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- Designing Mobile Service experiences, an exploratory studyPublication . Sarmento, Teresa; Patrício, Lia; Bártolo, JoséThis paper presents the results of an exploratory study on the relevance of experiential factors when using services. The multidisciplinary approach is stressed seeing that is an important contribution in terms of service design interfaces. The project aimed at identifying elements for designing service experiences and for contributing to an improved service design and testing process. The paper presents a study carried out on a group of participants in a creative training course on innovation. This study challenged participants to create a tool for modelling a new mobile loyalty service. Its main objective was the development and increase of this kind of experience tests instrument based on the interaction of several techniques.
- Incorporating the customer experience along different iterative cycles of service designPublication . Sarmento, Teresa; Patrício, LiaThe creative transition from understanding the customer experience to defining the service solution, from current situation to preferred future, is central to Service Design. However, the incorporation of customer experience factors can change along the different iterative cycles of service design. To address this challenge, this paper presents the results of a study of how the path of customer experience was followed, studied and incorporated along a mobile service development. Three iterative Service Design cycles enabled a holistic vision of the service and raised ‘customer experience’ awareness on the development team. Following a design research approach, experience factors were actively taken into account and incorporated along ideation and implementations cycles involving a total of 61 interviews. The research work contributes to Service Design by providing a global vision of the experiential changes, especially in mobile and technology based services. It describes the reframed situations working with experiences at each cycle of design, and making use of service design tools and methods at each moment.
- Mobile Service Experience - a quantitative studyPublication . Sarmento, Teresa; Patrício, LiaIncorporating Mobile service experiences into service design bring new challenges to service innovation and entails a consciousness of service specific characteristics in the mobile context. This is more relevant if we have in mind that these are customer – journeys with self-service situations. This paper presents the results of a quantitative study of mobile service experience. This quantitative study was based on a survey with users of a new mobile service for managing loyalty programs. Study results allow the identification of service experience dimensions. Based on this process a new measurement model is proposed for the customer experience factors and includes them into the design of new services. These results are important to understand the impact of some Mobile Experience factors on experience outcomes such as emotions, sensorial descriptors, attitudes, and social self-concept. Previous literature has conceptualized customer experience but empirical studies are still scarce. Helkkula (2011) charactherizes the service experience’s concept demonstrating the existence of empirical studies only as a outcome based. However, in order to better understand this concept, Verhoef et al. (2009) have developed a conceptual model that reveals the holistic influence of antecedents and moderators in the customer experience. Thus, in spite of its interest, complexity and distinctiveness the service experience and its research applied to mobile services, has not been made in-depth so far. Therefore, it is important to study Mobile service identifying its main dimensions so they can be incorporated into New Service Design. This study develops a scale to measure Mobile Service Experience (MSE). Starting from exploratory and qualitative study, a questionnaire was developed and administered to 241 customers around the world. Data analysis allowed the identification of six MSE dimensions: ‘Awareness’ is the extent to which the service is promoted to be known by the general public. ‘Availability’ is the extent to which the service is available and accessible. ‘Usefulness’ is the degree of service’s convenience through an overall experience perspective. ‘Ease of use’ is how the service is ‘ease to learn’ and how ‘appealing’ it is. ‘Security’ is the extent to which the service cares with ‘privacy of data’ and ‘trust’. ‘Service in store’ is the way service takes place in the store environment. This paper contributes as an empirical study of MSE showing that encompasses a broader set of experience factors. MSE dimensions influence the conception of mobile services; their consciousness will be a good contribution to New Service Development.
- Mobile Service Experience Prototyping: A Holistic View of the Service ExperiencePublication . Sarmento, Teresa; Patrício, LiaPrototyping is a well-established practice in New Product Development. The increasing importance of New Service Development [NSD] and customer experiences has created a significant interest in Service Experience prototyping [SXP]. However, further research is still needed to better define SXP and how it differs from traditional views. This paper presents the results of an empirical study comparing traditional interface prototyping and SXP. Study results reveal significant differences in the inputs gathered from the two prototyping processes. Mobile Service Experiences bring new challenges to NSD and require an awareness of all the mobility aspects, especially for customer-journeys within self-service situations. Designers cannot control the entire experience as they cannot control all the service process. Some authors propose to take social interaction as a starting point and explore co-experience with prototypes. Though experience prototyping is a rather new method with relevant potential its application to services has not been fully explored. There is also authors who advocate that companies can promote trial experiences, involving simulated activity in a simulated setting, thus enabling customers to assess value-in-service. SXP is a form for testing that enables developers and customers to gain first-hand appreciation of a future service. It differs from the conventional prototyping tools, as service experiences should be seen through a holistic outlook, considering the different service encounters in space and time. This paper presents the results of an empirical where two prototyping processes were implemented and compared - Service Experience Prototype and Interface Experience Prototype. This exploratory study was made with five groups of students from NPD/NSD courses. The experiment consisted on prototyping and testing, the same mobile service with the same set of tasks. Participants worked in groups over two related storyboards, where the same tasks of the mobile service were sketched with the different focus. Participants had to decode service tasks into service experience factors, and over the storyboards create a movie script. Subsequently participants were invited to develop the screenplay and perform it. One group evaluated the service experience focusing on the service interface and the other tested the service experience from a more holistic perspective, involving the service process, people and serviscape, and the different service encounters. Study results indicate that no prototype is best to evaluate all service experience components. The qualitative results revealed that SXP participants were able to create an overall representation of the service experience, highlighting service design issues that could not be so easily discovered by the UXP groups, such as people and social context within which the mobile service is used. On other hand participants of the UXP group could test and evaluate in more depth the tangible dimensions of the service interface. The quantitative results corroborated the qualitative results, as the different experimental situations also provided different inputs to the process. Whereas UXP groups we better able to evaluate and indentify improvements regarding ease of use and learn-ability, ‘SXP groups were felt more able to evaluate and identify improvements regarding the overall service offering, involving physical and social context aspects of the service experience. These results show that the SXP does not substitute, but rather complements UXP, as it considers different goals. The resulting feedback helps to determine advantages and disadvantages of each method on assessing a more holistic approach to SXP and helps designers and service developers to enhance superior service experiences. Prototyping the mobile service experience requires testing the service mobile interface, but it should consider all the elements of the service offering in a continuous contextual change. This research provides a new perspective on SXP, highlighting its contributions to the NSD process, in particular to the increasingly pervasive mobile services where customer experience, is a crucial differentiator.
