Agility and design

In Tom Kelley’s The Ten Faces of Innovation, there is a story about TellMe, the company behind much of the voice-recognition software we know best as telephone support.

One of the company execs was having dinner with a client from UPS. Long story short, the client piped up over appetizers about the official name change from United Parcel Service to the more succinct UPS, going the way of so many longstanding corporate brands these days. The TellMe greeting, when calling the UPS hotline, still referred to United Parcel Service. The client acknowledged that it was a small detail but that it was important to them. Mr. TellMe rose at a pause in the conversation to make a telephone call. When dessert rolled around, the client was handed a cell phone and was asked, “Try it again. I think you’ll like what you hear.”

This story illustrates the agility companies are capable of when they have a culture of experimentation, a bold willingness to allow faults in their products and services in order to seek greater refinement.

How to build agility into the design of a service seems like a great challenge. We are used to thinking of projects being somehow "finished" when they have already gone through an iterative design process and emerged all smooth and shiny. But this is very much a product-based way of thinking. Manufactured goods offer a certain flexibility for the creative types willing to see beyond their intended uses and relate to them in novel ways, but services can be communicative in a way that stuff really can't. Interaction and service design are exciting because there is the possibility for constant evolution. If you want the chair to evolve, you have to make a new one or hack at the old one (which doesn't lead to a very elegant chair).