How a Niche Audience Leads to Better Service Design
Finding creativity in constraints
A few years ago, Samsung developed a service for Deaf and hearing-impaired customers in Turkey: a video call centre. That was a clever move, as was the way they chose to communicate it to the public. It was a sweet advertisement showing what a day in the life of a Deaf man might be like if everyone he met could sign.
My little corner of the Internet, which includes a lot of Deaf and hearing-impaired friends, resounded with praise and warm emotion when it launched. But here’s what’s really praiseworthy: The fact that Samsung saw a niche audience in the first place, and recognised the service design opportunity it represented.
For deaf and hearing-impaired users, mobile phones are an even more important lifeline than they are for those of us who can hear. Samsung recognised this, and designed a service specifically to serve them. But this is the exception in big business, not the rule.
…it’s not the ad that’s exciting, but the service itself.
Generally, big business tends to view audiences like the Deaf and hearing-impaired as too niche to warrant specific attention. But it’s often the case, as it was here, that designing within the tight constraints of a niche leads to great creativity.
Think about it. Nobody looks deaf. Deafness can be isolating, as the film implies. In fact, anxiety and depression occur far more often amongst those with hearing impairments than the population as a whole, according to the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education.
So yes, an agency found a touching way to communicate the story. But it’s not the ad that’s exciting, but the service itself: something that does social good and also makes good business sense. Given how products and services tend to morph and adapt in the hands of real users, it also offers huge potential for users to shape it into something far more interesting.
Samsung’s website already explains the accessibility features built into their devices, but there is potential beyond just serving users with hearing impairments or other limitations. Video-based interaction also expands the potential reach of almost any service, allowing it to reach a wide audience across different sectors, while humanising the service models by showing a face, not just a disembodied voice or block of text.
An earlier version of this piece was publishes on the blog, Ten Corners, in March 2015.
