1. The Human Side of Service Science,
Engineering and Management
Challenges and Justifications for A User-
Centric Quality Model of Services and Service
Systems
Ahmed Seffah
Keynote talk for the Second International
Conference on Exploring Services Sciences,
Geneva, February 16, 2011

2. Human-Centric Quality Model
For today, how/for what and not why?

3. Agenda
 Quality attributes and model of services
and service systems
 Implications on/for human-centric service
design
 Persona, measures and patterns as
design tools

4. Motivations
 Software and service
 Service as a software
 Service systems and software systems
 Service-oriented engineering
 Where previously objects were linked to
compose software systems,
 We now see the emergence of independent
services that can be put together dynamically at
run time to form a system of services

5. Motivations
Service Systems
Technology side Service Systems
 SOA, Web services such as directory Service
services, description languages, and
invocation standards, Universal Service
Description, Discovery and Integration
(UDDI), Web Services Description Service
Language (WSDL), and the Simple Object
Access Protocol (SOAP)
Human
Human side
 The interfaces and interactions between
Human
the services, service systems and/or
service developers, providers, brokers,
users consumers and the many other Human
stakeholders

6. What is service systems quality?
A service system is a configuration of
hardware, software, information,
technology and organizational
networks designed to deliver services
that satisfy the needs and aspirations
of customers.

7. The back and front side of service
systems quality

8. The back side

9. The front side: the human and the
multiple user interfaces

10. Existing service quality model
SERVQUAL
 Service quality can be measured as the gap between
the service that customers expect and the
performance they perceive to have received.
 Respondents rate their expectations of service
from an excellent organization, and then rate the
performance they received
 Service quality is calculated as the difference in
the two scores where better service quality
results in a smaller gap (Landrum, Prybutok,
Kappelman, & Zhang, 2008).

11. The 10 aspects of service quality in
EVALQUAL
 Reliability, responsiveness, competence,
access, courtesy, communication, credibility,
security, understanding or knowing the customer
and tangibles
 Nyeck, S., Morales, M., Ladhari, R., & Pons, F.
(2002). "10 years of service quality
measurement: reviewing the use of the
SERVQUAL instrument."

12. Other models
 Variants of SERVIQUAL such as
SERVPERF
 Satisfaction questionnaire
 Key indicators performance (KPIs)
 ISO standards such as ISO 9000, ISO
9126, etc.

13. Drawbacks
 Traditional versus computerized
(electronic or SasS) services
 Patterns of human experience and behaviors
 New factors are emerging
 Trust, privacy, universality,
 Predictive measures
 Assess frequently and as early as possible is
better
 Lack of tools and standardized benchmarks for
testing

14. Beside quality models, design
patterns …
 Proven solutions for well-known problems
that occurs in several usage contexts and
projects

15. Trustfulness
McKnight & Chervany (1996)
 Trust is the extent to which and individual
or an organization is willing to depend on
something (e.g service or system) or
somebody (human, organization) in a
given context with a feeling of relative
security and safety, even though negative
consequences are possible.

16. Pattern of trustfulness
 Online shopping takes place between parties who have never transacted
with each other before, in an environment
 The service consumer often has insufficient information about the
service provider, and about the goods and services offered.
 E.g. The consumer generally has no opportunity to see and try
products, i.e. to “squeeze the oranges”, before he buys.
 The service provider, on the other hand, knows exactly what he gets, as
long as he is paid in money.
 Face to face communication patterns cannot be applied, call us, we will
help you! Also does not work
 (Barnes et Vidgen, 2001a ; Bressolles, 2002a; Wolfinbarger et Gilly, 2002)
proposed a design pattern
 If the consumer can not try the product or service in advance, he can be
confident that it will be what he expects as long as he or she gets all the
information online.
 The pattern indicate how much, when and how to make visible the
information

17. Privacy
 Privacy is the ability of an individual or a
group of people (an organization, a
community) to stop information about
themselves from becoming known to an
individual, a group of people and
organization other than those they choose
to give the information to

18. Pattern of privacy and reputation
 It is difficult, if not impossible, to complete a transaction
without revealing some personal data – a shipping
address, billing information, or product preference.
 Users may be unwilling to provide this necessary
information or even to browse online
 (Hafiz, 2006) suggeted four design patterns that can aide
the decision making process for the designers of privacy
protecting systems.
 These patterns are applicable to the design of anonymity
systems for various types of online communication,
online data sharing, location monitoring, voting and
electronic cash management.

