STBY » Geke

Mobility, Cars and Refueling Experiences

Geke — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 15:03:27 +0000

What do people care about in terms of mobility, and what do they want from a petrol station? STBY were recently contacted by a big international car brand who wanted us to help them gain a better idea of these topics to inform and inspire their service innovation process. Working with their internal innovation team, we designed a project that would help them better understand the lives and routines of a range of different people – with the ultimate aim of designing services that could support them better when they are out on the road.

As much of the research was taking place in Germany, we worked with our local partners in the Reach Network, Minds & Makers. Together we developed a methodology for the fieldwork, targeted around the kind of insights we needed. We involved a range of participants that covered a variety of social and geographical backgrounds, each of whom had different preferences and routines centred around mobility and re-fueling. A series of probes, semi-structured interviews, and location visits gave us the data we needed for an internal analysis workshop at our Amsterdam office.

The end result was a series of clustered insights that could be used to inform and inspire the client’s design teams. To make these insights as accessible as possible to these teams, we visualised them on a large-scale poster, in addition to presenting them in a more traditional report format. Presenting results in this way is something we’ve had a lot of success with in the past; after all, even the most resonant of insights will achieve little if the right people never get to see them.

In a full-day internal workshop with people from many different departments in the client organisation we presented the insight from the research, and participated in discussions around a series of new service concepts they are currently working on. The posters with observations, quotes and insights were there to refer to and to ensure that the consumer perspective did not get lost during the sometimes passionate strategic discussions.

Stakeholder Research in Food & Retail for Ahold In collaboration with LBi Lost Boys, STBY recently conducted a...
Say yes to the mess! For ‘The week of Service Design’ on Molblog, the online...
Say yes to the mess! For 'The week of Service Design' on Molblog, the online...

How to achieve and maintain a healthy lifestyle?

Geke — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:03:33 +0000

This was a question we addressed in one of our recent projects for a large international consumer brand. What do people consider to be a healthy lifestyle? Are they happy with their current ways of maintaining their lifestyles? What would they like to alter? Would they welcome any support with this?

Our client is in the process of developing a new innovative service proposition in this area. They wanted to obtain feedback from consumers on their early concepts, as well as get a fresh outside perspective that could help them to further develop the concepts and progress them towards implementation.

To expose the concept to many different people in a short period of time, we invited four groups of six reasonably healthy people to our studio to take part in a series of half-day Service Experience Labs. We prepared a set of engaging materials to introduce the concept to the participants, and to engage them in an interactive exploration and discussion.

In contrast to traditional focus groups, the participants in these Service Experience Labs do not just sit around a table and respond to general questions. Through a series of individual and group assignments they were prompted to reflect in detail and in a highly personal way on the consequences that the use of the concept would have on their daily lives. They also compiled a rich personal profile of their current (healthy) lifestyle, indicated the aspects they would like to change, and reflected on the potential use for them of getting support in achieving this.

Mobility, Cars and Refueling Experiences What do people care about in terms of mobility, and...

Stakeholder Research in Food & Retail for Ahold

Geke — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 14:56:55 +0000

In collaboration with LBi Lost Boys, STBY recently conducted a stakeholder research for Ahold, the international retailing group that owns large consumer brands such as Albert Heijn, Etos, Stop&Shop and Giant. As input for the development of a new digital communication strategy, Ahold wanted to gain a better understanding of the needs and concerns of their key external stakeholders.

Through a series of in-depth interviews with a mix of journalists, analysts, and NGOs in the US, UK and Netherlands we documented a large collection of recent and actual Customer Journeys. The recurring patterns in these stories, identified in the analysis, have been translated into a set of personas, each consisting of a rich profile description and a few typical aggregated customer journeys.

The conversations with the external stakeholders were complemented with interviews with key internal experts within Ahold. As professionals in Corporate Communication, Investor Relations and Corporate Social Responsibility they represent important ‘touch points’ for external stakeholders, either through face to face contact or phone and email. Their interaction can be one of the key aspects in the overall customer journey, just as the online platform can be. These individual touch points can all be ‘moments of truth’ that make or break the service experience.

The development of an online communication strategy cannot be done in isolation from these ‘offline’ touch points. They all need to fit together into a smooth and integrated service delivery. So one of the main research purposes was to develop a holistic vision on how the corporate website connects to the wider context of Ahold’s corporate communication.

By empathising with key external stakeholders, Ahold can look at their corporate service offering from an ‘outside-in’ perspective, validate their current communication strategy and innovate their future strategy. The insights from the stakeholders research provide a useful sounding board for this.

Customer Talk article on Service Design One of the editors of the online community for customer-focused...
Mobility, Cars and Refueling Experiences What do people care about in terms of mobility, and...
Are you being served? Collaborations to improve services for train travellers STBY have recently been working on a large-scale project in...

