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Capturing multi-stakeholder needs in Customer-Centric Cloud Service Design
Abstract
Cloud computing applications and services go hand in hand, yet there is no clear
mechanism for ensuring that the cloud applications are designed from a customer’s
perspective. Likewise services can require adaptation for multiple customers of
stakeholders, which require differing user experience outcomes. This paper describes the
initial design and development of a predictive analytics cloud service application, which
uses historic customer data to predict the existing customers that are most likely to
churn. Service blueprinting, a service innovation method, was used as the underlying
design model for developing an initial shared understanding of the required service.
Personas were used in the requirements analysis to develop insights into multi-stakeholder
needs. Using the design science paradigm an extended cloud service design
theory is proposed, as an outcome of the ongoing development of this analytics
platform.
... Mulder and Yaar (2006) (Pruitt and Grudin 2003), user diaries (Kantola et. al 2007), job profiles (O'Flaherty et al. 2013), or even capturing existing log data from in-use systems (Mesgari et. al 2015). ...
... As a second approach, role-based personas focus on an end user's position (role) in a social or an organisational context (e.g. Pruitt and Grudin 2003). For example, a predictive analytics cloud service application depicted personas as representing different user roles which were indicative of business goals associated with employee job types (O'Flaherty et. al 2013). In the third approach, personas can be seen as "engaging" creations, ones which emphasise the narrative story that helps designers understand the traits of targeted end users, either via a narrative created by designers, or by data being captured that allows end users to tell their own story. Lastly, there are also fictitious personas, ...
... PB has been implemented in various contexts, including service design (Beltagui, Candi and Riedel, 2016), healthcare provision (Saini and Yammiyavar, 2013;Williams et al., 2014), energy savings (Khashe, Lucas, Becerik-Gerber and Gratch, 2017). Persona building has been suggested as a promising tool for IS design and research (Ma and LeRouge, 2007;O'Flaherty, Pope, Thornton and Woodworth, 2013), supporting IS scholars in identifying and addressing user needs. Usually, persona represent a synopsis of derived field observations, rendering the persona to resemble the target group as close as possible (Rauth, Köppen, Jobst and Meinel, 2010). ...
Conversational agents (CAs), defined as software with which users interact through natural language, have gained increasing interest in education due to their potential to support individual learning on a large scale. With improved capabilities driven by advances in machine learning and natural language processing, these agents pave the way for a new generation of tutoring systems that offer an intuitive learning experience and can automatically tailor to individual learning styles and needs. A particular characteristic of CAs is their potential for anthropomorphic design, which can facilitate the feeling of a human contact in technology-enabled individual learning and contribute to a learner’s motivation.
While recent studies provide valuable prescriptive knowledge on how to design pedagogical CAs, we still lack an understanding of the impact of a human-like design on individual motivational regulations and perceived inclusiveness. In this study, we contribute to closing this research gap by investigating individual learner’s perception of a CA by means of a 3x1 experiment with 149 participants. Drawing on Social Response Theory and Self-Determination Theory, we find empirical evidence that anthropomorphic design and associated perceptions of humanness contribute to individual intrinsic motivation of learners and discover a positive effect on inclusiveness.
... For instance, researchers have developed process frameworks (C.-H. Lim et al., 2015a), taxonomies (Püschel, Röglinger and Schlott, 2016;Rizk, Bergvall-Kåreborn and Elragal, 2018) or adapted classic tools, such as service blueprinting and personas (O'Flaherty, Pope, Thornton and Woodworth, 2013), to support capability building on a tool-level, and thus enable practitioners to design data-and analytics-driven services. Besides capabilities on a tool-level, organizational capabilities, which are needed to offer data-and analyticsdriven services, are in the focus of research. ...
