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Abstract(s)
Prototyping 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.
Description
Keywords
Mobile Service Experience Prototyping