Master | Present | Feb ’22 – Jun ’22
Final Master Project
Client
New Optimist
Essense
Theme
Scaling the customer experience
Coaches
Minha Lee (TU/e)
Samuel Hirsch (Essense)
Veerle Beeker (Essense)
IN SHORT
The goal of the toolkit is to allow business owners of scale-up retail companies to scale their customer experience along with their growth. The way of working is built around the theory of servicescapes. There are three main servicescapes; physical such as your store, digital such as your website, and social such as your employees or influencers.
The tool is physical to stimulate co-creation, but there is also an online support platform where for each step you can also download the templates/materials, see an example of each step of how it was done for the client ‘New Optimist’, which was used as a case study while developing this toolkit.
The toolkit is divided into two phases: research and realise. In the first phase you are guided in getting grip on the as-is situation, mapping how your current servicescapes are used and what your customer’s needs are. In the second phase you take these insights and check how you can expand them across the other servicescapes as well so that no matter through which servicescape a customer interacts with your brand, they have a consistent experience.
The underlying goal of this toolkit is to make CX design and its methods available to all entrepreneurs that see the value and impact of CX, not just those that have the resources for it.
USER & SOCIETY
As mentioned, designing in a user-centered manner is something I value greatly as designer. In this project, I have involved the different stakeholders in various phases of the process. The end users through interviews and testing the experiments and the client and target group through a workshop and multiple validation throughout. This was not only important due to the high social relevance of this project, but also guided me in exploring and choosing the appropriate methods for each plase. By working with different methods such as journey mapping, co-creation and experiment design, I was able to develop a new method that is more holistic and user-centered.
To enable this project, a lot of research was done on customer experience, related work on this and where there are still gaps. By identifying several of these gaps, I was able to connect existing literature to current user-centered design methods and put them into practice in the industry.
CREATIVITY & AESTHETICS
In my final master project, I have demonstrated my creative way of working through the various methods used throughout the design process. By adopting both 1st, 2nd and 3rd perspectives in the process and tailoring the activities towards these perspectives, I was able to get and keep an holistic overview over the project and make sure all perspectives were considered.
For the design of the toolkit, I developed a strong visual identity. This way the user would be informed and guided through the visual elements. This identity also enabled a professional look and feel to exert expertise.
This expertise area strongly plays into my vision as designer. I challenged myself to set up the communication around and within the toolkit to make it understandable and accessible to all disciplines. This was done both through visual identity by illustrating the information provided, as well as avoiding jargon and researching how certain terminology is used in the (retail) industry.
BUSINESS & ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Although not being one of my chosen expertise areas, this project demonstrates a strong skill development in business and entrepreneurship. By collaborating with 2 different clients that had different goals, I have learned how to manage different perspectives, tailor my project towards different needs and lead the design process by positioning myself as expert towards them both. Due to the current developments in the experience economy, my stakeholders all acknowledged the positive impact of this project on the industry and how this toolkit can bring value to their proposition. Through experiment design, I was considerate of the limited resources of the client and showed a sustainable way of working to gain value from the toolkit without doing risky investments as a start-up.
TECHNOLOGY & REALIZATION
Throughout my master I have viewed technology and realization as a means of exploring, visualizing, experimenting and demonstrating new concepts and experiences. In this project, this has not been different. By constantly making my findings visual and tangible through creating frameworks and models, I was able to demonstrate my (throught) process to others in order to decide upon and validate next steps. Specifically in the last phase of my project, I did this by developing several embodiments of insights I had gathered from the interviews and client workshop. These designs were experimented with to test their possible feasibility, viability and desirability.
To stimulate collaboration, interaction and communication between users of the toolkit, the toolkit was made physical. To make the way of working of the toolkit more sustainable for a longer period of time, a supporting platform was added to the physical toolkit where all templates could be downloaded and printed as well, making the toolkit not a one-time-use product
MATH, DATA & COMPUTING
Collaborating with multiple stakeholders and involving users through multiple phases in the design process has resulted in an overwhelming amount of (qualitative) data. Through the expertise of Math, Data & Computing, I have been able to manage, keep overview, analyze and interpret all this data to inform each step taken in the design process. By visualizing the different data sets and streams, I was able to uncover underlying patterns and communicate these to the stakeholders to engage them in the process.
DESIGN RESEARCH PROCESSES
The process of my final master project has not been linear to say the least. Due to the involvement of many stakeholders and the construction of a case study parallel to the development of the toolkit, the framing of this challenge and managing the process were crucial. The defined research gaps served as inspiration for this project and provided a starting point and goal to work towards from an academic perspective. The combination of this with the case study also provided a starting point and end goal from an industry perspective. By balancing research and user involvement, I was able to inform my design process to create value for both my client as well as new academic insights.
COMPANY FEEDBACK
“Charlaine has taken an interesting approach in attempting to package the specialised and sometimes complex set of principles, activities, and mental frameworks that customer experience designers use into a product that can be used by anyone with interest. Not only is this something which I have not come across before in such depth, but this is something that I believe has the potential to provide value to many smaller organisations, improving their businesses and the experience of their customers.”
– Samuel Hirsch
Senior Service Designer @Essense
“Charlaine included the client in her research and design process. Taking the client step-by- step through her process, brought a lot of clarification to New Optimist about the possibilities of CX. She showed New Optimist a way in order to be able to improve their customer experience by themselves with the use of her Toolkit.
Next to working again with my graduation client, I really liked coaching such a talented person! Excited for what is more to come. Good job Charlaine.”
– Veerle Beeker
Junior UX Designer @Essense