Pieter Jongerius: On Service Design at Fabrique
Pieter Jongerius is a partner at the Dutch design agency Fabrique. Originally an Industrial Design Engineer, Pieter specialized in the design of digital experiences for the web as early as 1996. Pieter has an extensive experience in retail and fashion, working with such brands as Albert Heijn, SuperTrash, Hunkemöller, Heineken and others. He has also been a pioneer of using Scrum in design and development projects.
You joined Fabrique in 1997 as a web designer. Now, 20 years later you are a managing director. Tell me about your path at Fabrique.
I have a background in Industrial Design. Yet, my career at Fabrique has started from web design. Creating web sites in its early days was a lot of fun, and it still is. Twenty years ago there wasn’t much specialization in jobs, we basically did everything from functional to graphic design, the development and even the content management :) Later I wanted more influence, to spread my vision on design. So I started to take more responsibility. First I became a team leader, then a project manager. I was responsible for customer relations and development, as well as consultancy.
My work got broader, more abstract. I’ve taken a path to a UX design director, then a strategy director, up to a managing director, influencing more and more people. During these periods I focused on different skills and passions. Currently, I’m end responsible for everything we make at Fabrique, and work together closely with the creative directors of our three studios. I still do work for clients though.
Fabrique is a strategic design agency. How did your agency come to providing service design to clients?
Fabrique was not a strategic agency from the very beginning. We were a cross-disciplinary agency, creating design for print, spatial, interactive and industrial design, which are still our main disciplines. We were asked to create specific products, often briefed in a lot of detail. Being good at execution, we wanted to bring more value to clients rather than to carry out the assignment. Our first step was to be stubborn and ambitious at questioning client briefings. We were looking for the ways to improve client’s business. This is how we became strategic.
Our philosophy has always been to orchestrate, to connect touchpoints. Later we discovered that our entire framework looked a lot like service design, so we started formalizing and shaping that more. Now we provide a broader range of services: from service design and brand development to digital and industrial design.
What kind of companies are coming for service design to Fabrique?
We have service design clients from many industries: healthcare, financial, housing corporations, museums. Our retail clients however are often not ready for it yet. At any rate, companies don’t always come to Fabrique for service design specifically. We start a dialog, show them a value of service design approach and then apply it to the project.
It’s like how we introduced Scrum many years ago. The use of Scrum in projects was unobvious to clients. We had to explain them the principles of Agile development, its advantages over the traditional approach. Today many clients understand the value of iterative project development.
As for service design, there’s still not much understanding on the market. We need to educate our clients. But in the end, it gives us more insights on how we can help businesses.
What is unique about designing services for retail?
Retail business has a big focus on maximizing transactions number and their frequency. Service design practices are customer-centric, but retail is often transaction-centric. Retailers do work on customer experience improvement. They have a tradition to call it loyalty. But loyalty hardly ever has the same human-centered approach as a service design. It’s often focused on stimulating transactions.
Loyalty hardly ever has the same human-centered approach as a service design. It’s often focused on stimulating transactions.
Lately, there are many talks about omnichannel retail. It has something common with service design approach. Omnichannel strategy defines channels and a customer journey through the touchpoints. But service design has a broader view on customer needs and objectives. So, there’s still a room for retailers to become more customer-centric.
Is service design applicable to startups?
Service design definitely works for startups. They might not have NPS or other customers metrics. Their organizational structure might start taking shape. Still, they need to start from understanding the values behind service design. Those are very important for a great user experience and business results.
Startups may use some service design tools but at a smaller scale. For example, they might use guerrilla research tactics instead of extensive field study. They should rely more on qualitative than quantitative approach.
Tell me about the project of self-service passport control for the Schiphol Airport.
The passenger demand at Schiphol airport is constantly increasing. Our goal was to expand the passport control bandwidth. There are many ways to do that. We strived to serve more travelers using less space and less personnel. So we developed automated border passages.
We started from designing the journeys and floor plans. We took a field trip to the location to understand the passengers flow at Schiphol. While making an extensive analysis, we asked ourselves many questions. What are the user expectations? Should we reassure users, support them or put them under pressure? How do we ensure a safe but still enjoyable process? We built a life-size model of the e-gate to get a better idea of the whole thing.
Then we designed all user-faced software and screens. There were interfaces for three types of users: travelers, military police, and airport personnel. We helped design the hardware as well.
We accompanied the implementation and tested out the system within few iterations. In the first six months of use, the e-gates have already helped one million people cross the border. The system is now also implemented in other airports.
You are a Scrum adept. How does Scrum help design agencies to deliver their outcome?
Scrum helps us create relevant things. It takes some time in the beginning to get used to, but then most people never want to go back to the previous way. We developed a method to pair design and programming at Fabrique by using the Scrum approach. Our team and clients were so excited about the results that we wanted to share it with the rest of the world. That’s why we wrote our own Scrum manual: Get Agile!
With Scrum, the strategy, design, coding and copywriting are done at the same time instead of one after the other. It takes some time to ensure that the project is well prepared, but then the benefits are enormous. We can get started faster, as we defer discussions about features until they’re relevant. Everything that the Scrum team creates is immediately tangible and concrete.
Scrum lets our agency keep a healthier and more open relationship with our clients. Putting all participants together helps a lot in eliminating typical waterfall drawbacks. We avoid big handovers and major consequences of people not talking to each other.
What is the biggest challenge in service design right now?
Designers talk a lot about human-centered design practices. There is no much debate about the use of service design approach in the community. The main challenge is outside the designers’ world. It’s about accepting service design by marketers, IT and communications managers.
Service design is not about creating deliverables, it’s about improving client’s business.
Improvements are impossible without engagement from people inside organizations. That’s why explaining service design to those who lead the implementation has to be our main goal for now.
