Service Design: A Practical Guide to Interviews and Insights

1. 1. Introduction: How do we create value? Be creative myths often depicts a lonely genius sitting alone at the desk and just figuring out stuff like Leonardo da Vinci, coming up with great solutions to problems that we didn't even know that we needed solving. That never really seems to work for me though. I am a surface designer, designer and digital innovation strategists. My job is looking at the problems are big companies and government agencies and coming up with solutions that create value for their customers. This course is my attempt at creating a practical guide for creating value. This course is about speaking to people, specifically users. It's about analyzing your findings and then presenting it in a clear and concise way. My hope is that this course is going to add value to you, the entrepreneur, the artist, the employee. I hope that you're going to enjoy this course and that you will follow me along. 2. The Case & Class Project: This course will be centered around a case. I urge you to follow along to see if you can create value for yourself and your customers. This case is very near and dear to me. It's something that I've actually considered and I've been thinking about, I want to share to you the process that I've went through when looking at this idea, I love ice cream, especially vanilla ice cream. I've actually considered starting a side business. I wanted to start an ice cream bar, Jacobs vanilla ice cream pallets. So I've looked at a small location in the center of the town that I live in. And it has all the facilities needed to create the ice cream and sell it intuitively to me, that makes a lot of sense. I love vanilla ice cream. I know a lot of people that love vanilla ice cream. So I'm thinking, hey, why not give it a go? I really believe in this idea and it will allow for me to eat as much ice cream as I want it. In reality though this is risky, do I really want to start a business just based on my own assumptions? Well, I don't think I should. One thing is I've never seen that cafe that only sells vanilla ice cream. Maybe that's not a sound business model. Well, I don't really know. I have not tested it. No. I need to do a lot more research to figure out if my assumptions are correct and what steps I need to take to modify my idea to make it work in the real-world. I don't necessarily just start the business for doing this. I can do some steps. Eventually. I might need to make a prototype and test it for real. But there are a lot of parameters that you can tweak to make this work. Or maybe we need to discard the whole thing before we even start because there is just no business case. I encourage you to look through this course and then you can use it as reference material when you start your own project or your own business idea. 3. A Note on Value: A short note on value. What is really value? It can of course be money. How much monetary value we put on a good or a service. It can also be something that is very important to me, something that I assign value to. But that is a little bit too specific for this course. I want it to be a little bit more general. There are many different versions of this. This is just one version that I like for this course. I'm defining valuable as something that is useful, desirable, and accessible to a group of people. Usefulness is something that does the job for me and it does it well accessible that I can use it without complication or exhaustion. And finally, desirable, the thing makes me feel good. Let's go back to my ice cream example and see if it can create value for anyone else. 4. Project Planning: The first thing that I do in any project is I just tried to make a rough estimate of a plan for my projects so that I know what activities do I think I need to do? How long do I think these activities will take? And if something happens, then I will adjust my plan. No worries. But it's always good to just have a rough estimate on how long things will take. The more projects I've done, the better I get at this. So just make an estimate. We will take it from there, project startup and planning. This is essentially what we're doing now, aside from figuring out the project plan, It's also where we start to look at our first hypothesis in my ice cream case, that might be, I want to create the best ice cream in my hometown and I want to sell it at a premium. My target group would be people living in my hometown that like sweet desserts. Again, this is what we're doing right now. And I estimate that this will take about one day of work in order to achieve this research. This is where we get into the good stuff. This is where we talk to and observe people in order to get a deep understanding of what is it that drives them? In my case, what leads up to someone getting an ice cream? We will of course, get deeper into this as the course go along. But for now, I just want to mention that this will not be about asking someone what is your favorite ice cream flavor or how much would you spend on a scoop of ice cream? Rather, it's about getting a deep understanding about why people do as they do when I say think when going to get ice cream, how did they feel afterwards? What are their motivations? What are their needs connected to this? That's the information that we can use in order to create insights that will help us create ideas in order to serve these people better in the process of getting ice cream. This is by far the most resource intensive and work intensive part of any project like this. I have found that about five to eight interviews, 30 to 60 min long, is about enough to get a good amount of data that you can then iterate on and create insights from to create value consistently in this type of project. The earlier we are, the less information we need in order to find new things. So we want to reach the point where we are actually not getting a lot of new information from every participant that we talked to. And if you do interviews, I'm fairly sure that you will come to that point where you're actually not getting that much more information without modifying your interview script. I estimate that this will take about three weeks. Five interviews isn't that much, but I don't want to rush this. I have a day job that I need to attend to. I'm doing this in my spare hours. And on top of that, we need to find participants that are willing to speak to us. That means that we need to be able to be flexible with our time. I'm not going to