Service Design in Sydney, a healthy community of practice

On Wednesday evening Digital Eskimo, those fine purveyors of all things sustainable in design, hosted Design Thinking Drinks. Present were members of the service and interaction design community, as well as customer-centred designers from financial institutions and a few interested members of the public. It was an extremely engaging and uplifting night that has given me a very positive sense of the Service Design community of practice in Sydney.

The evening began with a short introduction from the founder of Digital Eskimo, Dave Gravina, on the company’s history and philosophy, more of which you can read here. After a short break Deborah Kneeshaw introduced Penny Hagen, a DE alumni and phD candidate. Penny spoke about her research and considered approach to participatory design in the realm of social technologies. Afterwards, discussion was invited. Here are some brief points on the discussion:

Defining value
One of the first topics discussed was the importance of expressing design methodology in concrete terms to clients who do not understand design (but are paying the bills). It was generally agreed that expressing a defined process is an essential part of convincing clients to approve budget for a project. Read the rest of this entry »

Poor banking service

Yesterday, when doing some much needed filing, I realised I only like one of the services my current bank provides for me: the pre-punched holes in my bank statements. Other than that, Lloyds TSB have been appalling bad with their service.

This is not an uncommon story with high street banks such as Lloyds. A 2008 study into UK consumer satisfaction with banks found that credit unions and co-operatives scored better with consumers than did the large retail banks (JD Power, 2008). Perhaps this is because personal customer service seems to be a key selling point of the smaller organisations. What Lloyds, and all of the other high street banks need to realise is that good customer service is the key to their business, especially if we are to believe that more people will tell of a bad experience than they will of a good one (Howcroft, 1991)*. Read the rest of this entry »