Giving Compass' Take:

• Governments are turning to service design, a method of design focused on attractive and easy to use casings so that more people will successfully use the products. 

• Government work has traditionally been on the lowest possible budget, how has this impeded the success of government programs? How can cost be weighed with impact to find more effective implementation strategies for government programs? 

• Find out how Massachusetts is using data to improve social programs. 

When Apple opened its first store in 2001, the company’s attention to design and customer satisfaction permeated the whole experience. The payoff was a windfall for the world’s largest tech company. Ariel Kennan worked for Apple in those early retail years, and she became a convert to what the company called “service design.”

Now Kennan is putting her Apple experience to work in a dramatically different context. She is in New York City, running the new Service Design Studio at the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity. She is convinced that what worked to sell computers can work to make municipal government better at responding to fundamental human needs.

More simply put, the service design concept reimagines customer relations for both business and government. It’s not a quest for efficiency, or for constant repetition of time-honored practices. It’s focused on the end user, and on enticing customers who have varying degrees of knowledge and experience to interact with a service and stay long enough to fully engage.

Read the full article on service design by J. Brian Charles at Governing.