For us as Designers the biggest challenge was to design the bunny out of the blue. Since we didn’t have a concept made by a dedicated 2D Artist, there was a lot of trying out to find its ultimate cuteness.

Design Process

The usual way of designing a 3D Model, is to create a 2D model first, usually by a concept artist. That model can either be a sketch or a detailed drawing. Subsequently, the model then goes through a feedback loop, is refined and approved. At that stage, the 3D artist then models it. Thus, dividing the whole process into three major steps.

Just like when we design web pages, our UX designers start by crafting mockup screens, followed by a frontend developer that assesses their feasibility and implements them afterwards. Professional 3D artists in big studios however, are generally given a concept drawing, that is detailed enough for them to simply “copy” or rather translate it into 3D.
Pedro Couto – our main 3D artist at Liip – however, was given free reign in creativity, doing the entire form-finding process directly in 3D. The challenging part was to build everything from his imagination, without a 2D model, but ultimately lead to a great result, we believe.

Decision to go straight into 3D

Practice over theory is one of our core principles at Liip. As such, we worked with compasses over maps or creativity over fully defined concept art this time. Starting to model in 3D directly led to several iterations of the bunny and allowed Pedro to further hone his modeling skills. Furthermore, it enabled him to explore new ways to efficiently draft objects in 3D.

Pedro and I as a UX designer and Illustrator worked closely together to further enhance Hazel’s cuteness factor and to align its visual appearance with Liip’s branding guidelines.

Evolution of the bunny

It takes a lot of effort to build things in 3D. Here you see some of the several stages Hazel went through.

Step 1: Sculpting the first draft

Step 2: Joining all the blocks, plus further sculpting. Hazel was in need for some arms too…

Last but not least: Hazel received a proper Liip branding shower and a cute-effect facelift

Innovative design
The birthday present to Steps was an innovative, reduced design of the website www.steps.ch. The appearance is now completely responsive and therefore usable on mobile phones, tablets as well as at home on the desktop.

Challenging implementation
The implementation of the new design was particularly challenging in the development, as the new appearance consists of several micro animations. This also applies to the current date change in the schedule.

New CMS
The basis of the website was also renewed in the project: Steps now runs on the Sitecore Content Management System.

Cross-agency cooperation
The new Steps appearance was created in close cooperation with Migros in Lead, Y7K as design agency, Namics for the technical implementation in CMS and Liip for the front-end implementation.

Liip has supported the Migros Group on the basis of a preliminary study, first wireframes and the CI/CD to design the new online career portal, to design it interactively and visually as well as to implement it technically. "One of the biggest challenges in the project was to map the complex group structure of Migros in a way that was easy for the user to understand," says Product Owner Martin Meier at Liip. The solution to this problem was, among other things, user testing of an early wireframe prototype and a consistent focus on the user on both the visitor and editorial side. Although the "Migros Gruppe Arbeitswelt" hosted more than 60 cooperatives and companies at the launch and the content was created by a correspondingly large number of teams, a very high degree of visual and structural consistency can be ensured through the site. This is made possible by a flat information architecture and numerous content modules that automatically adapt to the respective context. This gives cooperatives and companies sufficient flexibility and scope to optimize their new career site.

The new online platform was implemented together with the Migros Group deliberately following an agile approach. The continuous optimization during the course of the project enabled us to develop a high quality product, which already comes with extensive functions in the first release. The focus is on the search function for 600 jobs per month and the 1500 additional apprenticeships advertised each year, which is extremely efficient and flexible due to the modern Vue.js frontend architecture. For content management, the open source system Drupal 8 was chosen. In summary, Micol Rezzonico, Head of the Competence Center Employer Branding, says: "Together with Liip, we have succeeded in building a clear and stable platform that can be developed further on a modular basis and gives the Migros Group the opportunity to make its extraordinary diversity and the many qualities in the field of career accessable".

Responsible at the Migros Cooperative Association: Micol Rezzonico (Head of Competence Center Employer Branding), Christopher Schmidt (Project Manager), Pascal Schwager (Product Owner), Sabina Del Grosso (Content Strategy), Ivan Ganarin (Information Architect); Responsible at Liip: Martin Meier (Product Owner, Consultant), Jan Hug (UX Designer, Developer), Jonathan Minder (Developer), Krisztian Kovacs (Developer), Christian Wüthrich (Developer), Christian Stocker (Developer), Fabian Ryf (SEO/Analytics), Daniel Frey (Scrum Master), Tonio Zemp (Consultant).

