This lovely piece of work is in a multistory car park in Ipswich in the UK. There are two lifts next to each other and something must have broken or been changed in one of them meaning the usual function of one button calling whichever lift is next free no longer works. The engineers have obviously had to remove the old panel and install a new one. They should have fixed the source problem, of course, but they have made the whole thing even more hilariously worse by installing a second “button” that is this huge module. It doesn’t fit and they can’t re-cable it, so the bodge solution is to install as picture above.

To top it off, they’ve had to put on stickers to explain which button does what. Extra labels always being the sign of badly thought through interfaces (that link is NSFW, by the way).

Why does this matter? Well, as an Englishman who has lived in Germany for many years, this level of workmanship is just shocking and something you would never see in Germany. More important is what it signals about the care the owners of the car park are going to take of your car and personal safety in the place. The whole thing screams, “we don’t care.”

In Germany, mobile phone contracts are 24 months by default, not just for an iPhone. Additionally, there is a culture here whereby contracts are automatically renewed for a year (in some industries, two years) if you don’t quit the contract in writing, three months before the end of it. Of course, most people forget and hate their telco forever more. The telcos haven’t got their head around this yet.

Pre-pay accounts are, of course, a lot easier, but you usually have to provide some kind of ID. I saw this vending machine in Heathrow airport – the first time I’ve seen the possibility to just buy a SIM card without any human interaction and just start using it. The vending machine appeared to be provider neutral, with all the big networks represented. Interestingly, some of the SIMs were just data-only, which is a sign of the times for mobile telcos (VOIP killed roaming, so let’s sell them data instead).

It is also a reminder that SIM cards are really the only product that the mobile telcos sell. The handsets are sold by the manufacturers, subsidized by the telcos (who also get a cut, of course). Telephony is pure service.

My home town of Offenburg has a whole load of Veloboxes at the station (at both entrances on both sides of the tracks). On one side they even have a Velobox and Lufstation (air station, where you can pump up your tires). The boxes are pretty large – the biggest of bikes would fit and I would imagine even two at a squeeze. They are in great demand and, amazingly, only cost around 15 Euros per year to rent, according to one user that I asked.

(As an aside, it’s a shame these companies have such awful websites – but then check out the site of the guy who is credited with designing it. Notice anything similar?)

I suspect they are subsidized as part of Offenburg’s effort to be one of the most cycle friendly cities in Germany. The city, which is small at about 65,000 people, has a bike hire service rolled out across it as well as free bikes that can be borrowed by visitors, free cycle-lane maps, and a hotline to phone in broken glass on the road to be cleared. The city also have a program to become an electric vehicle friendly city, with e-cars in their car-sharing fleet, public charging stations in prime places in carparks.

We also have grab handles for cyclists on traffic lights here, so you don’t need to put your feet down and you can get a good start when the lights change to green. I’ll try and photograph one soon.

All these small touch points add up to a sense of the city really being cycle friendly and gradually iron out some of the “glitches” that make cycling in cities irritating, such as cycle lanes suddenly ended at railings or a main road, or no cycle lanes at all. Why do the details matter? Because people’s barriers to use are so low, especially when using a car is so convenient. The more the glitches are ironed out, the less excuses people have for not cycling (although it’s -12ºC here today, which is challenging).

Derek & Clive’s Labels sketch is Peter Cook and Dudley Moore tackling service design in a discussion about the use of labels.

(Note:This is very much not safe for work or kids. Many will find the language is offensive, but that’s Derek and Clive for you).

This restaurant in Freiburg, Germany, called Omas Küche (Grandma’s Kitchen) was super family-friendly, but what caught my eye was the first page of the menu. It has all the usual stuff about opening times and lactose and gluten-free diets, free wi-fi, etc., but then goes on to offer single cigarettes for sale for “Gelengheitsraucher” (casual smokers), a case with reading glasses of different strengths and they will even post your mail for you and have stamps available to buy at the bar. A nice set of service extras that have probably grown out of people asking for them over the years. Shame the website lets it down.

