out of oblo - July 2024
Shadowing sessions, coaching programs and summer readings... while getting ready for the upcoming vacation
Are you still struggling in the urban heat? ☀️
Or already relaxing in a much fresher and nicer spot in nature? ⛰️
No matter how close or far we are, we’d like to take a moment to walk you through our last weeks, and share the best wishes for this summer.
July has been hot in temperature and in projects: lots of activities, events, presentations, new things starting and others running towards deadlines. We feel we are coming out of a marathon, and it’s not because of the Olympics 🏃🏽🏃🏽🏃🏽.
A month of service safari and shadowing
One of our favourite techniques to understand service experiences is to try out things ourselves, either by pretending to be the customer, or just by accompanying some other users or employees along their interactions. In the past weeks, we have been simulating and observing the experience of buying a house with Abitare In: from finding the listing online, to experiencing the showroom and immersing in a full reconstruction of the house environment. From meeting the agent to identify and customise the ideal apartment, to visiting the construction site to shadow house deliveries to other customers.
All the observations and insights collected along the way have been summarised on a huge customer journey map. The goal of the analysis was to identify areas of interventions and ideas to better orchestrate the experience across the variety of digital and physical touchpoints.
✏️ We typically organise our shadowing sessions by designing dedicated notebooks, as explained here.
A month of mentorship :)
In recent times, we have found ourselves more and more often organising and conducting mentorship programs, with either brand new customers or organisations we have been working with for a while.
What do we mean by mentorship program? The main concept is to accompany a team or a few individuals while they work on a new project, or on restructuring existing service offers and processes. We first identify a set of appointments (on a weekly or biweekly basis). When we meet, the mentee updates us on their progress on the project, and we identify key content and service design methodologies that could be helpful, teach and apply them along the way. It’s a combination of customised training and highly-specialised practical support - made sustainable.
Over July we have completed a 4-appointment coaching program with Make In Progress (to help them reboot their offer), kicked-off a 5-appointment coaching program with Regione Sardegna (targeting 10 local start-ups) and completed Q2 mentorship with Medici Senza Frontiere (digital marketing team).
Interested in something similar? Let’s discuss.
We have been testing our AI Kit with a few companies
As you may know already, we have developed a canvas and workshop activity to help companies identify opportunities related to the integration of AI in their service back-end or front-end. It’s a beta version that we are interested in testing and refining through practical application.
So far we had two main testers: ID&A (tele-control softwares for water systems) used the AI kit to verify the relevance of predictivity in their offer, and to brainstorm possible expansion to an existing project. Whereas Insights (corporate assessment and transformation) is approaching the AI kit more as a discovery tool, to explore how their service experience may evolve and change in the future.
What we are learning so far is that the AI opportunity landscape canvas is solid, and that the supporting cards (which describe specific AI applications) could be a very interesting reference for non-AI experts, to better understand what the technology could offer. We are also still looking for more testers, so if you are interested please get in touch!
We met amazing talents at Service Design Meets UX writing
July’s Service Design Meet has been dedicated to the topic of UX writing: how do we use text and content in shaping a service experience? We tried to give an answer by speaking with Alice Azzolini, Andrea Tangredi, Giorgio Trono, Elena Rebaudengo and Valentina Ziliani. The conversation highlighted the importance of involving content designers earlier on in the process - not at the end, when the UI of digital touchpoints is already in place and “you just need to add some copy”.
We have also learnt that synthetic personas could be used to test changes in content components: indigo.ai is already doing it to optimise their chat service, as part of a continuous product optimization. Overall, the meeting reminded us of the importance of written language in a digital experience, and the challenges related to building a relationship of transparency and trust with users - who often don’t want to read long texts, even when they are very relevant. When is the last time that you have read a privacy policy?
🗓️ Next appointment: Service Design Meets Summer
On 7 August at 6.00pm, we are meeting outside the studio to play ping pong
🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺
Finally… We shared tips for summer readings!
Every Friday we spend 1 or 2 hours together to exchange knowledge around a specific topic. We call that moment oblo-friday, and it could go from sharing learnings from a specific project to aligning on internal practices and operations. The last one was turned into a book-club, to collect and exchange suggestions for readings either related or not to the design sphere.
Here you can find some of them:
Ivan Illich, Energy, vitesse et justice sociale: in a moment in which we constantly speak about circular economy and green transition, a classic lecture to rediscover the beauty of a bicycle - as a way to enable, enjoy and democratise movement.
Asako Yukuzi, Butter: a story about food, feminism and emancipation in Japanese culture. You may end up craving for some ramen while reading, but also reflecting on men and women's roles in society, and the complexity of reaching gender equality.
Joanne Anton, Sexus Botanicus: did you know that plants can love each other and manifest their attractions and sexual behaviours in a variety of ways? Highly recommended to look at nature with different eyes, and expand your love expertise.
It’s all for this month, see you soon!
Anything you want to discuss with us? You can book a 30 min call or drop us a line.
Enjoy August,
Roberta and oblo team