Link to the Migros Gruppe Arbeitswelt: www.migros-gruppe.jobs

1. Why bother with user testing? We perform well!

Client : no need for this, our product is great, we're not leaders for nothing.

Designer : Oh really? If you never test it with users, how can you be sure that they don't struggle regularly on your product?

Some clients are so confident with the quality of their website / product, that they just think they will not learn from user testing sessions. But they are just wrong. You always learn something during user testing, even when made on great products, you always learn something interesting for the design, the development, or even the business model…

Users change, habits evolve and if your product does not take care of the users today, will they adopt it tomorrow?

2. There is no money for user testing

Client : Sorry, but we can barely afford this website, so no options can be added.

Designer : can you afford two websites?

If your client or boss pretends to be broke, ask him if it is ok for him to waste the entire budget just to save a few grounds.

If you have barely enough money to do one website, failure is no option. So you should try to get feedbacks as soon as possible, so please, make user testing instead of risking to hit the wall and never recover. Remove some nice to have features and use this budget to test your core features.

One $ spent during design phase saves up to 100 $  in development phase.

3. No need for this, our design is obvious and user testing is just an option!

Client : Come on! I'm not an idiot, user testing is optional, this is obvious!

What is obvious to you, is not necessarily obvious for your target.

Designer : Sure, just like seatbelts, airbags or success…

Today, would you buy a car that has no airbags, no seatbelts (assuming this is even possible)?

If clients have the right to tell designers that user testing is optional, then designers should be allowed to say to clients that success is optional as well.

A client of mine once told me: “Never underestimate the stupidity of the end users. It's the best way to fail a project”. Nevertheless, it was very hard to agree on doing user testing on the current project with him! If a end user cannot use properly what you designed, then it is your fault.

Remember, what looks obvious to you, might be very confusing for your end user.

4. No time left for this!

Client : We just don't  have time for user testing

Designer : Oh!? you go live next Monday ?

The more your wait before testing, the more features are subject to be tested.

The more there is to test, the more there might be features to redesign.

If you expect to use your time totes and fix things once your product is live, you will suffer.

The more your wait, the harder you might crash.

5. We already know the users!

Client : Nah, it's ok we already know the users and what they want, thanks!

Designer : Sure…

Is this the real life?

Is this just fantasy?

… you know the rest.

I heard this several times, and each time this was just a nightmare when I took a look under the hood. All the decisions had been made on several guessing games. When people pretend to really know the users, I ask them for the personas, and if they can't provide them, I ask for more detailed information (attention span, socio professional category, favorite device, brand affinity, product usage frequency, biggest fears…)

Pretty quick I cannot get an answer, or I face irritation. It sometimes is enough to make people realize that they have been designing a project without knowing their users. By doing so, they face terrible outcomes. The sooner they accept to confront their product to their real users, the more they have chances to adjust.

As soon as you will defeat an objection, prepare to face another one. It might not lead to do user testing on this specific project but it will prepare the ground for the next ones.

What happens if someone systematically refuses user testing or warning?

To conclude: this is what you should avoid

I will remember for a long period, this client who asked for help to design a portal for its employees, but did not want to consider user testing, who didn't want to take into account the personas we provided them either, and that systematically ignored our warnings.

Once we delivered the portal, one third of their users complained heavily, because they had to use it on their laptop as they were mobile and working at their clients places during rendez-vous. The portal was optimised for full HD resolutions available on the screens in the headquarters, and the laptops were far from this standard. And as if it was not enough, users complained about the complexity of working on it, as the 3G + VPN + Laptop setup was way too complicated to operate just to check information quickly. Users asked for smartphones, and wanted the portal to be accessible there, and usable, of course.

As they knew everything, they were not in the mindset of listening to consultants. If they had listened to our warnings, they would have saved 2 months of redesign to go responsive after a desktop first approach, they would have avoided the unexpected expense associated to that.

A quick user testing sessions in guerilla mode, even with printed wireframes and access to the real end users would have confirmed our warnings, and possibly have changed the project before any development.

