dott07.com: Bad Service Design?
Delivering a good service may also include providing a clearly structured website. In the case of dott07.com, we already realised during our research on the festival, the projects and the region that the website offers an overwhelming amount of information. There are lots of different topics and layers of information, there are articles, project descriptions and interviews mixed with articles from the official Dott 07 Blog. Then there’s all the information on what and who Dott is, how the actual festival is structured, what there is to see, but only very few fixed dates. As Dott 07 isn’t the only event taking place in Newcastle this month, there is also a description of the surrounding design events.
That’s all very well meant, but unfortunatelly a really good example of bad service design. More than once, we ended up quite frustrated when visiting the website. It failed to provide us with the “hard facts” we were looking for. It failed to give us an idea of what to expect when we got to Newcastle. It failed to get us excited about visiting the event. It failed to draw a vibrant image of the Dott 07 Festival.
And so it’s not too surprising that we followed the wrong directions on our first trip to the Dott 07 Festival. When we got off the bus at Monument and had walked a few metres, we were delighted to find stickers on the pavement advertising “design event”. Following the stickers and the really well designed street map (divided into squares representing approximately 4 minutes walk) and finding promising “launch”-stickers on the way, we arrived at Robert Stephenson Centre.
We did wonder, why the red branding of Dott 07 was so unimposing compared to the yellow design event branding. We soon found out that we were entering “Our friends in the North”, an exhibition showcasing renowned, cutting-edge graphic design from designers who were originally from the North East or trained in the region and not the actual Dott 07 Festival.
The display was quite impressive – the exhibits as well as the location. There were posters, CD covers and bookets for well-known artists, advertising banners, books, catalogues … all very explorative and experimental. So, in the end, we did somehow profit from the bad service design of dott07.com, as we probably wouldn’t have visited “Our friends in the North” otherwise.
Oktober 17th, 2007 19:54
Nice story, fun to read! And I agree that there was not much of an orientation on DOTT 07 in advance. And may be there will be some “non intentional service design” reflektions to be made! And by the way - did you ever get a feedback on your reservation for city camping… if yes, you are probably freezing in the tents now.
Oktober 18th, 2007 07:08
GoogleAlerts sent me your comments at this blog. Now that is a clever service.
You make a fair point: the co-existence of two events - Dott07, and DesignEvent is, indeed, confusing. Also to us!
This strange situaton is a result of confused politics more than confused servce design - but that is no excuse. I apologise for the inconvenience.
Do make contact if you would like help meeting the service designers behind the projects. + 44 7738 546 433
And today (Thursday 18th) we have a debate on movement, access and services that you should find interesting (13h Baltic Level 1).
Oktober 18th, 2007 10:46
[…] We really hope to catch them later to follow up on their theses and to get some more insights into Dott. By the way, have you already seen the comment John Thackara wrote here? […]