Yesterday's lecture, held by Master Board's senior consultant Francesca Foglieni, aimed at introducing the topic of service evaluation as an emerging field of study for the service design discipline. During the day, students have been presented with key concepts of the evaluation practice and with reflections on the role that evaluation can have throughout the different phases of the service design process.
Service evaluation is a strategy aimed at determining the value of a service with the purpose of enabling a learning process that can foster the service transformation. Since it is context-dependent, it needs to be designed to involve decision-makers and other stakeholders. To contextualize the strategy means to deal with the evaluation variables, such as the evaluation objectives, the time of evaluation, the perspective of evaluation, and of course the object of evaluation (indicators). Like almost all the other topics related to service design, it needs a practical and learning-by-doing approach to be better understood. So, as an exercise, students have been asked to experiment on concepte valuation, by using an existing evaluation tool. In particular, the exercise applied to the evaluation of concepts generated by students in the previous Concept Generation Pill, in order to hypothetically select the best idea to be further developed and finally implemented. The tool selected for the exercise allowed students to learn how to set up an evaluation strategy and discuss evaluation results.
Thanks to this course, students have acquired basics about the meaning and the role of evaluation, and how it can apply to service design practice: when to run evaluation in the service design process, how to turn user research into evaluative research, and how to structure a service evaluation strategy.
