Empathy With The Other — And Other Lessons In Service Design

We had one week to redesign an experience we were all familiar with, one that we mostly hated. It was low-hanging fruit, for sure.

A2 is a family-run cafe operating inside of California College of the Arts in San Francisco. All students have frequented this place with mixed feelings; some vowing to never return.

“I’m boycotting A2 because I am sick and tired of them charging me a different price for the same thing every time I go in there—and it’s gross.” — E.K.

“I order vegan to make myself feel better about eating at A2, but I don’t feel healthy after I eat it.” — S.G.

Did it ever occur to us that perhaps the staff’s ‘unfriendly’ service was given due to their insanely long working hours?

Had we any idea what the staff thought or felt? What limitations they might be operating under, what constraints from the city they had? What their day was like?

The cashier that we know as ‘Mama’ rings up a student near an empty pastry case in the evening.

Lee—or ‘Mama’ as we know her—arrives at 6:30am every weekday to prepare food for the students. She leaves 15 hours later at 8:30pm. She does this every weekday.

“I think to myself, ‘Okay, January is over. I just have three months left to work.’ And I count down the months until school is out when I can have time off—when I can go to the gym again.” — ‘Mama’

Her daughter Kelly arrives at 9am and doesn’t leave until over 11 hours later at 8:30pm.

Why the long hours? They claim, “This is a family run business, and we try to save on costs.”

“We’re only allowed to be open during the school year. We’re not open during summer break.”

My assumption was that because they are not open during summer break, this is why they charge the prices that they do and why they work so many hours during the school year—they’re making up for hours they can’t work during the summer.

Our brief was to redesign the customer experience in this cafe—but if we were going to improve the experience for the customer, we would have to improve the experience for the staff.

Experiences are systems, or “strings of pearls” my instructor calls them. “Of course, when you pull on one pearl, you move the others.” My team and I ended up pulling on one of the earliest touch-points of the customer journey—viewing the menu—which lead into another opportunity that lead into another, ultimately lifting up that “string of pearls” known as experience into the positive.

A macro journey map detailing peaks in customer flow of A2 cafe and their underlying causes.

Customer journey map through A2 cafe detailing the large divergence in experience between their busy hours and slow hours.

Through our research and interviews with customers and A2 cafe staff, we discovered that by relieving stress from the staff we relieve stress from the customers.

Any adjustment to reorganize the staff’s duties would potentially increase their overall happiness at work, thereby making it more possible to have friendly relationships with the students they serve as customers. This would effectively enhance their second core strength—customer service.

By also intervening on their main value proposition and first core strength — convenience — we could turn this main strength into a superpower, and further destress staff and customers. Opportunities here included redesigning the space so that people don’t bump into each other, redesigning the menu to be concise and not overload cognitive working memory, and splitting the lines into ‘express’ and ‘non-express’ to extract simple transactions from more complicated ones.

The learning here for myself is that our experiences do not exist in isolation. That by considering the Other, we consider ourselves. When we change someone else’s experience, we change our experience of them, and something new can arise—something better.