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These people – five in total – were ticket inspectors on an early afternoon bus in Luzern, Switzerland, very much a tourist destination. So why are they dressed like armed police (no guns, but with pepper spray and earpieces)? And what is a security firm, Securitas, doing supplying ticket inspectors to a public transport company?

Luzern has its share of social problems, but is very safe compared to other cities and has nowhere near the kinds of issues cities like London or New York have. I have seen transport police on trains in London, but the blurring of the boundaries by the use of uniforms and attitude is a poorly thought through touchpoint, much like the TSA uniforms and badges that they are hopefully about to lose in the USA. If certain people in society have special powers over others, it is important to be able to recognise that straight away, not be left unsure as to your and their rights and responsibilities.

I have been enjoying the Brain Culture: Neuroscience & Society series via BBC Radio 4′s podcasts recently. In the series Matthew Taylor looks at how developments in neuroscience are changing the way we think about everything from law and punishment to education and marketing. As a fan of Raymond Tallis’s writing, who is somewhat of a neuroscience sceptic, I found Taylor’s account pretty balanced, but not without asking some provocative questions.

The last episode looked at the use of neuroscience with regards to behaviour change, perhaps most famous through the Nudge concept favoured by the previous and present UK governments. Its also something that has gained some attention in service design and public policy/social design fields as a potential tool for designing for behavioural change.

The theory is essentially that by bypassing our brains’ rational level, we can be nudged into changing our behaviour on the semi-unconscious level, because our brains frequently make decisions before we are rationally conscious of them. This is put into practice in political environments, such as election campaigns, policy and public service systems (as in the case of using it for preventing no-shows to doctor’s appointments) or in the slightly scary sounding field of neuromarketing. On the one hand the practice appears extremely devious and devalues our sense of self and of being rational beings because it denies us the possibility of changing out nature (Tallis’s argument). On the other hand, neuromarketers claim that these techniques are no different from anyone who has baked bread or made fresh coffee in order to sell their house during viewings.

Science was built on the foundation of rational thought. Until recently economics and business thinking was also based on this rationale, much of it still is. The irony of the new discoveries in neuroscience, it seems to me, is that rational science is essentially getting excited about something designers and many others have know all along. People aren’t rational and make decisions – from financial investments to buying a car to getting married – based on their gut feelings, which they mostly post-rationalise afterwards. It’s also why we are so naturally rubbish at understanding statistics and probabilities. Science has taken several decades to rationally prove that we are irrational.

Seth Godin has written an interesting observation about a common experience of hospitals in a piece titled Pre-Digital:

A brief visit to the emergency room last month reminded me of what an organization that’s pre-digital is like. Six people doing bureaucratic tasks and screening that are artifacts of a paper universe, all in the service of one doctor (and the need to get paid and not get sued). A 90-minute experience so we could see a doctor for ninety seconds.
Wasteful and even dangerous.

He goes on to imagine what the experience would be like if everything were digitised. Everyone would know what’s going on without having to ask ten times, basically. “The entire process might take ten minutes, with a far better outcome,” he suggests.

I like a lot of what Seth has to say, but on this its worth really asking if it would be the picture he imagines. Given the UK’s £11bn pretty useless attempt at this, I’m not so sure. Sure, a well-conceived and integrated digital patient system would seem like a dream, but large, government I.T. projects are never well-conceived and integrated. They are mired in over-wrought requirements documents that are miles away from actual human needs, frequently taken on by companies that under quote to get the job and then blow out the budget and schedule later. The UK NHS project also ended up in a nightmare of privacy issues.

What Seth is arguing for here is really the classic “we need more technology to solve this problem” approach. It’s something that has served him well with many of his projects, like The Domino Project and it’s particularly an American approach to the use of technology. But the technological solution he describes masks the real need. The need is for a well-conceived and integrated system of communication and a quicker journey through the hospital system (a need and an organisation which, in turn, have their own underlying needs). It seems likely that digital tools and networks would play a part in this, but it’s by no means a given.