rush this step. I'm going to let, let it take the time that it needs to take analysis. This is where we take all the information that we've gathered from our interviews and we tried to make sense of it in a meaningful way. The core concept here is that we're not really interested in what any one participant has to say. Rather, what happens when we take the aggregate and we tried to see are there any patterns that will help us create insights into how we can create solutions for these people. In our decided upon context. These insights will then help us modify, strengthen, or disprove our hypothesis. For me, I think this is the most fun part of any project. I love this stage. We can really get into it and try to understand what are these people saying? What's happening here? What does that mean? How do they feel? I'm gonna do this continuously as we go along with the interviews. After the first interview, I'm going to start with this and then I'm going to keep up doing it maybe until three days after the last interview. That's what I'm going to put down in my plan here. Insights. This is where we create understandable, intelligible insights that we can communicate to other people in order to communicate what is it, what we have found in our project? And how can we create value for these people based on these insights? So this is a really important step where we just tried to formalize all our findings. I estimate about a day for this and it's going to run in parallel with the analysis. But about a day is what I expect this whole thing. Okay, last step that I'm not gonna go into very deeply in this project is creating a solution. What I would do in a normal project like this is I would take all the insights that are found. I would present them to a group of people that I think can add value to my projects. And I would create solutions and prototypes that I then can take back to the users and show them to verify if my solutions are correct. If you would like to see other things that we can do with the data and the insights that we've found. Please write to me and I will see if I can create other modules that we can build upon for your own project, you can use an existing project that you've been working on, or you can use mine and just follow along, capture as much data as you can and see if you come up with other solutions than I do. Who knows? Maybe your explorations will lead you to create the next ice cream. 5. An Iterative Process: We have a pretty clear plan and we have an idea of how long we think things will take before we start planning any user interactions. I just want to say a couple of words on the iterative nature of this process. One frustration that can and probably will arise while doing this type of project is that it will never be done. There's always something more you can do. You can always speak to more people. If you feel like there is no progress, are that you don't see that there's a structured process forward. You can always stop and you can re-plan. If you feel like you need more input, you need to understand more things about your users. You can always book one more interview and try to see if you can find something that you think you've been missing. It's okay if it's not perfect, the aim and the goal of this type of project is just understanding the users and then trying to use that information to create something of value. With that out of the way, let's go and plan our first interactions with users. 6. Interview Guide: Now we're getting into the fun stuff of actually talking to someone and listen to someone talk about the things that we think about all the time. But first, we need to make some preparations in order to make structured and well-organized interim. Typically, I want to start every interview with general information about the project and what we're doing. And then start asking very generalized questions about the participants. As the interview moves on, I moved towards more specific and personal topics. The general idea is that we want to ease the participant into being comfortable with us first and then we can start asking difficult or more personal questions so that the participant always feel safe and want to share with us. When I tried to create my interview guides, it helps me to pretend that I'm more like a journalist trying to find the big news rather than a marketing specialist trying to find statistically significant evidence for something. We're not trying to prove anything. What we're trying to do is understand the people that we're talking to so that we can create value consistently. It's gonna be okay if we don't ask the same questions every time. Therefore, It's okay to have questions that we think might be relevant, but we don't necessarily think that we're going to ask them every time. I'm going to start with general information. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself? What is your favorite part of a three-course meal? Do you have anything you don't eat? Do you have any allergies? All of these are very general questions that don't require a lot of personal information being disclosed. And this is where we get to know each other in the interview. We want these first questions to be very easy to answer and not require too much thought put into them. It's just a way of getting a rapport, of getting the participant comfortable with the interview situation. And also, to be honest us as interviewers, it's always good to just ease into the whole thing and this is a good way to start. Then I move on to the top right square, and I'm going to name this square ice cream general. As an example question. I'm gonna put down, When did you eat ice cream last time. Do you remember what flavors you ate? How was the weather that day? Were you with? What did you think about the ice cream? But this has triggers made to make the participant think about the topic that I want to discuss. It will also maybe give us a little bit of information that can help us guide us and keep us informed about the general ends that makes people eat ice cream. Lastly, we're just going to talk a little bit about formalities. It's always good to have a small presentation prepared about yourself and your project so that the participant has all the information that they need before they start the interview. It's also were very important that you get to know your local data privacy laws so that you know what you need to do to comply with your local law. You can, of course, find my interview guide and the files and feel free to use it, modify it as you warm if you're following along with my project, try to see if you can modify it to see if you can find any angles that I've missed. If you're doing your own project, obviously it's going to be different. Tried to get a friend or someone to help you just look through your questions. The important thing is to move from very generalized, easy questions to answer and then go into the more personal insensitive questions later when you've built a rapport with your subject. 