Designing for Love
Digital services, such as Google Maps and Foursquare, are a fast-growing part of our daily lives. These services can be beneficial and much loved, like Amazon Prime, but poorly designed services can create bad feeling, causing customers to terminate brand relationships. DESIGNING LIVING ENTITIES
So what is service design all about? At Fjord, we practice service design to shape delightful experiences wherever people meet the products they use. Service design is about creating living entities that evolve and change over time. This is fundamentally different from other forms of design that generally aim for permanency. Successful service design changes in three ways: • In response to people’s evolving needs and expectations • According to feedback loops from users and related service systems • Adapting to natural growth and added functionality over time It’s not that the design of services is inherently better or more important than other forms of design, but it is different. It’s more multidimensional, and it requires different skills and a different approach, because digital services are living entities, not static or one-off things. 84
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Instead of getting stuck in industry jargon, we like to compare services to human relationships. After all, people’s relationships with services mirror their relationships with people. Users go through different stages of service engagement and, when service design is great, they have a longlasting relationship of trust – they might even fall in love. It’s been proven through many studies that users’ relationships to their mobile phones (and the digital services that they use) can be as powerful as their relationships with people. They feel incomplete or cut off without their gadgets and services. At Fjord, we aim to design services that people fall in love with. When you design for love, you have to design for the heart, for an emotional connection, rather than merely for the mind. When you appeal to the heart, you can usually create more value.
Just like love in real life, falling in love with a service is something that happens gradually. Yes, love at first sight does exist, but it’s an exception, not the norm. Usually there are three stages of engagement with the service:
1. MATCHMAKING The matchmaking stage is about people discovering and understanding the service in the first place. Services must be designed so that they are easily discovered and understood. They have to feel real and relevant, by way of meeting real human needs. Importantly, there should be a strong ‘hook’ or strong point of differentiation – the thing that people will mention to their friends. If you’ve done a good job designing for this first stage of engagement, you can hope for a user reaction like ‘Aha!’ This type of reaction indicates that they understand it and could see how the service could be useful for them.
2. DATING The dating stage is the first trial of the service, and it’s really important to reduce all barriers to