Had I not have had my own copy of an X-Ray (okay it was on my iPad) at the hospital recently, we wouldn’t have been able to access the one the specialist gave us (in a proprietary format) on CD because the hospital’s radiology computer had crashed and they had to wait two hours for the I.T. guy to come and fix it.

Sometimes a whiteboard is the most efficient or usable way to display who is on duty or who is to be operated upon. It doesn’t flake out due to a system error, doesn’t go down when power fails and requires active effort to delete and change a name, not a typo or entry in the wrong field.

They are tools only. The question to ask when considering what the best drill is should really be, “how can we make holes?” or even “do we need holes here?”

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(Photo: Steve Rhodes)

I have a friend whose father used to be an insurance underwriter and he used to always complain about people lying about their insurance claims. He made the quite reasonable point that false claims put up the price of premiums for everyone. The problem is that insurance is often sold as a product rather than what it is, a service. When you pay your premium, it feels like you don’t get anything in return unless you claim. So the all-you-can-eat buffet effect comes into play – if you have paid a premium, when people do claim, they want to get their money’s worth.

Most people also have very little idea about what they are actually insured for an what they or not and routinely don’t claim for things they may well be insured for (broken spectacles, for example) and are often under-insured for their household contents. In our upcoming book on service design we use live|work’s work with Gjensidige as an example of re-thinking both the business model and the way complexity is presented. Although most people say they base their decisions on the policy, live|work found that actually people base their decision on price, because it’s the only thing they can compare policies on.

But there’s another aspect that is important to consider. Gjensidige, like all insurance companies, have complex actuary tables that calculate risk probabilities and thus the price. Most insurance companies follow similar models – household contents, life insurance, car insurance, etc., but there are, of course, many ways to slice and dice probabilities and risk. In the book we hope to present (we’re still clearing it with Gjensidige) a radically simpler version of insurance that came not from the service designers, but one of the actuaries who had been working on a formula for five years.

Edward de Bono’s book, Simplicity, is, like most de Bono books a mixed read, but there was one point that has stuck with me over the years. de Bono argues that there is inherent complexity in any system and the design question is where to push that complexity in order to gain simplicity elsewhere. These days one might call it the Jonathan Ive problem. If you want to make a device with no visible screws, then you have to make the manufacturing process more complex. If you want to make a e-commerce site a seamless, pleasurable user-experience, you have to spend a lot of time and effort working it all out so that the customer hopefully doesn’t notice it at all.

Many service industries, such as mobility, finance, insurance and telecommunications have inherent complexity, but they often choose to present this to the customer. I’ve lost count of the number of ticket machines that have asked me what zone I want a ticket for or via which station I want to travel, when there is no information about these decisions to hand and, in any case, I don’t care and I’m in a hurry to catch a train. Similarly, even staff in a mobile phone shop struggle to navigate the telco tariffs. It’s no wonder than insurance comparison sites have become so popular.

What’s worse than presenting that internal complexity to customers? Ripping them off by not presenting it at all. Last week I received a letter from my car insurance company with the insurance premium for next year – 100 Euros more expensive than this year. Bear in mind that, in Germany, if you don’t cancel your insurance by the end of November, you’re automatically locked in for another year. Of course, I called to find out why and was very helpfully told that that’s an old tariff and that “new internal calculations” mean that my insurance would “only” go up by about 25 Euros.

The customer representative was only too happy to change me to that tariff, but now I’ve basically caught them lying. While on the one hand they’re extremely particular about claims, requiring recents, reports, etc., on the other hand they are quite happy not to inform me about new price structures or to explain the recalculation. So although the woman on the phone did the right thing, I now hate the insurance company for deliberately trying to get away with charging me more than is necessary.

