Service Design Research Tools and tips for how best to use them.
Digital transformation is accelerating the need for brands and businesses to deliver services that provide a seamless, omni-channel customer experience across real world and digital contexts.
To deliver a seamless service in today’s fast paced, ever changing, omni-channel world, it’s essential that your service design research is fuelled by context rich, in-the-moment insights that give you a multi media lens into what your customers (or colleagues) really need and how they actually behave.
Gathering this rich data however can be the most costly resource in terms of time and personnel allocation, especially if you are relying on traditional, in-person service design research methods. This is where Indeemo’s Mobile Ethnography capability comes to the fore however.
Because it is a remote, in-the-moment research method, you can conduct context rich service design research without the need to travel or meet with your research participants. Research can be conducted in any location or context without ever leaving your desk. For this reason, it is a powerful tool for capturing the insights you need to do great service design.
What research methods can be used for Service Design?
In the context of Service Design research, Mobile Ethnography (also referred to as Digital Ethnography) represents an agile service research method for gathering rich, primary qualitative research data without having to set up in-person interviews or do any travelling. It leverages smartphones to gather data from large sample groups of design research participants.
It saves time and money by removing the constraints an individual or group of researchers have. While traditional ethnography methods require time spent on-site shadowing and limits the window of the interaction of one researcher to usually one participant or a group of participants in one environment, Indeemo’s service design research tool removes this constraint when you need to conduct service design.
It also allows for service design researchers to remotely conduct in-the-moment, service design research with numerous respondents at the same time without needing to travel to meet them in person.
Finally, it also makes it easy to capture all the rich data in one secure platform. All the data is captured in the proper context and from the point of view of the researcher subject. So higher quality data is available in greater quantity as well as in a format that makes it easier to filter through and manage.
What is Service Design Research?
Described by NNG as “Service design is the activity of planning and organizing a business’s resources (people, props, and processes) in order to (1) directly improve the employee’s experience, and (2) indirectly, the customer’s experience.”
Service design helps streamline the internal organization’s workflows to provide maximum efficiency for internal operations as well as for the customer touchpoints.
Service Design research therefore is the primary research that is conducted as part of service design projects. It it typically exploratory in nature and can also be referred to as discovery research or generative research.
How to use our Service Design Research tool
In short, Indeemo can shave off numerous hours and improve the quality of your service design research. Indeemo allows for asynchronous, service design research to occur over an extended amount of time. The data is nicely cataloged, making it easy to filter and synthesize.
This article will address how to leverage this powerful technology at each step of your process forming your research strategy, capturing data, reviewing your data, and creating the final deliverable.
Planning your service design research project:
Before taking on any project, it’s important to have a solid execution plan. Service Design requires you to consider the following before starting any interviews: Your service categories of people, props, process.
People: personas for front stage (your client) and backstage (your business operations).
Front Stage research
Narrow down the persona to your most common client. It’s best practice to have one concrete case per journey.
Having more than one case will result in a branching journey and this can be confusing in both the creation of the deliverable and the adoption of the final deliverable.
If necessary, set up a second and/or third persona to capture separate data
Backstage research
Determine the subject matter experts (SMEs). Who are the people in your internal operations that have an impact on the client-facing touchpoints?
It’s good to interview them separately to make sure you have all the needed SMEs accounted for before diving into the research.
Once you have established your people on the front and back-stage, find out their availability in advance and give them some time to block out their schedules. Your clients and SMEs will appreciate the extra consideration.
Service Design research tools and/or technology
Consider what technology is being used by your persona and your SMEs. This is also a great time to consider if the technology they are using is optimal and how you can vet for any pain points.
Next, consider what technology you will need them to use for the study. While there are different learning curves for different technologies, it’s a good idea to budget in onboarding time to your overall plan.
Finally, think about what technologies you need to observe them using and if there any processes that are currently done in an analog format (like paper) that would be good to capture.
Process: any set workflow you are looking to capture. You can prep your study plan by considering the following:
What information are you looking to capture on the front stand and back-stage?
What time-span will allow for optimal capture? How long will it take for the full journey to be completed: hour, day, week, month, quarter?
What’s the best way for you to document these workflows?
Once you have the answer to these two questions it will be easier to define the tasks you would like to track.
What are the benefits of using Service Design Research tools?
Works front stage (customer journey) and backstage (business ops / employee experience)
No need to travel, saving time and money usually allocated to these tasks
Great platform for easily setting up research. Everything you need to execute is built into the system.
User-friendly onboarding process for you and your participants. This will save you quite some time that usually needs to be spent on onboarding materials and the technology learning curve.
Get your research framework done in no time by assigning tasks to participants before the official kick-off.