The potential created by ongoing developments in data and analytics permeates a multitude of research areas, such as the field of Service Innovation. In this paper, we conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to investigate the integration of data and analytics as an analytical unit into the field of Service Innovation – referred to as Data-Driven Service Innovation (DDSI). Overall, the SLR reveals three main research perspectives that span the research field of Data-Driven Service Innovation: Explorative DDSI, validative DDSI, and generative DDSI. This integrated theoretical framework describes the distinct operant roles of data analytics for Service Innovation, and thus contributes to the body of knowledge in the field of DDSI by providing three unified lenses, which researchers can use to describe and locate their existing and future research endeavors in this ample field. Building up on the insights from the SLR, a research agenda is proposed in order to trigger and guide further discussions and future research surrounding DDSI. Ultimately, this paper aims at contributing to the body of knowledge of Service Innovation in general and Data-Driven Service Innovation in particular by presenting a three-dimensional research space model structuring DDSI towards its advancement.
In the recent years, design science has gained significant interest in the information systems development field. In the HCI research community it also proved to be an applicable and often used research framework for design and evaluation of user experience constructs. In this paper we presented the results of a systematic mapping study performed on more than 250 literature sources in order to obtain the information on which UX evaluation techniques are used by researches when performing design science research methodology in creation of UX related artifacts. The analysis resulted in 43 included papers which were classified in five relevant groups. Most of the included studies (21) reported the use different questionnaires in order to evaluate created UX artifacts. The keyword analysis showed that 32 different keywords were used when reporting the UX design and evaluation techniques.
Service processes require the participation of the customer: Without the customer, service processes cannot take place. The fact that the service provider is dependent on customer participation causes difficulties in managing service processes efficiently and effectively because customer's contributions can only be influenced by the provider up to a certain extent. The article will stress the management of service process efficiency. Therefore, a production-theoretic view will be used to identify the sources of efficiency problems. Based on this approach, we will differentiate between customer-induced and customer-independent activities for a better efficiency management. The well-known blueprinting technique will be used in a revised version based on the production-theoretic approach to identify starting points for improving process efficiency. Differentiating between three areas of process management, we will suggest measures of factor combination management, information management and property rights management.
We present the design of the Snackbot, a robot that will deliver snacks in our university buildings. The robot is intended to provide a useful, continuing service and to serve as a research platform for long-term Human-Robot Interaction. Our design process, which occurred over 24 months, is documented as a contribution for others in HRI who may be developing social robots that offer services. We describe the phases of the design project, and the design decisions and tradeoffs that led to the current version of the robot.
Purpose
Focusing on one main research question: how is the phenomenon “service” portrayed within service research?, the aim is to describe and analyze how the concept of service is defined, how service characteristics express the concept, the relevance of the existing “service portraits”, and to suggest a new way of portraying service.
Design/methodology/approach
A literature search was carried out in order to find definitions of the service concept and expressions about the service characteristics. Databases were searched and 34 articles were used for further analysis. The same procedure was carried out for service characteristics. The articles that were chosen by the databases were reviewed thoroughly and those most relevant to the search topic were chosen. Sixteen leading scholars who had been shaping the service research field were also asked two basic questions.
Findings
The analysis of the concept of service and service characteristics shows that the definitions are too narrow and the characteristics are outdated as generic service characteristics. It is suggested that service is used as a perspective. When service is portrayed as a perspective, the approach is clear: it depends on who is portraying the service and on the purpose. If service characteristics are outdated, when will they stop being used in teaching? It is no longer necessary to defend services as being different from goods. Service is a research area in its own right.
Research limitations/implications
The number of articles and books used in the analysis can be criticized for not including enough relevant literature. The keywords used when searching in databases should also have included other words to capture the concept of service and service characteristics.
Practical implications
The practical implications are not so clear since this article is a contribution to the ongoing discussion about future directions of service research. However, it is suggested that service is a perspective on value creation and that value creation is best understood from the lens of the customer based on value in use.
Originality/value
This paper contributes with a literature review, a discussion on what service portraits are, and describes service as a perspective on value creation through the lens of the customer.
In this paper we present the use of a persona creation process for gathering information from intermediaries for information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) projects. Our approach represents a departure from traditional persona use in that it does not organise pre-existing data about potential users, but is itself a data gathering process. We present a case study of our use of the process on an ICT4D project, during which time we observed the combined benefits of using personas and of working with a non-governmental organisation (NGO) intermediary materialise. We attribute these outcomes to our persona creation workshops. Information which the NGO furnished regarding sensitive personal circumstances typical of our end users greatly improved our understanding of our users. This information would likely not have come to light had we interviewed the users ourselves, which we believe demonstrates the validity of relying on intermediary information for persona creation rather than first-hand information.
