Integrating Bricks with Clicks: Retailer-Level and Channel-Level Outcomes of Online–Offline Channel Integration

This paper considers different ways of approaching service design, exploring what professional designers who say they design services are doing. First it reviews literature in the design and management fields, including marketing and operations. The paper proposes a framework that clarifies key tensions shaping the understanding of service design. It then presents an ethnographic study of three firms of professional service designers and details their work in three case studies. The paper reports four findings. The designers approached services as entities that are both social and material. The designers in the study saw service as relational and temporal and thought of value as created in practice. They approached designing a service through a constructivist enquiry in which they sought to understand the experiences of stakeholders and they tried to involve managers in this activity. The paper proposes describing designing for service as a particular kind of service design. Designing for service is seen as an exploratory process that aims to create new kinds of value relation between diverse actors within a socio-material configuration. This has implications for existing ways of understanding design and for research, practice and teaching.

Designing for Service as One Way of Designing Services

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01133837/document

Two decades of research on innovation in services: Which place for public services?

The impact of channel integration on consumer responses in omni-channel retailing: The mediating effect of consumer empowerment

Economics has accumulated a great body of knowledge about value. Building on economics and other disciplines, service science is an emerging transdiscipline. It is the study of value-cocreation phenomena (Spohrer & Maglio , 2010). Value cocreation occurs in the real-world ecology of diverse types of service system entities (e.g., people, families, universities, businesses, and nations). These entities use symbols to reason about the value of knowledge. Like mathematics (quantity relationship proofs) and computer science (efficient representations and algorithms), service science must ultimately embody a set of proven techniques for processing symbols, allowing us to model the world better and to take better actions. In addition, the emergence of service science promises to accelerate the creation of T-shaped Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) professionals who are highly adaptive innovators that combine deep problem solving skills in one area with broad communication skills across many areas. This paper casts service science as a transdiscipline based on symbolic processes that adaptively compute the value of interactions among systems.

Toward a Science of Service Systems

Service management and design has largely focused on the interactions between employees and customers. This perspective holds that the quality of the “service experience” is primarily determined during this final “service encounter” that takes place in the “front stage.” This emphasis discounts the contribution of the activities in the “back stage” of the service value chain where materials or information needed by the front stage are processed. However, the vast increase in web-driven consumer self-service applications and other automated services requires new thinking about service design and service quality. It is essential to consider the entire network of services that comprise the back and front stages as complementary parts of a “service system.” We need new concepts and methods in service design that recognize how back stage information and processes can improve the front stage experience. This paper envisions a methodology for designing service systems that synthesizes (front-stage-oriented) user-centered design techniques with (back stage) methods for designing information-intensive applications.

/pdf/designing-service-systems-by-bridging-the-front-stage-and-52wgk79t1y.pdf

Designing service systems by bridging the “front stage” and “back stage”

Service management and design has thus far primarily focused on the interactions between employees and customers. This perspective holds that the quality of the "service experience" is determined by the customer during this final "service encounter" that takes place in the "front stage." This emphasis discounts the contribution of the activities in the "back stage" of the service value chain where materials or information needed by the front stage are processed. However, the vast increase in web-driven consumer self-service applications and other automated services requires new thinking about service design and service quality. It is essential to consider the entire network of services that comprise the back and front stages as complementary parts of a "service system." We need new concepts and methods in service design that recognize how back stage information and processes can improve the front stage experience. This paper envisions a methodology for designing service systems that synthesizes (front-stage-oriented) user-centered design techniques with (back-stage) methods for designing information-intensive applications.

/pdf/bridging-the-front-stage-and-back-stage-in-service-system-1xcs5oq2qo.pdf

Bridging the Front Stage and Back Stage in Service System Design

Service management and design has thus far primarily focused on the interactions between employees and customers. This perspective holds that the quality of the “service experience” is determined by the customer during this final “service encounter” that takes place in the “front stage.” This emphasis discounts the contribution of the activities in the “back stage” of the service value chain where materials or information needed by the front stage are processed. However, the vast increase in web-driven consumer self-service applications and other automated services requires new thinking about service design and service quality. It is essential to consider the entire network of services that comprise the back and front stages as complementary parts of a “service system.” We need new concepts and methods in service design that recognize how back stage information and processes can improve the front stage experience. This paper envisions a methodology for designing service systems that synthesizes (front-stage-oriented) user-centered design techniques with (back-stage) methods for designing information-intensive applications.

Bridging the “Front Stage” and “Back Stage” in Service System Design

Designing to stimulate health and fitness in children proposes particular challenges because children lack direct control over their environment. Additionally, children respond more to activities emphasizing recreation over education. This paper details the design and development process for children, highlighting design choices with research from industry, parents and children. The end product is a responsive and persuasive audio player that controls and varies music tempo based on measured activity level. This device makes use of music's natural ability to fuel activity, and it gives children a way to directly control some portion of their environment. Additionally, it delivers increased exercise under the disguise of fun and recreation. This paper contributes to the HCI design process for children by showing how to develop persuasive technologies to implicitly succeed a specific goal without explicitly addressing an existing problem.

Lindsay Tabas

Papers

Designing service systems by bridging the “front stage” and “back stage”

Bridging the Front Stage and Back Stage in Service System Design

Bridging the “Front Stage” and “Back Stage” in Service System Design

A responsive and persuasive audio device to stimulate exercise and fitness in children