As a conclusion, you should insist on testing prototype or wireframes as soon as possible and remind your client / your boss that the further the project is developed, the more expensive it is to change anything afterwards.

In my last blog post, we realized that companies are faced with an ambiguous situation, between innovation and users loyalty. Meanwhile users want  cutting the edge experiences and dislike learning news things.

1: Deal with these bad feelings concerning change in companies

I have bad news. If your company is struggling at innovating, maybe it is because it is excellent at killing good innovation ideas. Big companies are expected to innovate, but managing people in such companies just freak out at the simple idea of dealing with edgy ideas. Nobody wants to be the ones who brought a massive failure in the history of the product, or worse, in the collective memory of people about the company. Managing people are often more afraid of the negative consequences of their actions than interested by the very exciting potential behind this very original idea. Innovation seems risky, and can lead to failures.

No matter how careful you act, you never know how your new product will be received. There is always a risk and failure is an option.The risk shouldn't prevent you from innovating. Remember, only the companies that innovate survive. There is more to lose at doing nothing than at failing. Ask Kodak if they would still do the same if they were given a second chance to survive.

Help your decision takers with an environment where they can actually be aware of the whole uncertainty of each proposition. Put them in a danger free environment and allow them to be comfortable with uncertainty and to tolerate the unknown that comes with creative ideas, as it's a trainable skill, and a mandatory one to success.

Create an environment prone to innovation

Invite the management to test these ideas, and assure them that they can safely try and fail until they succeed. And invite them to fail as fast as possible. After each failure, analyze what you have, be it data, testimonials, learn from it, adapt, and iterate on your product, and fail again, and learn and modify and fail again and again.

Thomas Edison tested 6 000 different natural substances to create his first electric light bulb. He failed thousands of times at finding the proper elements to build his light bulb. How many times did you fail?

Failing helps getting closer, little by little.

As long as a company does not accept the risk of failing, it will miss the benefits of succeeding. Once your company is really ok with taking those risks, and once you provide a favorable environment to innovation to your teams, then you can go to the next step and ask user's participation.

2. Learn about your users and their resistance to changes

As human beings, your users have a set of characteristics commonly shared, no matter where they come from in the world, no matter why they use your product, no matter which language they speak. They can have feelings, and they also have memory. This sounds dramatic I know…

Understand the global cognitive economy of the human being

Learning costs (a lot of) energy. You have to actively put your attention into something new, and try to understand how it works, what you have to do and when you have to do it. We do this to be able to react quickly during the following exposure “ ok to launch the song I just have to tap here once”

What happens when we suddenly realize that what we learned _the hard way _is not working anymore? The connexions that occurred in our brains are obsolete, and the whole energy invested in this old wiring is wasted. We have to learn a know how again. Either we accept it, either we struggle.

When a feature is abandoned, or modified, in a software, the users have to readapt to it, or find alternative ways, or worse, alternative softwares to be able to do it the old way. Some will shout at you on social networks, and will spend X times the amount of energy that would have been sufficient to learn the new way, just not to adapt. And sometimes features are abandoned because of new innovative features, or just because they are almost never used.

Unfortunately, we tend to minimize energy expenses, and we try to save our energy. If we have to learn something new, a new way to do, then we basically will behave as if we were suddenly endangered. Change is a very good reason to freak out for many persons. May it be for silly things or for deep moves, users will complain , this is called resistance to change.

Habits have a tough life. You won't let users abandon easily their habits, just because you suggest them to do so with a new feature. If you want massive adoption of your product / feature / service by the users, you have to prove them that it it worth changing. Why would they abandon their beloved product for yours?

Time is counted, and so is everyone's attention span. If you cannot demonstrate the benefits of this new product / feature simply, in just one minute, then the risk is high that your whole product or feature will be ignored.

3. Innovate with your users thanks to Design Thinking.

As mentioned, users know parts or even your whole product, and know things you should improve. It's a pretty good start. But it's not enough. You should gather your users' opinion.

Question your users

Put them together in groups, in a cool and calm place, and invite them to solve your design problems. “How might we __ “ or  “How can we become the best at  __ “  “How might we onboard new users so they feel part of our community” “How might we remove any frustration on our customer's side”…

Make as many groups of users as you want and let them choose a design challenge. Be sure there are some challenges left, so that they feel in control, and not forced to deal with something they did not choose.

