Conference article

Service co-design with users offers great potential for companies. However; it can be difficult to reach potential users and only a small group can be involved in face-to-face co-design sessions. Online tools offer new possibilities for co-designing services with larger user groups regardless of time and place. This paper presents a case study; in which 36 users participated in the online co-design of a city adventure service and six of them also tested a service prototype in the real world. We studied how online ideation and face-to-face testing can be combined; and how the different methods support each other. Online ideation proved to be an effective method for collecting users’ general expectations and provided inspiration for development; whereas face-to-face service testing resulted with more concrete development suggestions. The results suggested that the combination of online co-design and real world testing leads to rich and extensive user input.

Co-design; consumer services; online ideation; service testing