User involvement in service design: A case study on designing a new service concept for cultural institutions

Recently, smartphones have been changing our daily lives by constant applications of new technologies and enabling new services. Cultural institutions are those institutions that usually embrace new approaches to help realize their missions. A multi-disciplinary team formed by students working toward a Master’s degree from Aalto University has been developing a new mobile service, as a start-up project, for cultural institutions by applying a relatively new technology. The challenges of developing this new service are to define the customer values for potential users, and creating a service system that involves different stakeholders. The aim of this thesis is to create a service concept that would allow the project team to describe the elements of the system and its usages to the client, particularly from the point of view of service design and cultural institutions. As a designer the author takes the responsibility to discover and present the future customer needs, and using different user involvement techniques to gather and analyze data from users, as well as integrating them into the service concept development process. This thesis presents an overview of user involvement in theories of human-centered design. The related user involvement techniques are analyzed from different theoretical aspects. Then it describes the application of a number of specific techniques through different stages of service concept development process. In the end a series of tools are presented to demonstrate the outcome service concept, which describe the service system, customer journey process, and implementing guideline for stakeholders.