Invite them to throw a lot of ideas, without any judgement on quality. Focus on quantity first. Once you have one hundred ideas, abandon the ones you really dislike (not financially healthy, or damaging for the company's reputation), cluster the ideas into themes, and ask your groups to select one theme they want to pitch to the other groups.

100 Post-it challenge

Start prototyping

Once the theme is selected, and the feedbacks from other groups are taken into account, start prototyping! Give them big paper leaves, post its, ropes, legos, cutters, wooden sticks, wool, duct tape, corks, anything that can help building something quickly.

Even very abstract prototypes can help you communicate your ideas to innovate.

Listen to your users' ideas

Let them express all the crazy ideas they have in their theme, and then let them pitch, take feedback, iterate, and slowly evolve to something more feasible.

And Voilà!! you get brilliant ideas on different subjects for your product, almost all feasible now. You still have to prioritize, begin fine tuning design, do user testing sessions, develop, do user testing sessions again on the ready to go live product / feature / service.

Take feedback and adapt

When arriving at this point, you minimize your risks, and only propose the new features / products to a limited and representative sample of your users. You take feedbacks, adapt, retest, and then only you push it to the masses.

To conclude

UX can support changes with in three main way:

• Give the companies the “Fail Fast” attitude / environment they need to dare to innovate
• Learn from your users, why they refuse change, what would motivate them to follow you
• Involve you users in your innovation process thanks to Design Thinking activities

Once you have followed these advices, my final tip is to invest even more effort on User's onboarding for the new product / feature. Remember, if the user doesn't get it in one minute, he will leave and nobody wants this to happen!

Let's innovate while keeping users happy ! But how?

Innovation: Risky but necessary

Innovation is everywhere! Is every existing thing not good enough and has to be improved? As if we required on a daily basis cutting the edge and exciting experiences! May it be only for pouring coffee in our mugs, or for giving feedbacks to developers who implemented what we co-designed with a client, or for completing a survey, booking a room, making a conference call…

The users of a product know what's wrong with a product, what is not working properly, what takes too much time. In other words, they know what could be improved. It might be risky  for a company to take the leap, because end users might dislike the change.

An example: Instagram's new logo

The Instagram app icon redesign made a real (bad?)buzz, because many people complained about not finding their app icon easily, even if the app didn't move from their phone screen / home screen for years. In the meantime, the algorithm that composes the user's main feed in the app was rebuilt. THE core feature that brings new and unpredictable contents to the users and keeps them hooked to the app was redesigned , and only a bunch of power users realized they were shown old posts mixed with fresh ones in a weird way… The most important technical change on the most crucial feature of the product was just invisible, compared to the noise made by an icon redesign.

As a result, sometimes companies fear about change, because they are so popular, that no matter what direction they take, they get serious complaints. And even with a strong knowledge of their customers, they hardly can predict what will be accepted and what will be rejected. This is basically resistance to change. People would totally accept putting energy in a virulent discussion to avoid change, rather than learning a new way of doing.

Let's ask the users what they want!

Unfortunately, users are not so good at expressing their needs. Some people tried. Brilliant ones. Still, they face difficulties…

Like I said earlier, users are able to tell you what is wrong, what should be improved or go faster. But when it comes to think about new features, new activities, new usages, it gets really harder. But it is still possible. Sometimes hard, but possible…

But in the end, for something this complicated, it's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. From Steve Jobs, in BusinessWeek 25 mai 1998.

To summarize: An ambiguous situation

Companies want innovation, because only innovative companies last, but they fear reject at the same time.

Users want to have cutting the edge experiences because it is more interesting than boring ones, but they hate learning new ways to do things, and will struggle for a Status-Quo.

To be continued: How can a UXer support change ?

These quotes may look very negative towards people, but I have to admit that they carry truth to my UX Designer life. Innovating is hard and this is totally ok if end users cannot do it themselves, as it is our job to find solutions to these pain points.

Fortuitously, as a UXer we can also come up with solutions! We can help entreprise by dealing with bad feeling and user test

… read more in my next blog post!

What the true meaning of our topic was, we didn't know by the time we proposed it. Yet we had a strong feeling that the ‘open' culture wasn't as strong in the design scene as it is in the tech scene and wanted to discuss that assumption, openly.

