Seek the Magic with Service Prototypes

To design an offering that customers will love, start with a rough draft—and co-create

by Jeneanne Rae

Studies show that people gravitate toward products and services that make them feel good, safe, calm, or happy. Yet the traditional foam core model, created in a design lab and proudly displayed on an executive's desk, can neither capture nor demonstrate the sensory and emotional state of a customer experiencing a company's service.

Think of GM's (GM) On-Star in-vehicle security and communications system. A physical model of the blue OnStar call button doesn't begin to convey the relief a lost or injured driver would feel on hearing the operator's voice. Marketing departments get this, it's why an OnStar ad focuses on the customer rather than the button, yet the distinction is too often overlooked in the development process.

With this in mind, it is strange to me that common practice in the service sector is to still test potential innovations with simple, written concept statements. Worse still are the companies that follow with an expensive pilot only to find that their promising concept missed the mark—because it had focused on the button rather than on what the button meant to the person pushing it.

Looking for Customer Delight

These practices are a terrible waste of time, money, and other valuable resources—including the careers of those brave enough to try new things. Service prototyping is a way to transcend these issues while at the same time improving quality and decreasing risk.

Rather than defining a service by what it does, think of it as the reaction it elicits from the people using it. This is because a service is essentially an experience. Experiences draw on our senses and our emotions, making their creation much more complicated by comparison to the average product you can hold in your hand. As such, more issues must be carefully explored before you can hope for customer delight: What constitutes value? Does the service integrate easily into the customer's lifestyle? What are the brand connotations?

Visualization and prototyping techniques that inspire concept development and iteration by development teams are important tools to aid in this process. When a sensory demonstration of the customer's response to a service comes to life, everyone involved can share the vision. Here are a few guidelines to consider as you strive to understand how your customer's emotions and value systems might interact with your new service.

Rough Draft Must Be Rough

At the front end of innovation, the "rough draft" must be rough. That means prototypes that are cheap, simple and quick. To be effective service prototypes, they should inspire your audience—from beta testers to C-suite decision-makers—to assess the service through the eyes of a customer. How does it make them feel? Is it engaging? What's missing? These early concepts should be unfinished and malleable, inviting improvement. Most importantly, these visualizations should create white space so the user can imagine the concept evolving into a service offering with which he or she would love to engage.

When innovators at the Mayo Clinic wanted to create a self-service check-in experience as part of its world-renowned health-care service, they worked with paper and patients' imaginations to understand how users would expect it to work. Learning as they went, they then deployed simple screen menus on a PC mocked up like a touch screen with someone beside it typing the system's response. During this process the team constantly watched and interviewed patients for the types of interactions, both human and machine, that would improve their overall experience, noting their pain-points and emotional wants and needs along the way.

Good service prototypes appeal to the emotions and avoid drawing attention to features, costs, and applications that can clutter the conversation and derail the excitement factor. Storytelling, vignettes, cartoons, amateur videos—all are low-budget tools that bypass the intellectual "gristmill" and go straight to the heart.