Tools and Temples

Service design- seemed like an extremely confusing term when we first heard it. As students who are expecting to be doing graphics and product designs, it was not something we could relate to.

After a week of classes and discussions with class the term may have become a bit clearer, but its still a mystery to an extent.

We as a group have to design services for a temple. To design services for a temple is not an easy task, considering it is a religious place and is governed more by the people who visit them. Rather than being a structural experience, it is majorly an emotional and spiritual experience. So, in these past few weeks we have tried to figure out certain services we can render to temples. We are still however struggling with whether to work with temples as a concept or a specific temple.

In this whole journey we have used the 'service tools' to guide us. From the very beginning since we started visiting temples to see the problems posed to the service-takers, all the way to the point when we started thinking of the solutions that we could provide.

These are a list of the Tools we used so far,

*Role playing- which was a tool through which we took up the roles of different identities. the roles taken up were of the elderly, the tourists, the devotees, the youngsters and the priest. This helped us a lot to come up with new ideas. It helped us understand the different point of views of the different people.

*Stakeholder Map- this is a Flowchart of all the people involved in a temple, starting right from the government(as temples are government funded) upto the devotees.

*Cognitive Walkthrough- It is alot like the customer journey map only its done after the service is designed, to check if its a viable option.

*Interaction Table- This includes all the interaction that took place in the group while we discussed the services.

*Personas- We take on the identity of the user and think in his/her way.

*Rough Prototyping- Making iterations and prototypes of all the ideas we come up with.

*Mind Maps- We used mind maps to map out all our discussions and all our random ideas, some of which were very useful to us.

*Group Sketching- we used this tool to draw out all our ideas and solutions to all the problems we faced.

After six weeks of working, and discussion with our Facilitator, Deepta, we decided to "Build a Harley Davidson". All this while we were only looking at the physical experience in a temple and looking for problems to solve but this week we finally came to a decision that we are going to rebuild a temple completely. Our aim now, is for the visitors of a temple to have a completely different experience.

Thinking about your customer...

The above illistrations are the posters we made as a part of the weekly work we put in our Service Design class.

An efficient bus service is essentially about timely service, with comfort and at the hands of responsible staff members.

In order to make a people-oriented and user-friendly service, it is important to consider what the consumer expects out of the service.

1. The consumer must have the desire to use the service.

2. The service must make itself be chosen by him, over other services.

3. The consumer should not remember the service for a bad experience he had to   face.

4.He must feel like using it again.

The first physical interaction of the service with the passenger takes place at the bus stop.

Hence, the bus stop is an integral part of rendering the service, to give the passenger a positive experience.

Components that make a bus stop not only a touchpoint, but also an "information desk":

1. Proper information about

i. the bus routes

ii. timings of the bus

iii. destination of the bus

iv. time due for arrival to the bus stop

v. Bus number of the approaching bus.

vi. A ticket vending or a coupon punching machine.

vii. Ample space to sit.

Speaking of a smooth bus journey experience, it is important to ensure three things:

1. Crowd flow

2. Fare flow

A general observation in Bus travel in a city like Bangalore is:  The movement of the conductor is resisted due to a large crowd which makes it inconvenient for both him and the passengers to sell and buy tickets respectively.

Hence, we thought about making the ticketing system efficient by installing a coupon punching machine at the bus stop.

Coupons and passes basically replace actual money, hence avoiding any cheating   on part of the staff or conductor.

This is an extremely effective way, according to us, that would avoid bad experiences for the passenger and avoid incidents of misusing of the customers money.

Things that we are working on:

A case study of the transportation system of Curitiba, Brazil.

Tools we have used:

Constructive interaction

Customer journey map

issue cards

mind maps

context panorama

offering map

The Bridging Tool:

A member of our group, Rohit Dasgupta, came up with a new tool called the BRIDGING TOOL.

This tool basically considers two ends of the service- Ideal and existing.

looking at these 2 ends of the service, we formulate a practical service. That takes the best possible from both services.