We thus introduced the open design notion with a big question mark: opensource we know since ages, opendata is now proving its value to the world, what about open design?

It turned out the discussions went fantastically well and we got thanked many times for having brought the topic onto the table.

Even more astonishing to us, what we encountered is a generational gap: digital-native creatives showed interest and seem to integrate open practices whereas their elders tended to disregard – if not despise – them.

Entering the conference

It took me a few minutes in the conference to realise that the event was filled with creatives, makers, coders, talents, artisans, … A mixed crowd of students (the conference was hosted by the SFGB-B design school teachers, agency and corporate employees.

The introductory talks that preceded the lab totally contradicted the tagline of the conference “design vs tech”. Although proponents of the design and the tech sides of the trade were supposed to battle on stage, they couldn't help but agree together. Being a strong believer that ‘design without tech without design' is useless, I was relieved to hear that proponents of both sides value and respect each other.

One of the learnings from the introductory talks were that there is great value in bringing design and tech as close as possible – potentially even creating both “components” at the same time. Finally defining a true agile approach.

After this introduction, the stage was set and I was expecting quite a bit of opposition and emotion to the inherent thesis we were about to throw in our two lab sessions: designers have so much to learn from techies about how to collaboratively design, build and refine their toolbox.

Discussion open design – session 1 : digital native creatives

The first lab session filled up with young people, probably most of them students of the school. I honestly must admit I feared they wouldn't get the idea at all. We did a short inspirational presentation of what ‘open' means in the tech scene and what open design initiatives we found interesting and then launched the discussion (in a park bench format), which started on how lame ready-made wordpress themes are and what a negative effect they have on the web design market: ‘Einheitsbrei' . Something I would translate with ‘insipidity'. Some went to throw UI frameworks like Twitter Bootstrap in the same pot.

Yet some voices challenged that opinion stating that far from being a major source of insipidity, those building block were the opportunity for designers to aim higher, to adopt and transcend them – adapt and improve – rather than just consider them as threats to tasteful and unique designs.

We then took the opportunity to direct the discussion onto the topic of ‘open brands': what does it mean for a brand to be open? Can it be more than careful attention to feedback? Could the openness of a brand avoid quinquennial rebranding rounds and ensure a constant and seamless evolution of the brand? Here again, that young crowd somehow nailed it down: they immediately identified that brands in the digital age have to plan for change, and to that purpose, designers shall anchor the brand in adaptive attributes.

Discussion open design – session 2 : not-so-digital native creatives

The second discussion slot filled up with people 10+ years older than the first session, mostly. Andy and I mostly did the same inspirational presentation and launched the discussion, in pretty much the same way as in the first session. And here again, the ghost of Einheitsbrei appeared after a few minutes.

But not first and foremost. The first thing that got discussed was … money – Ok, we had introduced 99designs (basically a online-bazaar for design) as ‘yet another way that design opens itself', which is a bit provocative, I shall admit. Through the exchange, I could sense the threat that the recent collaborative and global design market platforms imposed to the established designers and their business model.

Another striking difference to the first ‘younger' session was the importance given to the ‘genius' and ‘expertise' in design. That older crowd – or at least the ones who voiced up – didn't understand that one could contribute freely to a common effort at developing common design things and make money out of the advantages it gives them in client work – you know … the opensource business model.

The established models of thought and business were fighting back.

Yet, interestingly two pertinent ideas got developed at the end of that session: open font design and open design language.

A font is a clear building block for further design work and thus an ideal candidate for collaboration. Can a community develop a successful font in a sustainable and open manner? It turns it's actually the case with the Ubuntu Font Family, although it was not originally crowd-designed, its code is openly available and new contributors are welcome.

Material design is a powerful design language that has taken the world by storm. It however has primarily been designed by a corporation for its own sake. Can a community develop a successful design language in a sustainable and open manner?

The whole event was ended with an Apéro which in our book is always a good way to end a conference and gave participants an opportunity to network and exchange in a less formal environment.

Conclusion

By throwing that ‘open design' neologism to a digital crowd, we hit something: an open-native generation for whom design and tech are entangled, a design generation conscious of the role it can play in a global economy.

