Design: Service Design

If you were moving to New York City, what would get you excited? You might say the nightlife or the food. But for the geek in me, it was getting Verizon FiOS (Fiber Optic Service). I mean, who wouldn’t want blazing fast Internet speeds? My new condo is FiOS-ready, so I thought it would be easy. I called Verizon weeks before the move, so I would have Internet access on Day 1. But there was a snag: after about two hours on the phone, trying to figure out why we kept getting an error, the sales representative said that she would have to call me back. I never got her call.

Since I had gotten nowhere trying to order FiOS by phone, I next tried ordering FiOS online. Then, two days before my move, I again tried calling Verizon. That sales representative also hit an error and couldn’t help me. I called again on my moving day and asked to speak to a manager. While I waited for a response, I tried using my iPad to see whether I could complete the task online. It turns out that Verizon had run out of phone numbers in the 212 area code. No error messages alerted them to that fact or offered any alternative way of proceeding. Okay, so who cares about an area code? (It turns out, I do—and by yelling and screaming, I ended up getting one—but that’s beside the point.) Read More

I watched the water come into our finished basement during Hurricane Irene. I don’t believe it—not again, I thought, as my husband and I quickly prioritized which of our remaining belongings from the last flood, only 17 months earlier, we wanted to salvage as the water rushed in. Thirty minutes later, the water stopped rising at four feet—a foot higher than the last time. My husband cautiously turned off the circuit breakers and determined whether the water had reached the gas line. I was seven months pregnant, so could help only by asking our less-affected neighbors for some assistance. The following weeks were all too familiar: filing a claim with our insurance, calling remediation experts to dry out the basement, calling plumbers for quotes to replace the hot water heater and boiler, calling electricians to replace outlets—the list went on and on. Throughout this entire experience, all we wanted was to get our house and lives back to normal. Read More

I began my career over twelve years ago in marketing, defining the user experiences for healthcare Web sites at an interactive agency. At first, I loved the dynamic environment and start-up feel of an agency. It felt great that a large audience would interact with the sites that I helped design. Over time, however, I realized that I wasn’t doing good UX design. Rather, I was doing whatever the agency Account Manager or client Brand Manager wanted, which didn’t always jibe with what customers needed. The Account Manager or Brand Manager wanted site registrations and glossy, auto-play video tours, while customers needed educational content and information about financial assistance. I had lost the integrity that had driven me to choose user experience as a career in the first place. I wanted to design great user experiences for people based on their behaviors, needs, and preferences—not the whims of the agency or client. So, after five years, I decided to leave the agency to work on internal applications at an IT (Information Technology) consulting firm. Read More