The Human Side of Service Science, Engineering and Management

Challenges and Justifications for A User-Centric Quality Model of Services and Service

Systems

Ahmed Seffah Keynote talk for the Second International

Conference on Exploring Services Sciences, Geneva, February 16, 2011

Human-Centric Quality Model

For today, how/for what and not why?

Agenda

 Quality attributes and model of services and service systems

 Implications on/for human-centric service design

 Persona, measures and patterns as design tools

Motivations  Software and service  Service as a software  Service systems and software systems  Service-oriented engineering

 Where previously objects were linked to compose software systems,

 We now see the emergence of independent services that can be put together dynamically at run time to form a system of services

Motivations

Technology side   SOA, Web services such as directory services, description languages, and invocation standards, Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)

Human side   The interfaces and interactions between the services, service systems and/or service developers, providers, brokers, users consumers and the many other stakeholders

Service

Service

Human

Human

Service

Human

Service Systems

Service Systems

What is service systems quality?

A service system is a configuration of hardware, software, information, technology and organizational

networks designed to deliver services that satisfy the needs and aspirations

of customers.

The back and front side of service systems quality

The back side

The front side: the human and the multiple user interfaces

Existing service quality model

SERVQUAL  Service quality can be measured as the gap between

the service that customers expect and the performance they perceive to have received.

 Respondents rate their expectations of service from an excellent organization, and then rate the performance they received

 Service quality is calculated as the difference in the two scores where better service quality results in a smaller gap (Landrum, Prybutok, Kappelman, & Zhang, 2008).

The 10 aspects of service quality in EVALQUAL  Reliability, responsiveness, competence,

access, courtesy, communication, credibility, security, understanding or knowing the customer and tangibles

  Nyeck, S., Morales, M., Ladhari, R., & Pons, F. (2002). "10 years of service quality measurement: reviewing the use of the SERVQUAL instrument."

Other models

 Variants of SERVIQUAL such as SERVPERF

 Satisfaction questionnaire  Key indicators performance (KPIs)  ISO standards such as ISO 9000, ISO

9126, etc.

 Traditional versus computerized (electronic or SasS) services  Patterns of human experience and behaviors

 New factors are emerging  Trust, privacy, universality,

 Predictive measures  Assess frequently and as early as possible is

better  Lack of tools and standardized benchmarks for

testing

Drawbacks

Beside quality models, design patterns …  Proven solutions for well-known problems

that occurs in several usage contexts and projects

Trustfulness

McKnight & Chervany (1996)  Trust is the extent to which and individual

or an organization is willing to depend on something (e.g service or system) or somebody (human, organization) in a given context with a feeling of relative security and safety, even though negative consequences are possible.

Pattern of trustfulness   Online shopping takes place between parties who have never transacted

with each other before, in an environment   The service consumer often has insufficient information about the

service provider, and about the goods and services offered.   E.g. The consumer generally has no opportunity to see and try

products, i.e. to “squeeze the oranges”, before he buys.   The service provider, on the other hand, knows exactly what he gets, as

long as he is paid in money.   Face to face communication patterns cannot be applied, call us, we will

help you! Also does not work

  (Barnes et Vidgen, 2001a ; Bressolles, 2002a; Wolfinbarger et Gilly, 2002) proposed a design pattern   If the consumer can not try the product or service in advance, he can be

confident that it will be what he expects as long as he or she gets all the information online.

  The pattern indicate how much, when and how to make visible the information

Privacy

 Privacy is the ability of an individual or a group of people (an organization, a community) to stop information about themselves from becoming known to an individual, a group of people and organization other than those they choose to give the information to

Pattern of privacy and reputation   It is difficult, if not impossible, to complete a transaction

without revealing some personal data – a shipping address, billing information, or product preference.

  Users may be unwilling to provide this necessary information or even to browse online

  (Hafiz, 2006) suggeted four design patterns that can aide the decision making process for the designers of privacy protecting systems.

  These patterns are applicable to the design of anonymity systems for various types of online communication, online data sharing, location monitoring, voting and electronic cash management.

Universality

 Universality is the ability to supporting a broad range of hardware, software, and network access and accommodating users with different skills, knowledge, age, gender, handicaps, literacy, culture, income, while bridging the user knowledge gap between what users know and what they need to know

Patterns for universality  Sorry, I do not have

it yet Ph.D thesis  Designing a

universal online service: investigating patterns for universal design

 Facebook, twitter, yahoo, etc. are good examples of universal services

But…

 We need to assess the quality of design patterns as well

The three legs of a user-centric quality model of services

When (Practices), What (Factors) and Who (Human) in the Design Loop

Prac%ces    Usage  

  Requirements    Design    Evolu4on      Maintenance    Management    Governance    Deployment    Marke4ng    Quality  assurance    Process    

improvement  

Factors  1.  Usability  2.  Effec4veness  3.  Efficiency  

4.  Sa4sfac4on  5.  Learnability    6.  Universality  7.  Acceptability  8.  Adop4veness  9.  TrusPulness  10. Safety  11. Usefulness  12. Privacy  13. Sustainability  14. Comprehension  

15. Accountability  

Human  •  End-­‐Users  •  Indirect-­‐users  Stakeholders  •  Human  factors  /HCI  expert  •  UI  developers  •  Programmers  •  Analysts  •  Technical  support  •  Educators  •  Managers  •  Providers  •  Brokers  •  Etc.  

Quality model components   A set of factors

  15 factors   A list of criteria which are

measurable sub-factors   30 criteria

  A large repository of measures both qualitative and quantitative   50 measures

  The related techniques to collect and analyze data

  Data are collected using final service, Final service or service system

Design artifacts

Data

Measure

Criteria

Factors

Not just…

 Services  Service systems But,  Early design artifacts: prototypes, storyboards,

sketches,  Engineering documents: requirement portfolio,

business plan

Example 1: Design of ATM services Factors

Example 2: Usability Evaluation of ATM services

User/usage-centered design

Understanding and modeling user and user experiences  Identify and examine the different types of

people who could play a role  A persona contains information about a

fictitious, archetypical person who holds an interest in the service.  User Knowledge, skills, and abilities  goals, motives, and concerns  Usage patterns that a user would have of the

system.

Patrick

Scenario of usage, behavioral path

Human-centric service design: The whole picture  Scenario + persona as a platform for

human engagement and service consumer experiences modeling

 Patterns as a tool to derive service system from scenarios and persona

 Quality model to assess and predict quality in use of services and service systems

Conclusion

 Bridging the front and the back side in service design

 Closing the gap between disciplines as stated by SSME manifesto

Further reading

  Adding User Experience into the Interactive Service Design Loop: A Persona-Based Method, Behavior and Information Technology Journal

  P2P Mapper: A Tool for Modeling User Experiences and Deriving User-Experience Driven Designs. AIS Transaction on Human Computer Interaction

Join us…

  Special Session on HCI concerns in Service Engineering. First Conference on the Human Side of Service Engineering, Jan Jose, July 2011

  Workshop on HCI concerns in Service Design and Engineering   2011 Edition - Software as a Service: A User Experience Design

Perspective In conjunction with   IEEE SERVICES 2011 – The Seventh World Congress on

Services, July 5-10, 2011, Washington DC, USA   INTERACT 2011 – 13th IFIP-TC 13 Conference on Human

Computer Interaction September 5-9, 2011, Lisbon, Portugal