We have hope that open design becomes more than just an experiment in our minds and establishes itself as a true culture of design.

APIs are for humans what websites are for machines

Like a website, a point-of-sale, …, a web API is just another service touchpoint. And as any web-based touchpoint nowadays, its audience is part humans, part machines.

Interestingly, the audience and content structures of an API are diametrically opposed to those of a website.

A website is explored by machines – called bots – who precede and orient a (hopefully) larger number of human visits. A website main content targets its main human audience, while its metadata targets its secondary audience: machines.

For an API, it's just the opposite.

An API is explored by humans – developers, mostly – who precede and orient a larger number of machine visits. An API main content targets its main machine audience, while its metadata targets its secondary audience: humans.

Design APIs with the developer experience in mind

So how can user experience design help with APIs? Think of it as a kind of “Developers Optimization” (like SEO helps machines on your website): by lowering the barrier for the developers to understand and code with your API, you raise chances of adoption, success and reuse.

Suppose that you work for some bank and are designing some kind of money API. The information and action points that this API will convey belong to the banking business domain, maybe evenmore specifically to the field of mortgages, maybe even to a specific understanding of that specific field within that specific domain, an understanding that only exists within your bank.

Yet this future money API is certainly not aimed at you, nor at your business colleagues. What if one of that API's purposes is to support monetary transactions on gaming platforms? Then game developers might reasonably be your primary human audience, right? and game developers don't know much about the way your bank thinks and deals with money, right?

As for any service touchpoint, don't design an API around your business, but around the needs and understandings of those who will consume it.

A few design methods that can really help you designing great API experiences

1. interview target developers : what do they expect from the API and what do they understand about the business behind it,
2. build personas out of the insights from these interviews,
3. benchmark other APIs and their documentation to see what conventions are at play there,
4. prototype and user test the API before the single line of API logic. Provide the developers with a static mockup of the API response and do a walkthrough with them.

Further readings

The user experience of an API is a relatively new concern, yet – and as usual with new things – several people and organisations are developing it:

• APX is to API as UX is to UI, by Uri Sarid
• API Usability Testing Project, by the '18F' US gov. program
• API Integrations: 5 Ways to Optimize the User Experience, by Hannah Shain
• Thoughts On The Design Of APIs, by Anthony Ferrara

Reaching general consensus on priorities is always hard

I remember many workshops I facilitated where the mood was open and friendly until I invited the participants to set priorities in the ‘big cloud' of needs and wishes postit-ed on the wall. At this crucial moment, two distinct group behaviours would occur:

1. All participants would turn their heads at the ‘boss int the room', because after all that's her/his responsibility,
2. or every participant would get ready to defend his stake.

Funnily, 90% of the identified scope would in both cases be marked as ‘absolut priority'. As a process moderator, if you reach the consensus that “everything is absolutely needed”, well … you failed.

Yet the goal was simple: no two things should have equal priority. But the trick is that this is almost impossible to reach through group discussions. A more reasonable goal for prioritization in group is to define a pyramid of priorities.

I've come up with a little method to reach that pyramid of priorities – even with challenging groups of participants – and guess what? it borrows from algorithmic: roughly halving a set is a lot easier than ordering it absolutely. And halving again is easy …

Solution: build iteratively a pyramid of priorities

Split. Ask the group of participants to split the set of things in two subsets of equal size: the important things , and the more important things . Crucial here: never speak of less or not important things, you might hurt feelings.

Split again . Then focus on the higher priority set – the set of more important things – and ask participants to identify within it the very important things , again halving the set in two subsets of equal size. Iterate again and identify the most important things from the very important ones, the super-absolutely important ones, … slowly building the pyramid of priorities, bottom-up.

Yes, in every iteration there can still be quite some discussions and negotiations, but every iteration ends with an agreement, which is a firm step towards your goal: a common agreement on priorities.

It helps to present it to the group as a clear challenge with clear rules and to clearly timebox every iteration, it will get participants to switch to “game mode” and perform the task with open minds. Also don't explain to them that the goal of the exercise is to build a pyramid, because everyone will merely focus on his top thing. Simply tell them that “now has come the time to work a bit on priorities” and launch the first halving iteration.

That little prioritization method has done marvels in uneasy group settings. I hope it will help you too.

