Why Alanis Morisette is key to understanding Service Design
It isn’t ‘Ironic’ Alanis, it’s just poor Design
Last night I cycled home from another day at Pancentric towers, humming the 1995 classic Alanis Morisette song ‘Ironic’. Forgive me.
I internalised the lyrics because people think you’re strange if you sing out loud on your bike in London.
But shamefully, I do know all the words.
And my favourite bit goes something like this;
A traffic jam when you’re already late
A no-smo(oo)king sign on your cigarette break
It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife
It’s meeting the man of my dreams… And then meeting his beautiful wife
I suddenly realised that Alanis Morisette’s neighbourhood just needs a good bout of Service Design.
Allow me to explain
Here’s 4 unfortunate mishaps that have caused Alanis frustration. She’s so miffed in fact that she wrote a song about it.
But could something have been done to avoid these bad experiences?
I’d suggest that if a better designed service had been in place, she might have sung a different song. Perhaps ‘One hand in my pocket’ !
Here’s my argument.
A traffic jam when you’re already late
So imagine Alanis is on her way to the gym, she rushes out the door as she’s already late. The gym is located within a large shopping centre, for which there is an unsightly multi-storey car park.
It’s 8am, peak time for entering the car park, and there’s always a queue at this time. But today particularly so.
One of the ticket machines has run out of tickets, so all the cars are filing through a single lane. This has happened before, more than once. Letting out a deep sigh, Alanis waits in line.
Note that at this time, there is no queue whatsoever at the exit, because the majority of people are parking for the day.
By the time she gets into the car park, she realises that it’s too late for her to visit the gym, she’ll be late for work.
So she circles the whole multi-storey building, because of course it’s one of those where you have to drive the entire length, and height of the thing to get out.
By the time she exits the car park she is so fuming, that on arrival at work, she phones to cancel her gym membership altogether. Instead she joins the private gym two roads down, which is more expensive, but has private parking.
Multi-storey car parks are notoriously bad at the entering and exit part of their service. It seems to me that a few quick wins could have avoided all this mayhem. But now’s not the time to redesign a car park.
A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break
Alanis knows that smoking is bad for her. She’ll give up soon. But her neighbourhood has a high density of smokers and it’s hard to give up when others around you are smoking.
So for now she needs to find the smoking area in this pub, because that’s where she’s meeting her friends.
She can’t see any signs so she tries a few doors, but behind each is a room with a clearly marked no-smoking sign.
Where’s a girl to smoke around here?
She’s tries to get the attention of a bar tender, but the bar is 3 persons deep, so they’re all rushing around, grimacing. With not inclination to help her.
After wondering aimlessly through the pub for quite some time, sipping as she goes, she finally finds a door, that takes her down several flights of stairs, and eventually leads her outside to a tucked away smoking area.
It’s really busy, (because of the heavy smoking neighbourhood) and while looking for a space to put her glass down she realises it’s now empty. And she’s now really far away from the bar.
So given that most her fiends are smokers, she and they decide to go to the pub next door which has a well manned outside bar right by the dedicated smoking section, so they can top up their G&Ts, and then light up for round two.
It’s like ten thousand spoons
when all you need is a knife
This is the one that really rang true. Imagine Alanis has stopped by a cafe for a spot of lunch. She likes this particular cafe because they offer free WIFI that you don’t have to sign up to. And every table has a jug of tap water with fancy cucumber swirls!
She steps in the door, there’s a nice table by the window. Win! She seats herself, then joins the self serve queue, it’s well organised for ordering and payment, and staffed accordingly. Bravo.
The food looks delicious, they offer several soup variants, but as it’s a hot day Alanis fancies plain bread and butter, and an ice tea. She pays up, via a smooth and friendly transaction, and goes to collect her cutlery, but low and behold… there’s ten thousands spoons, but not a single knife.
The cafe hadn’t anticipated so many customers ordering the bread and butter. They knew it was a warm day, but they didn’t empathise with their customers’ need for something cool in the heat. And thus failed to adjust their cutlery supplies accordingly.
Alanis had a long wait while the waitress looked for more knives, and in the meantime she lost her window seat. This single pain point in what seemed to be a well oiled service meant that Alanis went hungry and disgruntled, and never returned again.
It’s meeting the man of my dreams… And then meeting his beautiful wife
Um… Maybe you should sign up to Happn Alanis?
Service Design understood?
You get the point.
I hope.
It’s about knowing your customers, each and every one of them. Designing a service, with their needs at the heart. If you put them at the forefront of everything you design, and iterate improvements in response to their feedback, then you’re in good stead for gleaming success.
And you’ll have all the Alanis Morisettes out there singing your praises.
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If you don’t know the song, you probably wonder what the bloody hell I’m going on about. Here it is on Youtube (a great service). And if you want to impress your friends, you can get the lyrics on Shazam, (another great service) and sing along like me.
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