Organizing new service development is an important topic for decision makers in service firms, since continuous innovation is expected to pay off. Although the literature on organizing new service development has grown rapidly over the last decade, the numerous publications are highly fragmented, each concentrating on a small piece of the complex innovation puzzle. This paper classifies current literature on organizing new service development (NSD) into two evolutionary stages: managing key activities in the NSD process, and creating a climate for continuous innovation. For both stages its consequences for the initiation and implementation of new services are discussed. The paper ends with limitations and suggestions for future research.
If you design and develop products for people, this book is for you. The Persona Lifecycle addresses the how of creating effective personas and using those personas to design products that people love. It doesnt just describe the value of personas; it offers detailed techniques and tools related to planning, creating, communicating, and using personas to create great product designs. Moreover, it provides rich examples, samples, and illustrations to imitate and model. Perhaps most importantly, it positions personas not as a panacea, but as a method used to complement other user-centered design (UCD) techniques including scenario-based design, cognitive walkthroughs and user testing. John Pruitt is the User Research Manager for the Tablet & Mobile PC Division at Microsoft Corporation. Tamara Adlin is a Customer Experience Manager at Amazon.com. For the past six years, John and Tamara have been researching and using personas, leading workshops, and teaching courses at professional conferences and universities. They developed the Persona Lifecycle model to communicate the value and practical application of personas to product design and development professionals.
The cloud computing field had many advances in the last years and new classifications proliferated in a discretionary way. Despite some attempts, there is still no agreed taxonomy. This paper analyses the related literature and practical implementations describing the diverse identified classifications. The analysed information is structured into a new proposal of service classification model. It is also demonstrated that some of the created classifications do not help the clarification of this new paradigm.
Context: To develop usable software we need to understand the users that will interact with the system. Personas is a HCI technique that gathers information about users in order to comprehend their characteristics. This information is used to define fictitious persons on which development should focus. Personas provides an understanding of the user, often overlooked in SE developments.
Objective: The goal of our research is to modify Personas to readily build the technique into the requirements stage of regular SE developments. Method: We tried to apply Cooper’s version of the Personas technique and we found shortcomings in both the definition of the procedure to be enacted and the formalization of the product resulting from the execution of each step of the Personas technique. For each of these limitations (up to a total of 11), we devised an improvement to be built into Personas. We have incorporated these improvements into a SE version of Personas. The improved Personas avoid the weaknesses encountered by an average software developer unfamiliar with HCI techniques applying the original Personas.
Results: We aim to improve requirements elicitation through the use of Personas. We have systematized and formalized Personas in the SE tradition in order to build this new version of the technique into the requirements stage. We have applied our proposal in an application example. Conclusion: The integration of Personas into the SE requirements stage might improves the understanding of what the software product should do and how it should behave. We have modified the HCI Personas technique to comply with the levels of systematization required by SE. We have enriched the SE requirements process by incorporating Personas activities into requirements activities. Requirements elicitation and requirements analysis are the RE activities most affected by incorporating Personas.
The basis of any service positioning strategy is the service itself, but marketing offers little guidance on how to craft service processes for positioning purposes. A new approach suggests that within service systems, structural process design can be used to "engineer" services on a more scientific, rational basis.