- Mobile Service Experiences – qualitative study with a broader perspectivePublication . Sarmento, Teresa; Patrício, LiaThe increasing usage of mobile technologies for service provision has created the need to understand customer mobile service experiences and to integrate designer’s and technology’s perspectives for the design of successful mobile services. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study with 44 mobile service customers, providing an in-depth understanding of the experience factors that contribute to design improved mobile services. The study results indicate that traditional interface factors, such as usefulness and ease of use, continue to be important. However, the study reveals that contextual factors, such as the social environment and service atmosphere, are very important for the mobile service experience. These results reinforce the need to adopt a broader view of the experience factors for the effective design of mobile services.
- Mobile Users and Service Experience DevelopersPublication . Sarmento, Teresa; Patrício, LiaCustomer Experiences have become increasingly important as well as challenging to differentiate and add value to products and services. Experiences play a particularly important role in the emerging field of service development and design, as value is cocreated by customers through their interactions with service providers resulting in a unique contextual outcome (Stuart and Tax 2004; Mager 2009). Services are relational and require shared knowledge and background between a company and its costumers (Verhoef, Lemon et al. 2009). Therefore it is considered more difficult to create valuable service experiences when the company is not present (Sandstrom, Magnusson et al. 2009; Verhoef, Lemon et al. 2009), and some authors advocate further research to create memorable service experiences through the design of new interactive applications, its interfaces and its specific mobility (R.S. Subramanya 2007). This research contributes to a better understanding of user’ experience requirements in mobile services and to improve its incorporation into New Service Development. This article reports the results of two qualitative studies that explored experiential factors in mobile services covering regular users of mobile services and designers/developers’perspectives. The first study involved in-depth interviews and focus groups with 25 users of mobile phone services, focusing on the experiential factors of a mobile loyalty service and analyzing existing services. The second study involved a sample of 82 individuals (mainly designers - 52, 6%), during a creative training course on innovation. Mental modelling supported the design of an imaginary mobile service interface through a codiscovery method. Following qualitative methods (Charmaz 2006), both studies were transcribed and analyzed to identify categories of service experience requirements. The analysis accomplishes a comparative assessment of the experiential factors identified by regular users as well as endorsed the identification of requirements influencing mobile service experiences from the designers’ perspective describing it with their own language code. The results of the study with mobile service users allowed for an in-depth understanding of the user experience, which are not strictly related to the design of the interaction device. According to study results, one of the most important factors influencing the mobile service experience is the interaction with service merchants, and the service environment in which the mobile service is used. This subject is relevant when people prefer some mobile systems due to factors such as emotional experiences that might play an important role in addition to functional aspects(Thüring 2007). Other factors such as ease use and its trade-off relationship with privacy, ease of learning, data usage, visualization, were also deemed important. The designers’ group also pointed out some of the experience factors already identified by users, such as ease of use and efficiency, but they paid much more attention to the functional and technological aspects surrounding mobile phones in comparison to the service characteristics. This fact may be a result of their professional backgrounds. This two-way analysis places two unlike approaches and as a result similarities and differences can be identified on how the service processes, and the way interface is used. Although the usability and performance factors are mentioned by both groups, designers do not address the contextual elements that have a strong influence in the overall customer experience, such as the service environment, the service process. This perspective has eased the understanding of the differences and priorities of experience in a mobile loyalty service according to developers and regular user’s perception. Furthermore it has helped to identify the service design elements that affect users and developers’ experiences, such as the interface and the service context of use, and to find their specific responsiveness to the interaction process. This points out to the need of a more collaborative approach from both stances. We believe that this work can contribute to increase this collaboration and therefore add value to service innovation. The New Service Development demands a good understanding of the user’s service experiences, as well as developers that must be aware of this complete service scope.