Service Design: Usability or Desirability?
While service design is more than just taking a service and making it meet the user/customer’s need for the service, we often tend to mistake the literal meaning to create a sense of need or desirability in the user towards the service(and product in a larger goal).
A design isn’t finished until somebody is using it.
Often or not we counter in our daily business operations from people who target to build things desirable for the user. While the question of what usability is compared to desirability is always seemed to be a lost cause in a Service UX design and is sought to be indistinguishable.
While usability is the basis of any user experience infrastructure without which its difficult to create a worthwhile experience wherein desirability make the experience memorable to the user.
Usability and Desirability
From the four levels of User experience defined by the Nielsen Norman group around the design in service and general
1. Utility
2. Usability
3. Desirability
4. Brand Experience
The solution to a problem (utility) and the ease of usage of such a solution(usability) seems enough for our users. While this could be true a decade earlier where solutions were less exploited, we should understand that user expects beyond usability with the growing need to interact with products which can stand apart(desirability).
For example, when Apple launched the iPod; it was not the first MP3 player or the most usable one, it had that unique blend of usability, utility, and desirability in it which created a wave of brand experience for its customers while moving up the value chain of user experience.
Principles of Service(UX) Design
- Design to be based on the purpose of service, the demand for the service, and the ability of oneself(company or individual) to deliver that service.
- Should be focused on customer needs rather than the need of the business(internal).
- Designed to deliver a unified and efficient outlook rather than taking a component-by-component which leads to a decline in overall service performance.
- Create value for users/customers and to be as much as efficient as possible.
- Designed on the understanding that special events/use-cases (those that cause variation in general processes and architecture) will be treated as common events (and processes designed to accommodate them)
- Services should always be designed with input from the users of the service
- Designed in conjunction with a clear business case and model with a prototype before the development push.
- Design and Developed as a minimum viable service/product (MVS) such that they can then be iterated and improved to add additional value based on user/customer feedback.
Real World Outlook: Delhivery’s Last Mile Ops
While working on a process improvement wherein a field executive marks a parcel pending for delivery when the operator is not able to deliver the same. Over the evolution of business, the field executive is asked to justify the same.
In the existing scenario, where the business operations have proposed an exhaustive list of these justifications (around 20) which from a business point of view covers all use cases but overlooks a basic principle of service design of creating special use-cases efficiently to be presented as common and used with ease.
On our initial discussion among business stakeholders, we realized
- First, Irregularities around the usage of these
- Second, the data interpretation by our product management along with their counterparts in operations also concluded a direct relationship to unclear information under operational pressure to these field executives.
Going by the principles of service design, understanding the contextual environment of the users(field executive) which impacted the
- First, being on the field impacts the attention span of the user under conditions such as bright sunlight, increased load.
- Second, being able to include curative edge cases around use cases specifically available based on the geo-location of the device.
However, at Delhivery we utilized our ground expertise to run a customized usability test using maze.design.
With this whole exercise, we established our key success metrics around the time spent to achieve(usability) and the emotional quotient(desirability) the process brings along.This proves that even though, one product is highly usable doesn’t imply its most desirable.
Conclusions
Service design in principle has the right proportions of usability in it, designers often tend to skip the part of desirability on the fact that the clients/operators are by-default going to use the product. We can surely conclude from the growing expenses around product iterations across to the likes of even Apple, Uber, etc that efficiency can prevail over creating value for the user.
In service design or design in general, we should understand the key difference between the two(usability & desirability) is that usability is a minimum requirement — there is no user experience without usability. Desirability changes a service/product from usable into something that a user wants to use.
Resources
- https://www.interaction-design.org/
- http://design4services.com/
- https://moz.com/blog/applying-service-design-online
- http://www.theservicedesignprogramme.org/2012/11/guest-post-10-principles-for-service-design/
- http://www.slideshare.net/smercer0114/beyond-just-usability-desirability-and-usefulness-testing
