Information Systems and Service Design (Fall 2011) UC Berkeley, School of Information

Front-end designers, back-end developers, marketing, customer service, and many other participants in service system design or operation each employ some set of qualitative or quantitative techniques to model the actor, customer, or user of the service. Unfortunately, each of these models has some limitations of its own and even worse, collectively the models can be inconsistent and incompatible. For example, user interface and user experience designers often create one or more ‘‘personas,’’ fictional characters that represent typical customers or user groups for a product or service. In contrast, marketing or customer support organizations use “hard data” to segment a customer base into different groups using demographic and psychographic variables.