About

We live in a digital world where the spectrum of services is delivered across various marketing channels and technical platforms. This is challenging not only for the customer, because of the many channels and contact points services are delivered through, but also for the service provider who is responsible to develop and maintain the services.

Service Design is an emerging field that seeks to innovate or improve services to make them more useful and desirable for consumers and efficient and effective for organisations. Service Design provides excellent methods for developing ideas and service concepts, but lacks efficient support for specification and realization of these concepts within the framework of existing infrastructure services portfolio and organization.

Project main idea

The main idea of the VISUAL project is to develop a visual language supported by methods and tools for service design. The language will enable specification, implementation and maintenance of new and existing services through a common terminology and extensive use of visualization. This will ease the cross-departmental communication and provide a common language for customer experience.

In the first phase of the project we will identify key terminology, establish definitions and a basic visual design to describe customer interactions. Further more we will conduct workshops to get deep insight into company service portfolios and needs, in order to plan and conduct case studies for evaluation of the visual language.

Project facts

• Project responsible partner: Halogen AS
• Project industry partners: Hafslund Strøm AS, FINN.no AS, DIPS ASA
• Project research partners: SINTEF ICT (technical responsible) and Linköpings University (Sweden)
• Project official start date: September 1, 2012
• Project duration: 3,5 years

The VISUAL project is funded by The Research Council of Norway through the programme User-driven Research based Innovation (BIA). This programme funds industry-oriented research and has no thematic restrictions. Companies may apply for partial funding of R&D projects, provided that they invest substantial own efforts in the project. Read more about the BIA programme here.