19. Universality
 Universality is the ability to supporting a broad
range of hardware, software, and network
access and accommodating users with different
skills, knowledge, age, gender, handicaps,
literacy, culture, income, while bridging the user
knowledge gap between what users know and
what they need to know

20. Patterns for universality
 Sorry, I do not have
it yet
Ph.D thesis
 Designing a
universal online
service: investigating
patterns for universal
design
 Facebook, twitter,
yahoo, etc. are good
examples of
universal services

21. But…
 We need to assess the quality of design
patterns as well

22. The three legs of a user-centric
quality model of services

23. When (Practices), What (Factors) and Who
(Human) in the Design Loop
Factors
1. Usability
Human
2. Effec4veness
• End-­‐Users
3. Efficiency
• Indirect-­‐users
Prac%ces
4. Sa4sfac4on
Stakeholders
 Usage
• Human
factors
/HCI
expert
5. Learnability
• UI
developers
6. Universality
• Programmers
 Requirements
• Analysts
 Design
7. Acceptability
• Technical
support
 Evolu4on
8. Adop4veness
• Educators
 Maintenance
• Managers
9. TrusPulness
 Management
• Providers
 Governance
10. Safety
• Brokers
 Deployment
11. Usefulness
• Etc.
 Marke4ng
12. Privacy
 Quality
assurance
13. Sustainability
 Process
improvement
14. Comprehension
15. Accountability

24. Quality model components
 A set of factors
 15 factors
 A list of criteria which are
measurable sub-factors
 30 criteria
 A large repository of measures
both qualitative and quantitative Factors
 50 measures
Criteria
 The related techniques to collect
Measure
and analyze data
 Data are collected using final Data
service, Final service or service system
Design artifacts

25. Not just…
 Services
 Service systems
But,
 Early design artifacts: prototypes, storyboards,
sketches,
 Engineering documents: requirement portfolio,
business plan

26. Example 1: Design of ATM services
Factors

27. Example 2: Usability Evaluation of ATM
services

28. User/usage-centered design

29. Understanding and modeling user
and user experiences
 Identify and examine the different types of
people who could play a role
 A persona contains information about a
fictitious, archetypical person who holds
an interest in the service.
 User Knowledge, skills, and abilities
 goals, motives, and concerns
 Usage patterns that a user would have of the
system.

30. Patrick

31. Scenario of usage, behavioral path

32. Human-centric service design: The
whole picture
 Scenario + persona as a platform for
human engagement and service consumer
experiences modeling
 Patterns as a tool to derive service system
from scenarios and persona
 Quality model to assess and predict
quality in use of services and service
systems

33. Conclusion
 Bridging the front and the back side in
service design
 Closing the gap between disciplines as
stated by SSME manifesto

34. Further reading
 Adding User Experience into the Interactive Service
Design Loop: A Persona-Based Method, Behavior and
Information Technology Journal
 P2P Mapper: A Tool for Modeling User Experiences and
Deriving User-Experience Driven Designs. AIS
Transaction on Human Computer Interaction

35. Join us…
 Special Session on HCI concerns in Service Engineering. First
Conference on the Human Side of Service Engineering, Jan Jose,
July 2011
 Workshop on HCI concerns in Service Design and Engineering
 2011 Edition - Software as a Service: A User Experience Design
Perspective
In conjunction with
 IEEE SERVICES 2011 – The Seventh World Congress on
Services, July 5-10, 2011, Washington DC, USA
 INTERACT 2011 – 13th IFIP-TC 13 Conference on Human
Computer Interaction September 5-9, 2011, Lisbon, Portugal