7. Recruiting Participants: Now we need to find someone to talk to. My preference is starting small and safe. Therefore, I just went to my kids kindergarten and I put up this note. Would you like to speak to me about ice cream over a scoop of ice cream? The torque would take 30 min. Send me a text if you would like for me to set this up. We can talk for an initial exploration like this. I think it's fine to have five interviews if you can get people to speak to you for an hour, that's great. If you can only speak to them for 20 than try to make those 20 min count. The general rule of thumb is it's better to speak to people they're not. And remember, it doesn't need to be perfect every time we're not trying to get statistical evidence, we're just trying to understand our users. I like talking to strangers because strangers are less prone to be influenced by me talking about my ice cream dreams for years and years and years. That being said, if you for this project and can only find friends or family to speak too, that's also good. It's always better to speak to some people than no people, but try to be aware that you might influence them when you do your analysis so that you take that into account and you sort of try to make adjustments accordingly if you want to follow along with the course, I strongly suggest that you try and find one or two people that you try this out on. You interview them and you bring that data into the project and try to analyze that. Fantastic if you do five or eight, but try to find some just so you'd get a feeling of how it is to do the interview process. 8. Doing the Interview: Now we have an interview guide would relevant questions, and we have a couple of people that we want to talk to. That's great, but it can still feel a bit overwhelming and maybe even a little bit scary to talk to people like this. That's okay. If you feel nervous, Don't be afraid to tell the people that you're interviewing, that that's okay. Most people will understand also, when you get into it and you start talking to people, you will get to know more things about the project and how that's going to affect you. And that's going to make you feel so much more interested in the results, then you are scared of talking to the people. Here are some things that I like to think about before I start any interview. It's okay if it doesn't go well, we're not interested in any one particular interview. What we want is the aggregate of all the introduced together and the analysis that we can make on that data. It's okay if it doesn't go well, the second thing is silence. It can be good. Don't be afraid to let silence draw out a little bit that will give the participants motivation to elaborate on their thoughts. Don't worry too much about the note-taking. It's okay to stop the interview for a little bit. Just take notes of what you heard. You can even read back to them and ask them if what you thought you heard was what they were trying to convey to you. Now, it's time to go out and do our interviews. And the only advice that I can give you now is to try and have some fun. I would love for you to go out and do at least one interview. Share with us how that went. Did you speak to a family member or did you go out on the town? How did it feel for you? Was it scary? Did it feel fun? Would you do anything differently now that you've done one interview? Did you do several interviews? How did that feel and how can you compare the first interview to the last? I'm really curious to see what your results are. 9. Post-Interview Processing: After each interview, it's good practice to take care of your notes and your data. We do this by transferring it to a medium that is suitable for doing analysis later, I usually like to use a digital whiteboard. A regular whiteboard is perfect, and the process for doing this, it's very, very simple. What you do is you take a post-it note, you put exactly one thing from the interview and you put it on a sticky note and you put that on the whiteboard, then you repeat that process for the entire interview until you have all the data from your interview on the whiteboard. Then you take a differently colored post-it note and you do the same process for interview number two. For all your interviews, the reason for taking a post-it note this color for each interview is that that makes it so that you can distinguish between the interviews without actually having personal data on the sticky notes, we're starting to see things that we didn't see in the start. And we might think of things that we didn't think of when we created our interview guides. Perfect, that means we're learning stuff and we're figuring things out. That also means that for the next couple of interviews you're lasts ones. Perhaps. You might want to modify something in your interview guide. That's okay. Don't modify the whole thing. We still want some consistency between the different interviews in the same group of interviews, but it's okay to add things and remove things that you'd know don't work. Just try to make sure that you're capturing the essence of what it is that drives the people that you're talking to and how that helps you create value for them in the long run. 10. Analysis: Now that we've made two or three interviews and we've transferred the data to our post-its, It's time for us to structure and make sense of the data. The process here is fairly simple. We take a post-it note and we turned to find another post-it note that contains information that is similar or connected to this in some way. Then we take those notes and we put them together, and then we repeat the process until we have no single Post-it Notes left. And we have these clusters that contain two or more post-it notes that in some way connect. Then we tried to find titles for these clusters. When you feel like you can't, don't make any more connections than we are as far as we can get in this clustering session. Sometimes we find the Post-It Note that we want to put into two or more categories. When that