Interview with Hegle Sarapuu-Johanson on service design

Hegle Sarapuu-Johanson: “We're looking for a balance between how to provide a service to people, whether it's commercially sustainable, how expensive it is, and whether the technology will enable us to achieve our goals.”

Photo: Trinidad Wiseman Collection

As an innovation manager and founder, you have been at the forefront of internet service developments for a couple of decades. Risto Siilasmaa, founder of the Finnish cyber-security company F-Secure, has said that people in the technology sector need a higher purpose to operate. Do you also have a higher purpose that motivates you?

Yes, I do. There must be a target of some kind. A question arises: why am I doing this? I don't think that if everything is fine today, there are no problems, and then inevitably, one day, when I'm old, I'll wake up and think that I should have organised my life better. I wouldn't want to have any regrets later. What motivates me is that when I am old and need more different services, I would like the country I live in to have reached a certain level of maturity regarding these services. All so that I would be able to manage on my own without having to call in my whole family for help. Being able to manage on one’s own with dignity is essential.

However, other than egoism, it would be nice if we made wiser decisions as a society. The decisions should be analysed and data-driven, not based on random opinions. It is the topic of a smart future that resonates with us most in Trinidad Wiseman. Our aim is to make informed decisions, and that is what we want to achieve in the organisation and society at large.

Trinidad Wiseman will soon be 20 years old, and during those years, tremendous technological advances have guided the development of service design. Could you share your thoughts on how service design has changed over the last twenty years?

Twenty years ago, design hardly played a role in our industry. Websites looked pretty awful back then. There were a few digital agencies that could more or less handle the tools for layout and design, and that was one of the reasons people went to them. The people who were designing digital systems at the time were not usually trained designers, but they were willing to experiment with different tools, and the end result looked a little better. At the same time, there was often a lack of understanding of the correct use of colour, and the creation of web services tended to be skewed towards developers - at times, there was even a sense of hostility towards design, as it was felt that involving designers in projects would create unnecessary costs and make development more expensive.

On your Inspiration Day, there was a pretty good illustrative explanation of this through the metaphor of the three-legged stool chair – the stool's three legs are the product owner, the analyst, and the designer. So was it more of a two-legged stool in the beginning, where the leg of the designer was non-existent or limped badly?

At the time, there was often a shortage of product owners. There may have been a project manager, but at the same time, a lot of the burden fell on the shoulders of the analyst, who had to wring the information out of the product owner or their organisation to see what they really wanted. Meetings in those days were more about someone enforcing their will. There was no such thing as first making a prototype and then developing it. Overall, it was kind of a wild, wild west. Slowly, everyone learned and got better.

But even since those days, service design in Estonia has been led by the public sector. Namely, the public sector has been at the forefront of service design, user-centric design, user engagement, and information systems development. Even today, the private sector uses less design and service design than the public sector.

When we started Trinidad Consulting (ed: before Trinidad Wiseman), we started talking about usability, but we didn't talk about user experience, and we definitely didn't talk about service design. From the idea of usability came the World Usability Day - an annual conference on user experience, web and interaction design, which we have been organising in Estonia together with co-organizers and sponsors since 2008. In the beginning, there were about 40 people, and today, it has grown into a significant event with 600 participants. That is also where we started talking about it not being the user’s fault when they do not understand how something works. And so, this knowledge of the usability of service design has been growing.

Technology has, of course, radically changed the way we use the internet today. The advent of the touchscreen and working with it is something else entirely. I remember when we bought the first iPhone for the company; it changed our world dramatically - when we were sitting in the pub in the evening, it was able to quickly end all arguments.

Moreover, everything is connected to the internet nowadays, and there are only very few offline services. Twenty years ago, connecting to the internet was expensive, complicated, and inconvenient. We were lucky enough that our internet connection wasn’t offered on a bit-and-byte basis like how it was in Latvia. It also created a very different set of preconditions for how services are to be created.

"Usability and interaction design conference" - can you explain what exactly interaction design is?

In short, interaction design deals with human-computer interaction. The term actually originates from the military industry, where, during the war, anyone could become an aircraft pilot. More and more pilots were needed, as the previous ones were often lost in battle. There was no time, and the pilots had very little experience. It was discovered that the more user-friendly it is to fly in an aircraft, the quicker the new pilots can learn. It later became a separate scientific discipline, studying how people react to things, what they use and how they use it.

