Product & service design

What is wrong with Business As Usual?

We often have unsatisfactory experiences when we use banks, buses, health services and insurance companies. Why are they not designed as well as the products we love to use such as an Apple iPod or a BMW? The 'developed' world has moved beyond the industrial mindset of products and the majority of 'products' that we encounter are actually parts of a larger service network.
These services comprise people, technology, places, time and objects that form the entire service experience. In most cases some of the touch-points are designed, but in many situations the service as a complete ecology just ‘happens’ and is not consciously designed at all, which is why they don't feel like iPods or BMWs.
Marketing and company strategy often provide the base specification for product and service design agencies. If not managed correctly, OTT specifications can negate agency expertise, especially if not involved at an early stage of strategic intent.
No Fault Found (NFF) returns impact on the financial, brand and carbon footprint. Poor service design can negate all the other product benefits.
Physical prototypes that work with the packaging are often greatly under-rated, and marketing spin is often used where intelligent product and service design would have been better.
Many production risk assessments lead to entrenched manufacturing practices, as these are deemed ‘safe’ for incremental change, but the opposite may be true in the long run.

Identify key material resource risk factors and/or energy price and security-of-supply risks. Decide the acceptable level of risk and develop a product design that works with your materials/energy strategy to help mitigate these risks
Use a People, Profit, Planet representation to capture product and service impacts, beyond purely financial, and use this to inform design factors.
Ensure product and service design is represented in the strategic planning stage.
Look beyond compliance for longer-term options; incremental design can prove more costly in the long run.
One of the goals of service design is to redress this imbalance of ‘accidental ecology’ and to design services that have the same appeal and experience as the products we love, whether it is buying insurance, setting up your internet access, or using a baby monitor.
Another important aspect of service design is its potential for design innovation and intervention in the big issues facing us, such as transport, sustainability, government, finance, communications and healthcare.
A coordinated portfolio of products provides a very powerful brand message, but this also requires coordinated user interface design, customer support (service design), how the product works with its packaging, and how it is designed for the end of its life.

This toolkit provides a ‘system model’ starting with the Design Wheel. By using it you can identify hotspots that are priorities for industrial and service options and understand the wider impacts of these proposed changes.
Ensure People, Profit, Planet performance KPIs are included in scorecards, to encourage continuous improvement.
Build awareness of the People, Profit, Planet assessment criteria via training, communications and use of tools that help evaluate these.
Decide on a product and service design roadmap. Consider more than one approach, eg: embedding the basics of DOT and the Circular Economy:
- enhancing existing products
- transformational concepts
- Present risks of BAU as a baseline against each case and the technology readiness levels (TRLs).
Reconsider current business models to see if a Circular Economy business model might add more value; this might include leasing or refurbishment models. What changes in the product and service design may be required to facilitate this?.

Look for improvements that are aligned across the People, Profit, Planet criteria and not purely driven by improved features and functionality.
Benchmark product and service design progress against preceding products, and consider scoring against your roadmap and the company’s materials strategy.
Have the design decisions made reduced exposure to materials and/or energy price and supply risks?
Has brand advocacy improved and is this translating into improved sales? How is this measured? Being a thought leader requires state-of-the-art marketing analysis for customer insight.
Evaluate People, Profit, Planet success factors at the product concept stage, to avoid costly re-engineering later, and track against successive product generations.

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