Future maintenance service (temporary name)

Inspiration

Do you remember the very first time you saw a horror movie? The feeling of uncertainty, unease, tension in your body not knowing what’s going to happen but yet sensing that something bad is going to happen. This description also happens to be what we discovered as users’ worst experience with maintenance services. Our team tackled the challenge and time restriction with applying Human-centered design (HCD), involving the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process. Using the double diamond method helped us understand the brief. Our work was based on a core set of values that influenced our process and helped us deliver an innovative solution. We also put significant time and effort into team building, defining our team culture, storytelling, co-creation and having fun in the process.

Research

The research part consisted in making a survey available at : https://jasminaaleksic.typeform.com/report/c62QkD/HqoBFa43AiwZbt8i and interviewing people over the phone. From this research, we discovered several key insights:

The current maintenance service fails the customer in providing help
Customer service rarely holds up to its name due to lack of empathy
Most of the effort and frustration stems from general lack of knowledge from the users. Inspired by these insights, our team’s challenge statement is as follows : “How might we improve the customer experience in devices breaking down by building for people a communication bridge with appliances in order to disrupt the maintenance service”

What it does

Let’s make the invisible visible which can be very helpful when people don’t know what to believe in an uncertain world. How about building a communication bridge between you and your everyday appliances and creating a maintenance service making it possible for your appliance to tell you what’s wrong and lets you know what the problem is. Users often have no clue about the origin of the problem and this has to change!

What if the maintenance service is omnipresent and communicates with you through appliances. This is more than the regular smart home system that you can ‘control’ your appliances through a smartphone. Smart home system is focused on convenience and control. But we need to think more about empathy and addressing the human aspect.

How it works:

Gathering of data from appliances : This includes sensor data, as well as qualitative data from user input. The qualitative data will go through parsing trees and sentiment analysis to standardize the data for future comparison with data from other devices.
Predictive maintenance :
- Using past data (see above), gathered from other similar devices all over the world.
- Reduce surprise element. It will be possible for our system to report potential failures to the user, thus avoiding the unpleasant surprise element.
- Maintenance will be better prepared, reducing down time
- The customer is less involved in the repair process
Using big data and various machine learning techniques for more efficient automated diagnosis In addition to predictive maintenance, collecting this database of sensory data and treatments will allow us to compare the sensory data from a certain incidents to similar past incidents and generate an adequate diagnosis.
Communicating personalized responses to the user. Natural language processing, Calendar data, One way to craft empathy is to make this experience effortless from the user perspective. This means that all activities that the user doesn’t need to do or is bad at doing will be done by our devices in the background.

How we built it (tools of the design process)

Team canvas Survey Interviews Insights Pattern finding Formulating the challenge statement Ideation (Eg. Idea parking lot) Value proposition canvas

Challenges we ran into:

Understanding the brief Dealing with the business aspect Business viability Applying design thinking

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Applying design thinking Thinking outside the box Being open minded We had research to lean on during the process Facilitate the double diamond process Creating a value for our solution

What we learned

Design thinking Recognizing empathy as a driving force design Putting the human in the center of the design Team building and knowing how to work with one another is super important