Service Design Network

is the leading institution that aims to strength the impact of service design internationally, both in public and private sector. It aggregates an open-minded and knowledge-sharing network of different professionals and believers that get together, discuss and think about new aways to improve the interaction between service providers and customers. Besides all their events, there's a bunch of nice online and print publications, have a look at it on their website.

Service Design

is then about meticulously choreograph a long run, every touchpoint from a service, in detail. Is to build an ecosystem that delivers relevant outcomes by integrating and managing capabilities and services, from people to infrastructures, products and communication, because the design of every component matters to fulfil the needs of the involved participants.

Creating value for Quality of Life

A lead that connects people that, one way or another, have a reason and the will to share their thoughts about what/how can design help achieving a better world – equitable, fair, peaceful, safer, reliant, visionary, kind, healthy, pleasing, comfortable, familiar, etc… However, this meetup was not about glorifying us (designers) and the value of design itself as a problem solver, but about sharing fears, questions, strong ideas and lots of open answers.

We all have our doubts and hesitations, and we all fail, but besides that, we usually can't (alone) have enough capacity to effectively change things as we think they should. A long list of constrains keeps holding off our (designers) goals and targets: financial issues, political principles, business requirements, technical impediments, design restrictions, poor strategies, incomplete visions, strict deadlines, incompetence, misvalue, misunderstanding, etc …

Above all, great concepts aren't always able to initiate and develop the innovative ideas they were meant to, and that's what have been blocking the improvement of many services and experiences. And more than empowering experiences, service design enables saving and generating lives too. It was a great relief to see so many people keen to get their hands dirty and budge those obstacles around!

As on every conference, attendees' background, interests, expertise and expectations are diverse, and that creates already a challenge for the organisation itself: how to engage and raise the right discussions? how to provide what people is looking for? And as a service design conference, somehow everyone presumes to get the best conference experience so far.

From the day I got to know the event, to the day I bought the ticket and booked my flight, to when I arrived to my hostel or reached the location, to the substance of the talks and the breaks, the food and the mates… all that, till the day I'm writing this post, and the ones that will come – affected by what I experienced during all this journey –, all these matter.

The overall experience of the conference was good, but not great. Maybe because I was too obsessed with “service designish” details, or regarding the talks, maybe I expected more concrete deepness about tangible challenges, real practices and failures rather than success theories and unexciting workshops. But again, it's an evidence of how hard is to achieve everyone's ambitions and to overcome their expectations about something. But despite that feeling, interesting speakers and cases came across, from social to business design perspectives, so I would like to remark a few interesting thoughts.

Talks and notes

Mark Levy - Head of Employee Experience at Airbnb

shared some lessons about a world where we belong anywhere, how Airbnb community is changing the world by enabling genuine experiences between people. It all started on improving the employees experience. Their internal engagement enabled great customer experience for both hosts and guests, and that has been leading to a massive community engagement which then reflects again on the employees satisfaction. Happy employees <=> happy customers. A full loop of great experiences that inspire the one after.

Stan Phelps - founder of 9 INCH marketing

mentioned the impact of service design on loyalty and word of mouth. The way you reach the customers' heart creating memorable experiences. Something relevant, unexpected and authentic, as Walt Disney's dream of exceeding people's expectations over and over again. Surprising and entertaining people was his way of bounding without spending money on advertisement.

Kigge May Hvid - a leading global voice in this sector

made her clever point remembering us that we don't need to develop more services and products, but rather, to wisely connect the existing ones in order to reach higher solutions for world wide problems. A design that serves. The right balance between an industrial society and a knowledge society will articulate better systems instead of multiple and duplicated insufficient services.

Low Cheaw Hwei - Global Head of Product and Service Design for global Philips

brought up an interesting topic about the trend of not providing a service (no service = self-service), for example the shift from “being taken care of” to “taking care of” (self). The future of healthcare is (already) beyond the hospitals, clinics and doctors boundaries, and getting closer to a self-help approach. Instead of a full professional service, the examination, diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, recovery and maintenance is being brought home. In one side it can decrease anxiety and increase comfort, but fear and confidence are affected too.