happens, one of two things is usually true. Either the post-it note needs to be broken down because it contains several things. We take the post-it note and we tried to make several post-it notes out of it. And when then we can put those into the correct categories or we have categories that aren't well-defined, that lacks clarity. In that case, we see if we can break the category down into several categories, or if we can put categories together that makes more sense, just elaborate with this, tried to figure out what's happening. This might take some time when you've done your fourth interview, you might find something that makes you want to change the cluster and modify it in different ways. That's totally fine. Work on it until you're satisfied. Make new titles, move post-its around. And then we're going to have an analysis that we're happy with and that we can create insights from. 11. Insights: Okay, so now we have our cluster interviews and we're starting to get a feel for what's happening and what is driving our participants in the context that we're exploring. Now it's time to try and put our clustered insights that are preliminary findings into more formalized versions that we call insights. There are many formats that you can use. I tend to use one that I'm going to show you now, the important thing here is to not be afraid to modify the format. If that is, what is going to help you create clear finding that you can communicate to your stakeholders or whomever you need to communicate your results to. You can experiment. I'm going to show you one format that I tend to like. Usually I stick to the following format. What is happening? To whom is it happening? The desired outcome or need to be fulfilled? And lastly, what's stopping the outcome from happening? In this case, parents won't let their children go into town with their friends to get ice cream because they feel like the roads aren't safe. I also like to add a quote or an image that helps me communicate the story behind the insights. Sometimes this is enough. I usually like to elaborate a little bit more. Anything that I can add that adds clarity to the inside, makes it easier for someone to understand even if I'm not there, I think is good. Therefore, I tend to add a small description and try to elaborate on how that affects my target group. In my case, I've added a couple of bullet points just to clarify some things that I think is important connected to this insights. You might notice already here that we've found something new. We thought we were going to talk only to adults and that might be our target demographic. But these people that we've spoken to have pointed us towards their children, the difficulties that these children have getting to the center of the town, whether it's already a competitor that is serving ice cream, but the kids can get there because it's not safe because of the traffic. That might be something that we want to explore in our ideation phase later. So what are the values of these formulas insights? Well, depending on where you are in your process, they might be used for a number of things. One thing can be just to make sure that you know what it is you need to do in order to create value for your users. The other thing, they are excellent for conveying to stakeholders how you need to allocate resources to move your project forward. And the third thing that I usually use these insights to is just to align everyone in an ideation session around the different problems that we were trying to solve so that everyone is on the same page and we're trying to solve the same problem. Now that we've done our interviews, we've analyzed what's been said, and we've created new insights from this. It's time for us just go back to the beginning and see where we started. We started with a hypothesis, I can make the best artist and vanilla ice cream in my town and people will buy it at a premium. My target audience is people who eat ice cream in my town. But after looking at my insights and brainstorming, we disprove this hypothesis. There is already ice cream in town. And people don't seem to be as overly enthusiastic about only eating vanilla ice cream as I am. But after looking through my insights and brainstorming about my hypothesis, I have come up with a new one. I can make the best vanilla ice cream in my town, and I will sell it together with one additional great flavor that changes every week. My target audience are people that are looking for tasty cold snacks and are not in the town center. 12. Now we Iterate: Now I've tested my hypotheses and I've changed it and I feel a little bit more confident that I'm on the right track. I think what I wanna do now is I want to create a prototype. I want to start making some ice cream, vanilla ice cream, because that seems to work well for people. And then the additional flavor that I want to test. And I'm going to invite my friends over to try these different flavor combinations and evaluate from there. They also have a really cool idea with an electric moped that I have attached a cooler too. And I'm going to try that out. Maybe make some sketches and see if that's something that people would like. I'm going to call it Jacobs ambulating one-and-a-half flavor ice cream bar or something like that. Maybe I need to work on my naming scheme a little bit, but I think I have a concept here that I can try out and iterate on. And then I can do the same process again. And I'm going to get closer to final products that I think will bring value to my target audience. I've come a long way from my starting position and I've found that my initial hypothesis didn't hold up, but that doesn't matter because we did the work and we found new insights that we can base the next iteration of our concept on. 13. Finishing Thoughts: Thank you for taking the time to go through this course with me. This course has been based on design thinking and service design. Two topics that are very close to my heart. I've tried to include as little theory as possible while still making it consistent and logical. Just to make a hands-on course for you to follow along with. If you are in the process of creating a new project or a new business, and you want to be able to make sure that you're creating value for your users. If this course has been valuable to you, please comment below, if there's anything else you would like for me to go through, I'd be happy to do that. Create more courses, perhaps. Have a great day, and I hope to see you soon again. Thank you.