Getting an innovation adopted is difficult; a common problem is increasing the rate of its diffusion. Diffusion is the communication of an innovation through certain channels over time among members of a social system. It is a communication whose messages are concerned with new ideas; it is a process where participants create and share information to achieve a mutual understanding. Initial chapters of the book discuss the history of diffusion research, some major criticisms of diffusion research, and the meta-research procedures used in the book. This text is the third edition of this well-respected work. The first edition was published in 1962, and the fifth edition in 2003. The book's theoretical framework relies on the concepts of information and uncertainty. Uncertainty is the degree to which alternatives are perceived with respect to an event and the relative probabilities of these alternatives; uncertainty implies a lack of predictability and motivates an individual to seek information. A technological innovation embodies information, thus reducing uncertainty. Information affects uncertainty in a situation where a choice exists among alternatives; information about a technological innovation can be software information or innovation-evaluation information. An innovation is an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or an other unit of adoption; innovation presents an individual or organization with a new alternative(s) or new means of solving problems. Whether new alternatives are superior is not precisely known by problem solvers. Thus people seek new information. Information about new ideas is exchanged through a process of convergence involving interpersonal networks. Thus, diffusion of innovations is a social process that communicates perceived information about a new idea; it produces an alteration in the structure and function of a social system, producing social consequences. Diffusion has four elements: (1) an innovation that is perceived as new, (2) communication channels, (3) time, and (4) a social system (members jointly solving to accomplish a common goal). Diffusion systems can be centralized or decentralized. The innovation-development process has five steps passing from recognition of a need, through R&D, commercialization, diffusions and adoption, to consequences. Time enters the diffusion process in three ways: (1) innovation-decision process, (2) innovativeness, and (3) rate of the innovation's adoption. The innovation-decision process is an information-seeking and information-processing activity that motivates an individual to reduce uncertainty about the (dis)advantages of the innovation. There are five steps in the process: (1) knowledge for an adoption/rejection/implementation decision; (2) persuasion to form an attitude, (3) decision, (4) implementation, and (5) confirmation (reinforcement or rejection). Innovations can also be re-invented (changed or modified) by the user. The innovation-decision period is the time required to pass through the innovation-decision process. Rates of adoption of an innovation depend on (and can be predicted by) how its characteristics are perceived in terms of relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability. The diffusion effect is the increasing, cumulative pressure from interpersonal networks to adopt (or reject) an innovation. Overadoption is an innovation's adoption when experts suggest its rejection. Diffusion networks convey innovation-evaluation information to decrease uncertainty about an idea's use. The heart of the diffusion process is the modeling and imitation by potential adopters of their network partners who have adopted already. Change agents influence innovation decisions in a direction deemed desirable. Opinion leadership is the degree individuals influence others' attitudes
How do we ensure that our Web sites actually give users what they need? What are the best ways to understand our users' goals, behaviors, and attitudes, and then turn that understanding into business results? Personas bring user research to life and make it actionable, ensuring we're making the right decisions based on the right information. This practical guide explains how to create and use personas to make your site more successful. The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas takes you through each step of persona creation, including tips for conducting qualitative user research, new ways to apply quantitative research (such as surveys) to persona creation, various methods for generating persona segmentation, and proven techniques for making personas realistic. You'll also learn how to use personas effectively, from directing overall business strategy and prioritizing features and content to making detailed decisions about information architecture, content, and design.
The gap between who designers and developers imagine their users are, and who those users really are can be the biggest problem with product development. Observing the User Experience will help you bridge that gap to understand what your users want and need from your product, and whether they'll be able to use what you've created. Filled with real-world experience and a wealth of practical information, this book presents a complete toolbox of techniques to help designers and developers see through the eyes of their users. It provides in-depth coverage of 13 user experience research techniques that will provide a basis for developing better products, whether they're Web, software or mobile based. In addition, it's written with an understanding of how software is developed in the real world, taking tight budgets, short schedules, and existing processes into account.
The design of commercial products that are intended to serve millions of people has been a challenge for collaborative approaches. The creation and use of fictional users, concrete representations commonly referred to as 'personas', is a relatively new interaction design technique. It is not without problems and can be used inappropriately, but based on experience and analysis it has extraordinary potential. Not only can it be a powerful tool for true participation in design, it also forces designers to consider social and political aspects of design that otherwise often go unexamined.
Weizenbaum (1977) wrote: "Tools shape man's imaginative reconstruction of reality". That has always been so. The creations of the visual and performing arts follow not only from the tools, but also from the concepts of technology. The defining technologies of the 20th century were mechanical; everyday conversation, news reports and talk shows use mechanical metaphors, such as to "push the gas pedal", to "overhaul", to "mesh with" and so on. The defining technology of this decade is communication technology. Management systems of the 20th century focused on making the company seen as a machine, efficient. Management systems of this and the next decade focus on the company as part of a communicating network. Economic and management structures follow not only from requirements of lowered costs, faster work and higher quality, but more deeply from the images and concepts which we all absorb unconsciously from the environment, and which are changing from the images of mechanical machines to the images of a globally-connected fluid network of interacting nodes. The network provides much more than a tool for enhanced business practice; it provides a conceptual framework that changes perceptions of organizations and of business strategy and operation.