Services can be hardware based which means they are scripted – limited, linear and predictive, with processes and clear steps towards a specific outcome –, or iterative, fluid, active and responsive, which means they are spontaneous – towards the same outcome, but allowing agility and broader goals, because they are empowered by values (e.g. a call service for health support that turned out to be a “shoulder” for old people that called because they were feeling lonely).

Nathan Shedroff - program chair of the ground-breaking MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts

reflected about the relation between the qualitative and the quantitative sides of “value”, which for different sectors have different meanings. We all create personal and business relationships where value exists, and within that experience we tend to relate it with professional or personal values, either finance values, sales and revenues, or emotional values, affections and other more spiritual ways of quantitive/qualitative sharing. But the opportunity to build the best value requires us to first understand the qualitative issues that drive decisions, meaning, identity, emotion and satisfaction, and leave the quantitative for a second thought. The way for service design strategically drive premium value into businesses has all to do with triggering the sensorial “state of mind” of business people.

Malin Orebäck - director of digital strategy at Veryday

proved us the benefits of a “shared value approach”, which basically means a “win-win” of all the players in the entire value chain. The challenges while trying to solve different social problems (e.g. end the sea pollution with fishing nets) acted as an engine for business innovation projects (created a service which generated job opportunities: pick and clean the nets, produce carpets and sell = clean sea, money to improve life quality).

Tenzin Shenyen - tibetan Buddhist monk

elucidated us about a monk life style to argue that there are things we can't design. Karma and experience “can't even be correlated for predictable effect, much less be designed”. Contemporary life runs in a chaotic speed and stress which leads designers to the hard task of rushing with deadlines to simplify and ease what surround us, so Shenyen enquired us about why not to adopt the silence and slow methods of a buddhist monk, and learning to say “no” more often?

Alisan Atvur & Byron Wilson - consultant and idea manager

are often confronted with the others' discomfort of changing things, even towards a better reality. As creatives, designers, or consultants, it's sometimes hard to encourage people to overcome the fear of risking, of failing or lose. Healthcare sector cares about results, not about design, unless that magic does bring actual results, so for that, your deliverables have to clearly impact their decisions and present the profits. Answer their “why”s with research, and their “how”s with strategic visions, designing a change that makes them comfortable to accept and act upon.

Marion Fröhlich & Mauro Rego - Strategic Design Consultant and Designer at SAP

highlighted the impact of enterprise IT on quality of life with the humanised softwares they structure and design. As we know, the primary purpose of a business software is generally a functional objective: “to track, store or manage data or to support related processes using that data”. So it's impact is limited to what it can accomplish in that specific context, but when its concept pursuits real value for all the roles involved, then enterprise software can affect people's lives differently, from business-centred, to user-centred.

Denis Weil - recently Corporate Vice President, Concept/Design at McDonald's Corporation, now “Innovator at scale”

shared learnings from his current personal transition into social innovation and made a case for social design as a new and better model for design, particularly service design. In a place with low levels and notions of hygiene it's hard to suddenly change their cultural behaviors. Lots of efforts and understanding are needed to find the better paths to achieve that goal, because there is no system at all, and funcional toilets aren't enough to build a new habit.

Long time of thoughts and experiments, the team managed to implement sanitarium facilities, organize waste removal, transport, treatment and reuse as compost because they added value in participation return. Each toilet owner earned for each time it was used, but also had the take care of it, getting the revenue from the waste he returned. Soon, people realized they shouldn't pay for a toilet, but instead make the same profit a have their own to gain from their waste too.

My take away

Working as an Interaction Designer / User Experience / Service Designer is to be aware of all that and to learn to move from design as a skill set to design as a mindset. To take an active part designing the best experience through engaging and delightful interactions for the users, but more than that, to make them meaningful, to empathize, listen and witness the users' journeys, feelings, actions and reactions. Grasping the information we wouldn't get while embodying them. Re-researching, digging, analyzing and evaluating our findings. Design-think, try, test, fail, retry and rescale to (hopefully) solve all those puzzles and embrace the passion of helping others to improve their quality of life.

You will get proud of yourself, at least I do. What's more fascinating, motivating and rewarding than being able to share and apply your knowledge and experience, dedicating your work to benefiting human kind and the world around you?

Now, at Liip, we mostly do it through web, but in the near future, we will more and more enhance all different kinds of services, focusing on developing even better customer experiences than the approaches we have done so far.