How to design service based on sets of recurrent user activites

What is it about?

A longstanding assumption in design research has been that successful design requires a deep understanding of the user's activities. In this paper we show how designers can identify sets of recurrent user activities, and how an understanding of such activity sets can be used as an input for service design. In contrast to previous research, we do not focus on diving deep into specific contexts for user behavior, but rather define activities as units of behavior that the user can initiate in many different environments and contexts. As a practical example, we show how a recruitment company applied the new approach to understand users' different job-seeking activities, using it to come up with a new digital recruitment tool.

Featured Image

Photo by Akson on Unsplash

Photo by Akson on Unsplash

Why is it important?

We introduce a new way to collect user information for service design. By studying how users understand their own sets of recurring activities, we are able to expand the lens for service design beyond traditional user-service interactions, or fixed contexts or locations.