Shopping. This method is pretty straightforward. The service designer will test a service as a user and not a researcher. In a way, it’s like being an undercover cop who wants to understand how the mafia works. The service designers want to discover how a service works.

More importantly, they want to experience themselves how it feels to go through the different interactions of a service. By feeling the same emotions the users of a service feel, a service designer can better empathize with them.

Mystery Shopping is done to uncover how it feels to be a user. In the past, I have used this same method to better feel how it is to be an employee or service provider. To do that, I wasn’t a fake user, but worked as a staff member for a few days. In this case, it wasn’t a mystery for the staff members that I was a researcher, but it was for the users. Such variations of the mystery shopping method can be used with partners, staff members, or any other person involved in a service who you want to better understand.

Observation

What people think they do, what they do, and what they tell you that they do are very different things. That’s why service designers use observations to even better understand the people involved in a service.

Observation is a great tool to see what people really do in a service. It’s a great way to discover the general trends in a service and to quickly capture inspiring stories that can help you create new solutions.

Observation is especially loved by service designers, because it doesn’t require much preparation and doesn’t require much time. A typical interview lasts about an hour. During this time, you would have just talked with one person. In an hour of observation, you might see how 30 different people use a specific part of a service.

Recruiting people for interviews is usually a painful task or one that costs a lot if you ask a specialized agency to take care of the recruiting for you. Observation doesn’t need any recruitment, as you just observe the people that actually use the service as it happens.

It doesn’t go into the same depth as an interview where you can also uncover the motivation behind peoples’ actions. But it’s a quick, cheap way to discover trends about a specific interaction between users and a service.

Of course, observation is limited to the parts of the service done in public. I’ve used a lot of observation sessions to improve the waiting rooms for example.

Shadowing

Shadowing is a bit of a mix between an interview and an observation session. In a shadowing session, the researcher becomes the shadow of the person he tries to better understand.

During a typical shadowing session, a user receives a task to perform. While they performs this task, the user is asked to think out loud to reveal what is he/she is thinking at every step. The researcher or service designer usually records this by taking notes, photographs, or filming the user. The researcher might also ask the user in the middle of the task or after the shadowing session why they did something in particular.

A shadowing session has the advantage of an observation session where you see the real behavior of a person. It also has another big advantages of the interview, to enable the service designer to ask follow up questions to better understand a specific moment in the service interaction.

A shadowing session is something that is again quite costly and time-consuming since you have to recruit the people to be shadowed. Every shadowing session might take one hour to a full day.