A case is made for further developing a branch of systems engineering that focuses on problems and issues which arise in the
service sector. We promulgate this special focus not only because of the size and importance of the service sector but also
because of the unique opportunities that systems engineering can exploit in the design and joint production and delivery of
services. We begin by considering the economic, technological and demographic contexts within which the service sector has
flourished; we then address both services, especially emerging services, and systems engineering, followed by a discussion
of how to advance the field of service systems engineering, and concluding with several remarks. In particular, a number of
service systems engineering methods are identified to enhance the design and production/delivery of services, especially taking
advantage of the unique features that characterize services — namely, services, especially emerging services, are information-driven,
customer-centric, e-oriented, and productivity-focused.
A business incurs much higher charges when attempting to win new customers than to retain existing ones. As a result, much research has been invested into new ways of identifying those customers who have a high risk of churning. However, customer retention efforts have also been costing organisations large amounts of resource. In response to these issues, the next generation of churn management should focus on accuracy. A variety of churn management techniques have been developed as a response to the above requirements. The focus of this paper is to review some of the most popular technologies that have been identified in the literature for the development of a customer churn management platform. The advantages and disadvantages of the identified technologies are discussed, and a discussion on the future research directions is offered.
In contemporary knowledge work organizations, work is often accomplished through communication. Consequently, communication disruptions often translate into work disruptions. In this paper, we identify two types of communication disruptions with implications for the relative organization of work: delays and interruptions. Communication delays contribute to work disorganization when a worker is unable to move forward with a task due to insufficient information, while interruptions derail the flow of activities directed toward the accomplishment of a task. Communication technologies are often designed with the intention of improving work organization by reducing communication delays (first-order effect), but the use of these technologies may, in practice, inadvertently contribute to an increase in work interruptions (second-order effect). We illustrate these first and second-order impacts of communication media use in a descriptive model. Then, using this model as our point of departure, we draw on prior research on personal control, relationships, and organizational culture to offer testable propositions regarding likely worker responses (third-order effect) to either communication delays or interruptions with further implications for the organization of work. Our argument suggests that communication technology use may not result in either more or less organized work overall but, rather, may simply shift the locus of control over the flow of work.
User-centred design (UCD) has been widely used to solve those failure products that are not proper designed for target users.
Although UCD techniques are varies, some similar drawbacks were found as it requires complex skills to manipulate and it is
time consuming as well as costly. Big enterprises have no problem with carrying out UCD because of rich resources. However,
most of researchers made effort on the improvement of approaching UCD. Lack of studies contributed to the area of promotion
UCD to those companies which do not launch UCD correctly or barely know UCD. Neither any of studies addressed on the investigation
in difficulties those companies have and therefore helped them to be solved. Hence, this research aimed to assess a cost-effective
UCD model to assist designers in idea generation. 16 designers were invited into the two-phase assessment. In addition, there
were 51 end users as the participants to evaluate that if the designers who followed the proposed model can generate better
UCD ideas. In this project, an MP3 was chosen because it is portable, easy, and with both aesthetics and functionality factors.
In addition, 25-34 office workers were selected as the target users as the participants. This research was a whole process
of the assessment of a cost-effective UCD model in assist designers’ idea generation, and this assessment successfully showed
that the cost-effective UCD model could eliminate the complex of the UCD skills and the cost, in which the UCD results were
identified by the users. Therefore it could encourage more designers to apply UCD in their work. Further recommendations were
also illustrated in this paper.
Current cloud solutions are fraught with problems. They introduce a monolithic cloud stack that imposes vendor lock-in and don't let developers mix and match services freely from diverse cloud service tiers to configure them dynamically to address application needs. Cloud blueprinting is a novel approach that lets developers easily syndicate, configure, and deploy virtual service-based application payloads on virtual machine and resource pools in the cloud.
