User-centred design for solution providers

If you are a solution provider or organization responsible for designing customer service systems in various industries such as entertainment, food and beverage, retail, public services, malls, transport and service industries, your primary focus is to provide good, efficient services to build a loyal base of regular, repeat customers critical for sustaining long-term, profitable and growing businesses.

Whether you are a bank, restaurant, shop, fast-food outlet, transport provider or a supermarket, you want to deliver excellent overall customer experience through well-designed solutions that may comprise the environment, equipment, personnel and operating procedures which customers have to interact with.

For example, the collective experiences of a customer in a fast-food outlet may include the queuing system, reading and understanding the menu and pricing information, the procedure for ordering food, the interactions with the counter staff, the payment system, the total time taken to receive the orders, the ambience, space and layout of the dining area and how comfortable the chairs and tables are. Each of these individual experiences contribute to and affect the overall customer experience. Of course, in this case the quality of the food is just as important! Often, the competitive advantage hinges on how well-designed the customer experience is.

Sometimes, through the eyes of customers, system solutions seem to be designed to benefit the service providers rather than customers. It is frustrating to be made to follow procedures that users consider redundant or unnecessary. Customers don't like dealing with long-winded interactive voice systems, difficult-to-use equipment, confusing information displays or poorly-designed environments. Often, poorly-designed systems constrain users to do things in ways that are inefficient, inconvenient and unproductive.

For example, consider the following real examples of poorly-designed carpark systems: dealing with ticket entry/exit machines that drivers can't reach properly from within their vehicles, unclear or misleading parking and exit signs, dim lighting, lack of references for drivers to remember where the car is parked, difficulty finding the carpark exit, narrow entrance and exit ramps with whitewashed walls which make it difficult for drivers to judge their distance (and end up scuffing the walls and their bumpers) and inconveniently located ticket payment machines (I once had to walk 10 minutes to the nearest payment machine because I forgot to pay before collecting my car). Such a carpark would discourage customers from parking their vehicles there.

The overall customer experience is collectively based on smaller experiences with each part of the system that the customer interacts with. Designing a good system involves careful design of each one of these parts.

Systems can be complex, comprising many different components working together to provide the solution. We can help you to analyze the system components, procedures and methods from a user and task perspective to identify critical factors and touch-points that affect the customer experience. Every part of the solution that customers interact with is a "touch-point" that can affect customer experience. By analyzing these touch-points and their relationships, we can help you to eliminate redundant, inefficient and unnecessary user interactions, while optimizing the design of remaining touch-points for efficiency and usability to improve the customer experience. Such an analysis can also help you decide which of these touch-points are better handled by machines and equipment and which are better handled by human staff.

We can help you to review your system by conducting live observations (if you have an existing system in operation) or by performing usability walkthroughs of simulated system environments, observing areas of inefficiencies (in terms of time taken and number of actions or steps required) and problems encountered by users. By breaking down the system into its constituent components, we can perform further detailed analysis on each part, recommend design solutions and test those solutions. For example, in the design of a carpark system, the design of the entry/exit ticket machines, the payment machine and the carpark signage can all be looked into separately.

When each component has been designed properly, we can help you to run usability tests on the integrated components to fine-tune the complete system to deliver the best possible customer experience.

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