Understanding how people experience service: A design research case study about airport security
My colleagues and I at the People and Systems Lab, QUT, have been investigating what people do in airports as part of a very large research project called “Airports of the Future“. We’ve been paying particular attention to how security screening works and how people get through the screening process.
In airport security screening the rules on which the system runs are complex and distributed among the security screening staff, the various security machines, and the passengers. When the service runs smoothly, servers, machines and passengers apply the rules of the service in the same way. When there’s a mis-match in how the rules are understood the service slows down, stalls, or fails until everyone and everything involved can be re-aligned. These breakdowns in the service, and how the service recovers, are especially useful for understanding how the service is enacted and how people experience and understand it.
Building on the concept of ‘mental models’ and the related concepts of ‘frames’ and ‘scripts’ I’ll use examples from our research to explain how we go about understanding the rules on which airport security screening runs and how passengers understand (or don’t understand) the service. I’ll discuss how we make sense of the complexity of service, from how we investigate it, to how we describe and model it.
This talk will show how we use Design Research techniques to understand a complex service and will be relevant to designers and UX practitioners who are interested in, or practicing, service design.
