Service Design — it’s not necessarily about the duration, it’s about the narrative.

When we choose to fly, we are consciously and subconsciously taking part in a number of different experiences. These experiences can be both pleasant or unpleasant and last only a short period of time, an excruciating long period of time or somewhere in the middle.

In Service Design, we call this the service experience lifecycle. As a Service Designer working within an airline, part of my job is to make sure these experiences are as pleasant as possible and last only as long as is absolutely necessary by using the minimum amount of steps needed (as highlighted in Louise Downe’s 15 principles of good service design).

However, I’ve been reflecting recently on the idea that we as human beings have two separate selves who experience things in different ways. You can learn more about this idea when reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus. In this book he talks about the existence of at least two different selves within each of us: the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘narrating self’. The experiencing self is our moment-to-moment consciousness, yet it remembers nothing and has little to no impact on our decision-making process. However, the narrating self is forever retrieving memories, creating and telling stories and making the big decisions for us.

To give some further insight into these two differing selves, he gives the example of a specific, ground breaking experiment conducted by the Nobel Prize winning economist and psychologist, Daniel Kahneman. He asked his participants to place their hands in very cold water as part of a three-part experiment. In the first part (the ‘short’ part) they had to keep their hands in the water for 60 seconds. In the second part (the ‘long’ part) they had to keep their hands in the water for an additional 30 seconds as water was slowly and secretly heated to a warmer but still uncomfortably cold level. In the final part, the subjects were asked to choose which experiment (‘short’ or ‘long’) to repeat. 80 per cent preferred to repeat the ‘long’ experiment, remembering it as less painful.

What this experiment did is expose the existence of these two differing selves. It is obvious to the experiencing self that the ´long´ part of the experiment was worse. It’s nonsensical to think that extending a very unpleasant experience with slightly more unpleasantness would make it better. However, the narrating self is less aware of duration. It pays no attention to the length of both parts, instead it narrates the story. It uses the experiencing self as raw material for the stories it creates, in turn shaping what the experiencing self actually feels.

Yet it does this by taking short cuts, it usually only narrates a story using what we call ‘peak-end rules’. The peak–end rule is a cognitive bias in which people judge an experience based on how they felt at its peak (usually the most intense point) and its end. As humans, we judge experiences by their most intense point and their end points, as opposed to the total sum or average of every moment of the experience. So, by remembering that the water was somewhat warmer at the end of the ‘long’ part while paying no attention to duration, the narrating self chooses to repeat this over the ‘short’ part.

Bearing all of this in mind, I have begun to ask myself; as service designers, how much attention do we or should we be paying to the peak end rule concept when designing better experiences, experiences that meet the needs of a person’s narrating self? When posing this question to myself, I remembered the excellent keynote delivered by Joe MacLeod at SDNC17; “ENDS: when we’re finished with products and services”. In the talk he argues that we are taking the wrong approach to challenging the impacts of consumption. He believes to tackle this; we need to create coherent endings in services and experiences.

He points out that today’s consumers have a very poor relationship with “endings”. For many, some endings to products and services never happen, and when they have the potential to, people simply don’t know how to end them, giving the excellent example of the mobile phone; “Everyone has a draw in their house with at least 5 generations of phones”. Joe believes that more products and services need better emotional endings, and these should be:

“Consciously connected to the rest of the experience through emotional triggers that are actionable by the user in a timely manner”.

However, if we are considering the narrating self when designing these emotional triggers then should these triggers be memorable, not just emotional? After all, the experiencing self doesn’t make the big decisions, it’s the narrating self that records these peak moments as narratives to use as a deciding mechanism.

Don Norman, the Professor of Psychology and Cognitive science at University of California goes even further and suggests we should design for memory, not for the actual experience itself. He argues that the entire experience is not as important as the way it was remembered.

I began writing this post as a way to explore heuristic techniques and what impact this could have on the creation of service experience lifecycle’s and the service development lifecycle. However, I found myself with more questions than answers:

• Do we design these lifecycles with the minimal number of steps?
• Do we design these lifecycles with an emphasis on peaks and ends, while not worrying about the duration?
• Do we design these lifecycles with emotional endings that are connected to emotional triggers during the experience?
• Or, do we design these lifecycles based on memories alone, disregarding the experience entirely?

My current thinking is this; we should be designing both a lasting and sustainable service development lifecycle and service experience lifecycle, while also considering how we can design and embed these memorable peaks and ends from both the perspective of the user and the business. We should be more conscious that it’s not necessarily about the duration, it’s about the narrative, it’s about the emotional ending and it’s about the consciously designed, memorable peak end moments.

We shouldn’t just be looking to the accepted principles of good service design. It’s only by analysing and experimenting with alternative views such as the concepts I touched on earlier that we can go further in the development of truly outstanding services.

In the meantime, here’s a fun example of how one airline (actually the airline employee) has provided a memorable, shareable peak end moment during the passengers journey — Westjet Safety Briefing