With the global focus on service-led growth has come increased need for practical techniques for service innovation. Services are fluid, dynamic, experiential, and frequently -produced in real time by customers, employees, and technology, often with few static physical properties. However, most product innovation approaches focus on the design of relatively static products with physical properties. Thus, many of the invention and prototype design techniques used for physical goods and technologies do not work well for human and interactive services. This article describes one technique—service blueprinting—that has proven useful for service innovation. Service blueprinting is securely grounded in the customer's experience and it allows the clear visualization of dynamic service processes. The technique is described in detail including real case examples that illustrate the value and breadth of its applications.
Design work and design knowledge in Information Systems (IS) is important
for both research and practice. Yet there has been comparatively
little critical attention paid to the problem of specifying design
theory so that it can be communicated, justified, and developed cumulatively.
In this essay we focus on the structural components or anatomy of
design theories in IS as a special class of theory. In doing so,
we aim to extend the work of Walls, Widemeyer and El Sawy (1992)
on the specification of information systems design theories (ISDT),
drawing on other streams of thought on design research and theory
to provide a basis for a more systematic and useable formulation
of these theories. We identify eight separate components of design
theories: (1) purpose and scope, (2) constructs, (3) principles of
form and function, (4) artifact mutability, (5) testable propositions,
(6) justificatory knowledge (kernel theories), (7) principles of
implementation, and (8) an expository instantiation. This specification
includes components missing in the Walls et al. adaptation of Dubin
(1978) and Simon (1969) and also addresses explicitly problems associated
with the role of instantiations and the specification of design theories
for methodologies and interventions as well as for products and applications.
The essay is significant as the unambiguous establishment of design
knowledge as theory gives a sounder base for arguments for the rigor
and legitimacy of IS as an applied discipline and for its continuing
progress. A craft can proceed with the copying of one example of
a design artifact by one artisan after another. A discipline cannot.
Personas is an interaction design technique with considerable potential for software product development. In three years of use, our colleagues and we have extended Alan Cooper s technique to make Personas a powerful complement to other usability methods. After describing and illustrating our approach, we outline the psychological theory that explains why Personas are more engaging than design based primarily on scenarios. As Cooper and others have observed, Personas can engage team members very effectively. They also provide a conduit for conveying a broad range of qualitative and quantitative data, and focus attention on aspects of design and use that other methods do not.
A service science discipline to integrate across academic silos and advance service innovation more rapidly is discussed. Today services means jobs and growth, but the companies who have been leading the charge lack a strong conceptual foundation for their work and are now reaching out to academics. There are elements common across many different types of services that might form a foundation for services, including close interaction of supplier and customer, nature of knowledge created and exchanged, simultaneity of production and consumption, and exploitation of ICT and transparency. Services exchange involves a negotiated exchange between a provider and an adopter for the provision of intangible assets. Services exchange today involves many complex combinations of both codified and tacit knowledge. A number of European countries have done a great deal of work to understand the growth investment in services sector and to try to increase government investment in services.
The use of personas as a method for communicating user requirements in collaborative design environments is well established. However, very little research has been conducted to quantify the benefits of using this technique. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using personas. An experiment was conducted over a period of 5 weeks using students from NCAD. The results showed that, through using personas, designs with superior usability characteristics were produced. They also indicate that using personas provides a significant advantage during the research and conceptualisation stages of the design process (supporting previously unfounded claims). The study also investigated the effects of using different presentation methods to present personas and concluded that photographs worked better than illustrations, and that visual storyboards were more effective in presenting task scenarios than text only versions.
Background. The importance of information technology to current business practices has long drawn the attention of practitioners and academicians. Aim. This paper aims to broaden understanding about service innovation as a critical organizational capability through which information technology adoption influences the competitive advantage of a firm. In the context of financial firms, this study examines how information technology is adopted and managed to enhance service innovation practices and whether and how service innovation practices may influence the competitive advantage of firms.
Method. A research framework and the associated hypotheses are proposed. An empirical survey was conducted and questionnaires were mailed to 558 financial firms in Taiwan.
Analysis. A total of 124 valid observations was collected and analysed using the partial least squares technique.
Conclusion. . The results suggest that adopting information technology has positive effects on service innovation practices, which increase the competitive advantage of firms.