Insurance is no exception. There are still many people paying rental fees to their telecoms companies for outdated or unused “equipment” (aka, telephones). The elderly are particularly prone to this because they tend not to shop around for deals in the same way and have a different relationship to technology. Thus that might not be aware that they’re paying 10 Euros a month for an old rotary dial phone when a DECT or even a corded phone might cost them just two or three times that monthly rental as a one-off payment. Banks do the same thing with outmoded accounts that attract high fees.

So, business as usual? Sadly yes, but it’s an unsustainable business model in the end. Service industries rely on ongoing relationships rather than one-off purchase, so it’s no good if your customers end up not trusting or, worse, hating you. It’s doubly damaging if your business relies on you having to trust your customers, as in the case of insurance. If you are a service, I expect you to be doing all you can to pass on your savings to me to stop me going somewhere else. Anything else and you’re selling what the Germans call Analog-Käse – fake cheese that looks, cooks and smells like cheese, but isn’t.

By now most of you will have already seen the learning thermostat, Nest, designed by Tony Fadell, who led the team that created the first 18 generations of the iPod and the first three generations of the iPhone. The news has been heating up the Web for the last couple of days.

For those of you who have not yet heard about it, Nest is a beautifully designed thermostat that is armed with an array of sensors and also Wi-Fi enabled. It is “programmable” in the sense that you teach it, but it’s not like one of the usual thermostats that is impossible to understand or operate. While thermostats sound boring, actually they account for an awful lot of energy wastage.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab approximately half the heating and cooling (HVAC) accounting for approximately half of the bill. The programmable thermostat, developed in the 1970s, promised to help people conserve energy, but 89 percent of owners rarely or never set a program (source: ACEEE, 2010). The devices are simply too complicated. In fact, Energy Star revoked its certification of all thermostats in 2009, according to Nest’s information sheet.

Nest addresses the programming problem through a combination of sensors, algorithms, machine learning, and cloud computing. Nest learns behaviors and preferences and adjusts the temperature up or down accordingly, making you comfortable when you’re home and saving energy while you’re away. Nest also provides people with tips and information to help them make energy-saving choices.

“It was unacceptable to me that the device that controls 10 percent of all energy consumed in the U.S. hadn’t kept up with advancements in technology and design,” says Tony Fadell.

So far, so normal. It’s a great product in an area that has really failed at any kind of innovation and a product that hopefully does what it says. Except, of course, that it’s not just a product. It’s a product-service system.

There are several layers of services in Nest. The first obvious one is that it’s an information and control system that’s managing your heating (or cooling) service. Warmth and coolness aren’t products, they’re environmental services that we are able to control and interact with. Most of the time we’re doing that with pretty blunt instruments, but Nest aims to change that.

Then there is the learning aspect of Nest. It’s smart enough, apparently, to know when the house is empty and turn itself down as well as learn the patterns of your behaviors. But it’s also able to influence your behavior with its leaf icon that shows you that you could save or be more environmentally friendly by turning it down a notch.

Nest is also Wi-Fi enabled, which means you can access, monitor and set it from a variety of devices via a Web interface. So not only do the designers have to design the product, but also consider how that Web interface is going to look and feel. Most of the other smart home interfaces I have ever seen look like an engineer’s readout on Windows 3.0. If the Nest concept is going to be successful in this regard, they need to be sure that this aspect of their service works.

Finally, you can buy a Nest from Best Buy, but you can also buy it directly from Nest themselves. So they’re offering a retail service, which also includes help working out the installation process along with useful videos and online support. The device also helps you install it and set it up. You can even order a Nest and have them come and install it for you. Again, a whole back-end of service management that must be taken into account as part of the design process.

If their website (compare that to other home heating manufacturers’ websites) and offering is anything to go by, Nest have this pretty well covered. But it just goes to show that even a single, seemingly small product, needs a well thought through service ecosystem for it to really work. Product designers don’t just design products anymore and they need to think of the product-service system they are entering into or creating, not just let others deal with it as an afterthought.

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