The service design for Internet product
Nowadays, the rapid development of Internet products has changed to a great extend, the practitioners who are exploiting in Internet product field possesses high teach, to dig more deeper in all aspects of the products, further more, These all kinds of abilities could make sure the product’ quality, to be obsessive. However, sometimes majority of customers do not buy it. From service design prospective might be able to approach the answer.
Four factors generally considers during product design: user, scenarios, processes, the products itself. Design thinking in the service design the product could be tangible or intangible; also each joints of interaction by user belong to the product. In addition, the user features, their needs, situations change, are essential to be considered. Service design is not only consider about the product itself, but also concern about the touch-point (all the contacts and user interaction occurs). The scope of user experience has been extended from “product” to the “ product centric entire service process”.
For example, a user would like to book a ticket online. The reservation page, payment page, order page, each kind of this page as a single interface, the product usability concerns about these, user experience focus on customer booking online this part, but the service design is designed to take all account of user generated products and all the contacts on the relationship between the two dimensions: the quality of each single booking interface and the process booking online.
Today, Internet becomes a vehicle to deliver service, to directly contact with the user. The trend of “product is service” is more obvious. The biggest difference between traditional services is the way we deliver to our customer. In past, traditional service depends on service professionals to conduct reference, service products guide, and product support. Nonetheless, Internet products rely on its single page to conduct info to their user. Thus, even if the product itself are very good, if we not insert in service design thinking, resulting in lack of factors to be considered, the user still will not achieve a good experience feelings, also the sense of branding would be hard to be set up.
User situate in the entire service process, from the service design point of view, we also need to consider about how deliver the ticket; how to remind the user to travel; how to notice user to be awareness of their trip, and these types of question will lead to more consideration. As a service designer, we are not only concentrate about the experience of Internet product itself; we also burden more responsibility to promote more touch-point for service, to optimize the overall user experience. Such as: using SMS to notify the user’s order information, inform the user destination weather in advanced, etc. both of them could ultimately enhance the user satisfaction.
When the service design happens, around the product I would like to divide into two directions to think, the transverse and the longitudinal. The transverse separate into three steps: pre-service; service; and post-service. For the longitudinal, I would like to think about the back-end, which support the service operating. Back stage is providing with the support. For example, the restaurant, the waiter is in contact with the front–end user, the client can not see what happens in the kitchen, can not see the chef is the back-end.
To distinguish the concept between the front-end and back-end, for the front-end design, more attention on improving customer satisfaction, we need to understand user behavior and usage scenarios, constantly digging use needs; and the back-end design work from the business perspective consideration, the object aim in improving business productivity, increasing revenue, we need to consider the processes, employees, industry, competition, etc. aspects.
