Takehiko Ohno’s research while affiliated with NTT DATA Corporation and other places

More and more companies are applying service design approaches to develop services and products. Not every project, however, has achieved its goals. In many cases, difficulties arise from organizational issues such as organization structure and evaluation system. In this research, we held workshops where success and failure factors of service design projects in organization are presented. By analyzing the results, we construct a model that explains the “difficulties of deploying the service design approach in organization.” On the basis of the model, this paper discusses the challenges to the deployment of the service design approach in organizations.

To develop services that are attractive to users, it is important to refine the service design iteratively by obtaining evaluations of the service from users from the earliest stages. NTT Service Evolution Laboratories has developed Concept Tailor, which supports iterative design and applies a rule that divides service concepts into four stages. This article introduces the process of realizing a service concept using this tool.

Devising new service ideas for information systems by deploying user-involvement approaches is a challenging task. The power of collective creation by involving users in designing systems has attracted attention; however, stakeholders with no design training face critical challenges in generating ideas. In this paper, by exemplifying our user-involvement method with game elements, ICT Service Design Game, in comparison with conventional brainstorming, we show the impact of constraints and rules in user-involvement methods when creating service concepts and specifications for information systems. The analysis is based on a comparative experiment on two design methods and shows that the constraints and rules of our game approach fostered innovative idea generation in spite of participants’ limited knowledge of and experience with design processes. Although our analysis is still in a preliminary stage, it indicates some positive impact of constraints and rules in design methods, especially when the methods are used by non-design professionals.

This paper describes an enhanced participatory process created to support a regional vitalization project run by residents of a local community in Japan. The experiences and lessons learned during this project are shared. Since the local residents were unaccustomed to participatory design, it was a challenge to motivate them to contribute to the project as project members for extracting local information from them, creating and refining ideas with them, and putting the ideas into practice with them. In order to tackle above challenges, we also proposed and utilized some new participatory design methods in this case study.

This paper proposes a novel system that displays diverse information fragments to enhance troubleshooting efficiency. We focus on supporting the technicians performing on-site network troubleshooting by developing a knowledge management system. Most prior work assumes that the professional technicians know the precise terms suitable for accessing keyword-based search systems. A six day ethnographic study and a laboratory experiment find that keyword-based search is not efficient for supporting on-site network troubleshooting. We derive three design requirements from these studies, (1)Display diverse information fragments for divergent thinking, (2)Support of veering between causes and symptoms to stimulate convergent thinking and (3)Navigation system for getting information quickly. A prototype based on these design requirements is created. We believe this research can be used to troubleshoot other complex systems similar to networks where there are many components that must be coordinated.

Historically, Participatory Design (PD) was introduced and applied in the Scandinavian and American context as a practical design method for collective creativity and stakeholder involvement. In this paper, by fusing game elements into PD, we suggest a first step towards a culturally independent PD method called the ICT Service Design Game to ease the prevailing concern that PD has limited applicability in other cultural settings. We conduct four experiments on ICT Service Design Game in Scandinavia and Asia to evaluate its feasibility. The experiments identify some differences in the PD process and the created Persona characteristics, probably due to cultural differences. Of more interestingly, despite these process differences, the game elements of our PD variant were found to promote the key values of PD in culturally diverse settings by stimulating idea creation and participation. Our experiments imply that the introduction of game elements allows PD to be effectively utilized in culturally diverse settings.

Historically, Participatory Design (PD) was introduced and applied in the Scandinavian and American context as a practical design method for collective creativity and stakeholder involvement. In this paper, by fusing game elements into PD, we suggest a first step towards a culturally independent PD method called the ICT Service Design Game to ease the prevailing concern that PD has limited applicability in other cultural settings. We conduct four experiments on ICT Service Design Game in Scandinavia and Asia to evaluate its feasibility. The experiments identify some differences in the PD process and the created Persona characteristics, probably due to cultural differences. Of more interestingly, despite these process differences, the game elements of our PD variant were found to promote the key values of PD in culturally diverse settings by stimulating idea creation and participation. Our experiments imply that the introduction of game elements allows PD to be effectively utilized in culturally diverse settings.

One of the key factors we should consinder in designing the new ICT services that provide high user experience is environment. In this paper, we show two example in which the use of ICT service strongly depends on the environment in which the service is provided. We then propose an environment-centered approach for desinging ICT services. Traditional user-centered approaches like the persona-scenario method focus on the user domain, but environmental factors are considered in little while designing servies. We found, however, that service use is diversed drastially in the different environments. We have started to examine the proposed approach for ICT service design. A preliminary finding is that we can focus on environmental factors, especially, the environmental difference at different times, which is not considered explicitly in the traditional user-centered approach.

Clearly picturing user behavior is one of the key requirements when designing successful interactive software. However, covering all possible user behaviors with one UI is a complex challenge. The Scenario-based Interactive UI Design tool is designed to support the characterization of user behavior based on scenarios and then using the information in UI design. Scenarios make it easy to understand and share user behavior even if we have little design knowledge. However, they have two big weaknesses; 1) integrating several scenarios in one UI is difficult, even if we can create appropriate scenarios, 2) maintaining the links between scenarios and the UI is a heavy task in iterative design. Our tool solves the above problems through its hierarchical scenario structure and visualized overview of scenarios. It enhances the designer's skill in writing scenarios and designing UIs smoothly and easily.