Design Research talk at Q Festival

Geke — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 08:41:41 +0000

What makes Design Research different from most traditional qualitative research? What are the most important characteristics in terms of focus, process, materials and output?

On 16 June at the Q Festival, organised by the Association of Qualitative Research (AQR), Geke van Dijk will present a talk, together with Marianne Guldbrandsen from the Design Council, and Kat Gough from Nokia. The tilte of the talk is ‘Design Research: The most creative in the industry?’

The Q Festival is advertised as the ‘Glastonbury of Qual…’, a festival of thought, surprise, provocation and illumination, so that is very promising.

See this link for more information on the Q Festival and on AQR

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Collaboration with Network Partners

Geke — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 16:41:30 +0000

In the spirit of a true network company, we are open for collaborations with parties offering additional expertises to ours, and working in a similar agile but highly professional approach.

One of the parties we really enjoy working with in The Netherlands is LBi Lost Boys. Following up on the successful and pleasant collaboration for the development of the national innovation programme ‘Creatie van Waarde’, and the support for the new Amsterdam School for Creative Leadership THNK, we are currently teaming up more proactively for various clients.

The synergy between our Design Research expertise and Lost Boys’ creative and strategy teams is high. This really shows the added value we can create together for our clients.

At the Creative Company Conference in Haarlem on 7 June, Ruurd Priester, Strategy Director of LBi Lost Boys, announced our collaboration as one of their strategic partnerships. In this day and age of networked collaboration we feel that we are learly not just doing the talk, but also walking the walk.

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Say yes to the mess!

Geke — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 16:51:22 +0000

For ‘The week of Service Design’ on Molblog, the online platform of the Dutch Marketing Magazine, Geke van Dijk was invited to contribute an article to illustrate the benefits of design research for service innovation. ‘Say yes to the mess’ discusses how empathic research into everyday life generates insights that illuminate and explain the often eclectic series of touchpoints between consumers and organisations. These insights show how consumers make their own choices on what service to use, where, when, how and from who. From the perspective of an individual service provider these choices may seem elusive at times, but from the perspective of the consumer they often make perfect sense, as they are rooted in specific situations and circumstances. (PDF, 479 Kb – Only in Dutch)

Say yes to the mess! For 'The week of Service Design' on Molblog, the online...
Mobility, Cars and Refueling Experiences What do people care about in terms of mobility, and...
Stakeholder Research in Food & Retail for Ahold In collaboration with LBi Lost Boys, STBY recently conducted a...

Say yes to the mess!

Geke — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 15:03:08 +0000

Say yes to the mess! For ‘The week of Service Design’ on Molblog, the online...
Mobility, Cars and Refueling Experiences What do people care about in terms of mobility, and...
Stakeholder Research in Food & Retail for Ahold In collaboration with LBi Lost Boys, STBY recently conducted a...

BNO picking up on Service Design

Geke — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 11:01:18 +0000

The main association for designers in The Netherlands, BNO, published an extensive article about Service Design. The trigger was a review of the book This is Service Design Thinking, but the editor Freek Kroesbergen extended this to a review of the current state of the Service Design field in The Netherlands.

The journal the article was published in is Vormberichten, the main publication of BNO. You can download a scan of the article through this link.

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Customer Talk article on Service Design

Geke — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:09:15 +0000

One of the editors of the online community for customer-focused businesses and innovative marketing has written an introduction on Service Design, based on interviews with Geke van Dijk from STBY and Arne Oosterom from DesignThinkers.

The article is Dutch, like the rest of the online content for this platform. It describes how services design offers an holistic approach to the innovation of services, working from the perspective of the customers. This approach can help to bridge the gap in the trust between organisations and their external stakeholders that has risen over the years due to relentless inside-out and push-oriented marketing and sales.

The article was written by Anne van den Berg. The PDF you can download through this link is a simple capture of the web page (so please ignore the surrounding and now redundant navigation items).

BNO picking up on Service Design The main association for designers in The Netherlands, BNO, published...
Say yes to the mess! For 'The week of Service Design' on Molblog, the online...
Design Research talk at Q Festival What makes Design Research different from most traditional qualitative research?...

Service Design Thinks Amsterdam

Geke — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 16:56:50 +0000

On March 30th a new Service Design Thinks event will take place in Amsterdam. The theme for this session is education for multi-disciplinary T-shaped professionals. Two speakers will give a brief presentation, leading to an open discussion with all attendees: Rianne Valkenburg (Haagse Hogeschool) en Peter van Waart (Hogeschool Rotterdam). They are both experts in the field of education. We’ll start the session with a quick review of the Global Service Jam activities in Utrecht, Rotterdam and London.

Everyone in and around Amsterdam is warmly welcome. See linkedin events or the SDNN website for more details.

BNO picking up on Service Design The main association for designers in The Netherlands, BNO, published...
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