Seek the Magic with Service Prototypes

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Letting the Customer Get Creative

Scott Stropkay and Bill Hartman of Essential Design in Boston use a technique that involves old magazines, scissors, and glue. In a throwback to kindergarten days, target customers are asked to cut and paste pictures, articles, personal thoughts, and feelings about a topic that relates to a new service idea.

Using this type of technique, if you are exploring the viability of a new cell phone service, and your target market is teenagers, a group of 13- to 19-year-olds might be individually asked to create collages about how they feel about their phones. The key at this stage is to encourage free association by providing a minimal amount of instruction.

Next, one of the teenagers talks about his or her cut-and-paste self-portrait. Can't you just hear that conversation? As the teenager describes her artwork, personal feelings about her cell phone become almost palpable.

"I want to keep my phone on, but then I have to answer when my mother calls. She calls a lot and it's embarrassing."

"I left my phone at home once. Wow, was I ever lost that day!"

"I got 52 text messages one day. That was a good day."

Exploring New Services

The power of the collage simulates her feelings and the environment she wants when using the service. Not only does this provide a healthy check-in on current offerings, but, more importantly, it creates the opportunity to explore new services that will excite, satisfy, or relieve anxiety.

"The idea here is to encourage the customer to co-create and help design the service," says Stropkay. At this point in the exercise, colorful cards with a variety of service ideas can prompt the teens to talk about how a service would make them appreciate their cell phone experience even more. As the research continues, the cards can be ranked or modified and new ideas that emerge added to the pile.

The unchecked emotions that surface during this hands-on experience help validate—and build a business case for—new ideas. Imagine trying to gain these insights through a survey, or around a company conference table. The collages have the added benefit of allowing you to see patterns emerge, and serving as visual talking points that designers can use to generate breakthrough ideas.

Expect and Plan for Iteration

Service innovators and management teams alike must accept that a fair amount of time and budget has to be devoted to early-stage development in order to get an offering right. This is especially true when creating "new to the world" services. Veterans of this sort of exploratory work will tell you it is nearly impossible to get a big idea working quickly. There are simply too many moving parts to optimize.

In an iterative development process, design thinking-methods and tools come in quite handy. User feedback delivered in real time, for instance, and a comprehensive approach to refining multiple touchpoints increase your chances of rapid problem solving. The other key element is a multidisciplinary team led by an experienced professional (a cognitive psychologist, human factors specialist, or marketer, typically) that can keep the development process focused and moving toward the desired result.

Not Ready for Prime Time

Google does this all the time. That's why we see so many of its new offerings in beta. The company expects to be in iteration mode until an offering is ready for prime time, presumably while usage patterns and business model become refined to the extent that a success can be claimed. This practice is part of the operating model—with expectations, schedules and budgets appropriately tuned. If you are interested in driving your company to become a systemic innovator, continuous iteration should become part of your operating model for innovation as well.

So does this mean service prototyping is easy? Nope. While an intuitive, thoughtful facilitator can extract meaning from early-stage prototyping with coarse materials, knowing when to move a project forward and when to keep preparing is a challenge. Is there a magic moment in the process when everyone knows—and agrees—that you've got a good one? How do the initial findings translate into a service offering that truly reflects the desires expressed by the customer? And how does the employees' experience of providing the new service become part of the prototyping process?

The Future in a Video

The answers to these questions are moving targets, but making a corporate commitment to more creative service prototyping efforts is the first step to pinning them down. Measuring human emotion, and customer experience, is a quirky mix of science and art. With practice, companies become adept at extracting useful data from a discipline that lacks clear delineation.

To help drive this point home, have a look at this video of a new health-care monitoring solution envisioned by my Georgetown MBA students last spring. It doesn't answer every question you would have at the fuzzy front end of innovation, but the information it provides in six short minutes would surely be ample inspiration for stakeholders at all levels to see what the future could bring.

Rae is the co-founder and president of Peer Insight, a research and advisory firm focused on service innovation and customer-experience design for S&P 500 firms. When not researching, consulting, or writing, she teaches executives in client companies and MBAs at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business how to structure and manage innovation.