Our studios in central London and central Amsterdam are perfectly situated to host these Service Experience Labs. In London we are close to Liverpool Street station, so easy to reach. And in the immediate surrounding of both an upmarket business environment and a buzzing creative area. In Amsterdam we are at Vijzelstraat in the canal area,easy to reach from Centraal Station, with many buzzing streets and venues around. In particular for consumer related services this gives plenty of opportunities for service safaris with telling real-life service experiences! Of course we can also talk to and work with your customers in our studios or at your location.

The Service Experience Labs are very suitable for teams that wish to familiarise themselves with the service design approach of engaging with customers in an early stage of innovation projects. In a full-day programme we facilitate an exploration of the essential stages of immersion, insight creation and idea generation. The programme will be customised to fit the objectives and prior knowledge of your team members.

1. Launch AMSI – Amsterdam Centre for Service Innovation On 3 September an ambitious new centre for Service Innovation...
2. User-led service opportunities for Sony In close collaboration with Radarstation, STBY conducted a qualitative consumer...
3. Never a dull moment… Dynamic as ever, STBY has moved to a new office...

Being known as a world-class specialist in Design Research (short for ‘design-led customer research’), many of our clients have asked us to deliver this kind of research on an international scale. Rather than developing this as an in-house service, we have initiated a global network with other specialists in design research around the world. These are small companies like STBY with a proven track record and working with highly senior staff. This way we can garantee a very high quality of local data collection and collaborative insight generation. In our experience this is far better way of conducting international research than travelling to the international sites ourselves and make do with interviews through local translators and freelance researchers.

The international network we have set up is called ‘REACH – the global design research network’. The network currently consists of 9 members companies, covering 11 countries around the world. We epect the network to further expand over the coming years. See the Reach website for all the details: www.globaldesignresearch.com

The Design Research we do through the network can be described as a combination of two approaches:

Understanding people’s practices to drive innovation
Understanding the people and situations you design for is crucial for successful innovation. These insights only come from spending time with your customers, and developing empathic conversations with them. When presented in an inspiring, visual way such insights are a strong driver of innovation.

Bringing design skills into customer research
Design skills such as generating, modeling and prototyping new ideas are crucial for successful innovation. If these skills are already used in immersive field work and insight creation, the resulting innovative ideas are rooted strongly in the markets your company innovates for.

1. Global Design Research network As part of the global design research network Reach we...
2. Reach: Global Design Research Network Reach is an network of highly skilled and experienced companies...
3. Global Innovation Group For clients who are looking for full service innovation projects,...

Learn from the leading edge of your customers where the most interesting opportunities to improve your service offering are. More and more companies ackowledge that the customer is becoming the dominant reference point for strategy and innovation. Where better to start than with the innovators among your customers? Based on ethnographic methodologies such as contextual inquiry we visit lead users at their work or their homes to find out what their needs are, and possibly what suggestions they might have for solutions to meet these needs.

1. Service design for utilities In close collaboration with the Design Council we worked on...
2. User-led service opportunities for Sony In close collaboration with Radarstation, STBY conducted a qualitative consumer...

Open innovation is an approach that welcomes the perspective of customers into the innovation process. The exchange of experiences with customers in co-creation workshops can be a very effective source of inspiration for your innovation team. In order to succeed, the interaction between the innovation team and the customers needs to be carefully guided. As The Innovation Partners, STBY (together with Radarstation and EDG) offers a highly skilled and experienced to team for this.

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In-depth studies that reveal how people use media and technology in their daily lives. The objective for these studies is to explore consumer needs and responses to concepts for new interactive services. The results are used as input during the early stages of the development process of these services. For each project we select the most suitable research method, such as interviews, focus groups, observation, diary study, probe study or documentary.

1. Follow-up study for T-Mobile Following on a previous study for T-Mobile in April, we...
2. User-led service opportunities for Sony In close collaboration with Radarstation, STBY conducted a qualitative consumer...
3. Training in Design Documentaries As part of the Executive Master Course in Information Management...

By spending time and interacting with potential users of new interactive services, we learn a lot about their habits, preferences, needs and concerns. This knowledge can be crucial for the successful development of innovative concepts for interactive services. Ethnographic studies offer rich data that allow empathic understanding of real-life consumer experiences. Contributing from the perspective of the consumer, our research is complementary to the perspectives of the design, enginering and marketing experts who are collaborating in concept and development teams.

1. Service Experience Lab Immerse yourself in the service experiences of your customers and...
2. Future usage of mobile internet services Together with designers of T-Mobile who are working on the...
3. Service Design workshop in Cambridge Geke participated in a workshop on Service Design at the...

STBY has developed a unique method to explore and communicate the elusive, inconsistent fabric of everyday life by using video and engaging in a dialogue with the participants in a research. Design documentaries investigate the opposites, paradoxes and ambiguities that are part of everyday life. They inform and inspire concept developers by offering rich insights into the often messy routines of consumers. We have found that this can be far more effective than the clean and simplified consumer profiles based on marketing statistics that are so often the basis for design briefs.

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1. Training in Design Documentaries As part of the Executive Master Course in Information Management...

Well-designed, surprising and playful materials can prompt participants to report in more lively and surprising ways than during interviews or focus groups, where they only sit and talk about their experiences. Probe studies provide participants with research materials they actively use for a certain period, and that trigger the recording of experiences during this use (e.g. notes, drawings, photos or audio recordings). For probe studies close collabaration between researchers and designers is crucial. This is an excellent method to actively involve members of design teams in the early explorations of a concept development process.

Diaries offer an excellent opportunity to document activities and experiences that take place on unpredictable moments or in private circumstances. In these situations direct observation is not a feasible option. As the research participants are asked to record their activities and reflections in a diary as soon as possible after they occur, the diaries provide reliable data with minimal intrusion. To optimally engage participants in the process of diary keeping, we have found that an ongoing contact with the researcher and an appealing design of the diaries are of crucial importance.

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Successful interactive services are based on scenarios that go beyond just pushing new technology. The process to develop these scenarios needs to be imaginative and well out of the ordinary to generate interesting, innovative and surprising concepts. The concepts then need to be thoroughly reviewed from a multiplicity of perspectives. The reviewing process may be light at first, but must advance as the scenarios get refined. Our scenario & persona development workshops facilitate this creative and multi-disciplinary process, in order to produce scenarios and personas that successfully combine realism and adventurousness.

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For research specifically focused on issues regarding young people in The Netherlands, STBY has initiated a joint venture with Spunk (www.spunk.nl). This group of young, dynamic and highly talented journalists (16-19 years old) is perfectly suited to engage with other young people and explore their perspectives on various issues. STBY is intensively involved in the preparations for the in-depth data collection and in the analysis of the qualitative results. In shared creative workshop sessions the findings from the interviews are processed into high level consumer insights. To  optimize the communication and understanding of the results, clients are invited to be present in these analytic workshop sessions.

See the website of Spunk//STBY for more detail on how we work and some examples of projects we have done.

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