Capture each step of the Customer Journey:
Once you have a game plan and prepped your research, it’s time to start the ethnographic research study. While you are armed with the right framework, background, and questions it’s time to start gathering data with through and workflow shadowing.
Traditional service design research would involve setting up numerous subject matter experts (SME) interviews and later groups of those experts to validate step-by-step workflows. While this method is thorough, it’s incredibly time-consuming, not to mention expensive. You also run into the recording constraints: technical constraint, and or permissioning to have access to technology usage during the discovery research phase. The traditional approach is also disruptive to SMEs workflow; Considering the already super busy SMEs having to take time away from their jobs to assist with the study.
Indeemo’s service design research tool provides the advantage of capturing workflow asynchronously, over larger periods of time, and not limiting research to one SME flow at a time. This frees up the researchers time to manage numerous journey collections and speeds up the research process as a whole.
Online workflows and mobile use workflows can be tough to capture but these items have the greatest amount of information. Indeemo breaks down this critical barrier with participant consent to capture online workflows. These recordings can provide great insights into the current technological constraints, pain-points, and workarounds. This can later be translated into opportunities for the future state workflow.
Benefits of Using Indeemo’s service design research tools:
Diary studies help capture workflows spanning over particular time frames, lifting up the constraints of spending time onsite and shadowing. Indeemo’s longitudinal feature provides the ability to capture multiple touchpoints in multiple contexts.
Mobile screen recording is great for omnichannel data capture. This allows for more time to capture more moments. No longer limited to one researcher per interviewee at a time. Now in that same hour doing an in-depth interview 30 respondents could be sending in videos via the video diary app.
Inquire in context using push notifications. Getting instant feedback on core tasks within a service will provide reliable data. It’s much easier to recall a task that was just performed rather than trying to recall a task sometime after.
Capture in-the-moment needs and emotions at each stage of the customer journey:
The traditional approach relies on having the participant recall their emotional state at a specific task. Although this serves the purpose of the study, often the recollection isn’t accurate. It’s human nature to remember the very high or low points, but recollection is never as accurate as a response in context.
Using service design research tools like Indeemo can take the guesswork out of the experience by letting the employee tell you exactly what the pain points are and when they occur. With a system that lets research participants rate their emotional state in context, a more accurate picture is created of their experience.
The constraint of time is also removed with Indeemo. If a workflow takes a week to complete, the emotional state can be logged throughout that timeframe at that exact moment. This leads to more high-quality data captured.
Benefits of Using Indeemo:
Simple and user-friendly prompts have research participants input a rating of their emotional state in real-time. More prompt the input the more accurate the result.
Indeemo displays individual emotional state flows and aggregated flows of the whole group in a simple and aesthetic chart.
You can start easily using this material to plot the fluctuations in your final deliverable.
Analyse your service design research data:
At this point, you have concluded your research and have loads of great data. During the wrap-up of ethnographic studies, reviewing data captured can take weeks if not longer. The following tasks need to be accomplished at this phase:
Filing the data - Deciding on where this information will be located. What is a secure and easy area to access and share the content with others?
Permissioning the data files - who on my team or organization do I need to share these recordings with? How much access do I need to grant them? Who else may want access to these recordings?
Transcribing recordings - Block out some time to intently focus and type out notes based on the recordings taken. This can take hours and can be an extremely draining activity
Tagging key parts of the interview - I’ll have to go through each part of the transcribed notes and tag the pieces that may be relevant to a workflow or part of a journey.
Synthesizing findings - What are the high-level themes emerging? What key takeaways can I spot in this data?
Benefits of Using Indeemo:
View all your recordings and assignments in one place. One secure and easy to access location.
All recordings are automatically transcribed and videos time-stamped, saving loads of research wrap up time.
All data captured is available in several formats making it easy to review and reference.
Create your Service Blueprint design deliverable:
Now that you have all your data refined and parsed, it’s time to get it in presentation format. While the journey framework will vary based on the blueprint’s specific needs, you will have all your content available to reference within each key point.
Benefits of Using Indeemo:
All your reference materials, recordings and assignments are in one place. One secure and easy to access location.
Easily plot the emotional stages of the journey using Indeemo’s analysis tool.
For the blueprint validation or to follow-up on an information gap, you have easy follow-up with your participant.
Let our Service Design Research Tools support your next project
Indeemo’s service design research tool can help take service design to the next level. Where researchers get boxed in due to constraints of time and budget, this technology breaks those barriers allowing for asynchronous gathering of data from a larger research pool. Where once weeks are spent combing through the collected data, now much of this work is automated making for easy tagging and aggregation. While there is merit in conducting some onsite research, this powerful technology can greatly enhance your studies at every step of the journey.