So, from the physical world, this research also made its way to the world of computers, albeit initially at an academic level. In the US, this led to the development of web design patterns that are still largely in use worldwide. And the more people use something, the more they assume how things should work.

What needs to be taken into account when designing services?

When talking about usability, we are not only talking about the end-user, but also the official or customer service agent providing the service. The experience of the so to say intermediary is also essential for the service as a whole. Their experience will influence the way they serve the end user as well.

What we do as designers is seek balance. We're looking for a balance between how to provide a service to people, whether it's commercially sustainable, how expensive it is, and whether the technology will enable us to achieve our goals. So, we create a prototype and go through the process systematically to find the balance. We will not maximise on any particular issue, for it is not the optimal solution. The interface can be very beautiful but, at the same time, very difficult to use. The service must be easy to use.

In addition, as has been said, there are design patterns and user expectations for environments. The challenge for designers is to make systems that meet people's expectations. When a designer wants to innovate on a major scale, people can end up in environments that behave in a completely different and incomprehensible way. Real services cannot be provided that way. The success of your business may not come from what your self-service environment looks like, but from how well and how smoothly the whole system works in the background. The quality of a service can be judged by how it works across all touchpoints.

As service designers, we must consider different technologies and people's preferences. Questions arise about how multidisciplinary the team is that builds the service, whether or not they can handle the hardware, whether or not they are able to develop on top of it, whether or not they understand all the possibilities of, for example, machine learning or other technologies like virtual or augmented reality.

Someone recently said that they saw a child in a city trolley looking out the window. The child spotted something interesting outside and started trying to zoom in on the trolley window with their fingers, trying to get a better view of the object. The world of technology has evolved rapidly, and we now have virtual reality, augmented reality, and, most recently, the arrival of a new giant, artificial intelligence. Do you also take these developments into account when planning new services?

Yes, we do. We have our own vision of what e-service will be like in the future and where it will go. Today, when we talk about electronic services, we are talking about services that are proactive, meaning they are offered before you yourself realise you need them. If your account is about to be closed or your document is about to expire, you will receive a notification before it expires.

Looking ahead, I think we are moving from proactive services to predictive services, i.e., services that estimate the probability of an event happening. In Estonia, for example, the gene base of most of the population has been mapped, and we are aware of the statistical probability of how many people are more likely to get cancer. A predictive service would basically say that if a person continues with a particular lifestyle, they are more likely to get cancer. A person who would hypothetically receive such a notification would probably be deeply disturbed.

Similarly, it is possible to predict school drop-out rates with a fairly high probability. Machine learning models can predict such things.

We are missing this great service that allows us to intervene before it is too late. A lot has to change in society for it to be available to provide such services. We are going back to the physical; we have to consider people’s potential emotions. We need a different approach, and we need to ensure that this different approach is delivered in a way that respects the recipient. If we provide a service that interferes with a person's life to this extent, that person must be able to trust the service provider.

Service design today is not yet ready for the kind of things that technology's many possibilities theoretically have to offer.

For the near future, the country has set out a slogan to double the economy by 2030. Clearly, such an objective cannot be achieved solely on the basis of the internal market. We need to trade across borders. In the European Union, we are subject to EU rules on web accessibility as well as cybersecurity requirements for businesses. How would one deal with this?

Growing the economy and the market depends on how effectively we can deliver our products and services and whether the market grows. It is also possible to increase turnover without increasing costs. But this cannot simply be done just like that - activities need to be systematised and automated. Unfortunately, it has to be said that Estonians, as far as the private sector is concerned, are rather timid when it comes to automation. If we look at the statistics, Estonian companies are not at the forefront of digitalisation in Europe - they would rather take on two more employees when their workload increases.

When building systems, you need to bring in experts who have familiarised themselves with the issues that require them to operate in Europe or the broader market. We can recruit people with different skills to our team. For example, you can't deal with accessibility if you don't have someone on your team who knows about it. It is much easier to ask an expert than to start learning the ropes yourself.

One person can't be an expert in cybersecurity, service design, etc. If you want to build the capacity to grow your business quickly, it makes sense to turn to professional service designers.