For the ninth and second to final blogpost i want to look at service design and user experience design in festivals in a broader perspective. The two main articles i have read for this post research are “Experience Design Board: A tool for visualizing and designing experience centric service delivery processes” and “Adapting Service Design Thinking to Local Festivals”. As this will be final post with new research in this project, i wanted to see what i can find about actual implementation of service design in the spaces that i am looking at. From the first article this quote “A customer’s experience is influenced by his/her interactions with contextual elements, such as servicescape elements and service employees, as well as by the presence and behaviors of other customers” stood out. Mostly because it strongly supports my findings from the last two posts. The interaction with the physical space, other attendees and and workers/services at the festival are universally important in experience design. The framework they propose in the article shows the interaction between these fields. In this board they have analyzed a theme park service and visualized it.
I think it is very interesting how it ties together with the other article i read this week, where they talk about the important for storytelling when creating a festival. As you can see at the bottom og the figure here, it is structured like a story with a beginning, middle, climax and end. This is also supported by my insight from last weeks user survey. The individual elements of services, organization, toilet queues are incredibly important for avoiding negative experiences. However if you want to create memorable and positive experiences you need a story and human interactions.
A simpler way of thinking about the user service experience is in this theater model, which i think is a very good mental model. It is applicable to many different types of events and it highlights the intersection between all the people that are required to create good experiences, including the end interaction between customers.
But how do you actually achieve these results that you want, in the second article they come up with 4 major points that I think all designers will find very familiar.
- Deep understanding og target group in early-planning stages
- Building mutual trust with local stakeholders
- Establishing stories of the region
- Utilizing prototyping tools
This article is based on how to user service design when creating local festivals which typically have government backing and are organized differently than for example a music festival. However i think the points still stand.
To end the new research part of this project i think that my main finding is that there is still a lot of blank spaces when it comes to user experience design specifically for festivals. Next post i will summarize to my best ability what i have found and learned, but i still think that is one of the core findings.
