Sling TV

Service Design
What is Service Design?
For UX designers, journey maps are powerful tools used to visualize each step a person goes through when interacting with a product. The deliverable may include what touch-points the user is interacting with and the joys and pains they experience at each step. Journey maps are typical limited to a user's experience inside and outside a digital product.

A service design blueprint broadens this idea by including the service as a whole: from customers, to customer support, to engineers, and more. The goal of this exercise is to improves the experiences of both the user and employee by "optimizing an organization’s operations to better support customer journeys."
Cut the Cable without Compromise
Sling TV provides affordable streaming television that customers can watch anywhere on any device. Their mission is to help customers ditch the high costs and hidden fees, bloated channel packages, and unreliable customer service experiences of traditional cable and satellite providers.

As the sole designer on this effort, I worked directly with stakeholders from product management, internal Sling TV design, marketing, and engineering departments to visualize the current-state, end-to-end customer journey in an effort to highlight gaps in the experience and help the team in identifying future opportunities for improvement.
Showcase of personas created for Sling TV service design discovery

Research & Personas

Objectives
  • Who are the customers?
  • What are their needs?
  • What is their journey?
Results
In the brief 4-week effort, I spent over 15 hours interviewing stakeholders and participating in customer interview sessions in order to gain a more complete perspective on Sling TV’s vision and organizational structure. Using what I gathered from customer interviews and stakeholder expertise, I developed six proto-personas as a means for the team to have a shared understanding of users in terms of goals and capabilities.
A value proposition canvas that displays what Sling TV offers and what customers want

Value Proposition

Objectives
  • What is Sling’s value proposition?
  • How does the customer’s journey reveal gaps in the experience?
Results
    Based on the information gathered during the research phase, I constructed Sling TV’s value proposition using the Value Proposition Canvas. I used this output to to tell the story of Sling TV’s brand: what is the promise that their brand aims to deliver and how their current experience delivers on that promise.

    Brand Promise

    Sling TV is cable without the cord—watch only what you want, watch anywhere you want, and watch without being tied down.

    What's Working

    • Sling service is available and supported on multiple devices
    • No complicated installation processes
    • No long-term contacts and ability to pause service make customers feel that they aren’t ‘locked in’

    What's A Problem

    • Channel availability may not meet user’s expectations
    • Service interruptions
    • No long-term contacts means customers cannot receive refunds if dissatisfied with service
    “Despite me signing up with Sling, it didn't bother telling me that I wouldn’t actually be able to watch football through local channels"

    Via Reddit

    "It is slow to respond and the stream constantly stalls or stops completely."

    Via Facebook

    Conclusion

    A Broken Experience

    Disconnect in expectations, service interruptions, and a strict business model means users don’t feel valued.
    Panorama image of whiteboard containing dozens of sticky notes as a result of the service design workshop

    Workshop & Output

    Objectives
    • What roles do internal employees play in the customer’s journey?
    • How does Sling’s technology currently support the journey from both customer and internal perspectives?
    • How can Sling use the gaps in the customer’s journey to reveal opportunities to improve the overall experience?
    Results
    After identifying three key themes in the customer’s experience, a team of 20 across product, design, engineering, and marketing departments gathered to engage in a four-hour workshop, filling in blueprint from customer, internal process, and technology perspectives. Along the way, we examined the customer’s thought processes and identified pain points and technological deficiencies.

    The resulting service blueprint was digitized and socialized to key Sling TV stakeholders. The ultimate handout of the workshop was providing Sling TV’s research team with the tools to identify specific problem areas in the customer’s journey that they can further validate with users. The team could take this information to present the greater Sling TV product and engineering team with actionable areas to prioritize for the purpose of improving the customer’s experience.
    Workshop participants taking photos of service design workshop whiteboard

    Hypothesize & Validate

    Template

    We believe that providing [solution, service]
    through optimization of [people, process, technology]
    will likely result in [desired outcome, assumed effect].
    We believe that providing [solution, service] through optimization of [people, process, technology] will likely result in [desired outcome, assumed effect].

    Hypothesis

    We believe that providing a step-by-step package selection guide
    through optimization of Sling’s marketing site and product catalog
    will likely result in customer satisfaction in channel availability and expectations.

    We believe that providing a step-by-step package selection guide through optimization of Sling’s marketing site and product catalog will likely result in customer satisfaction in channel availability and expectations.

    We will know this when we see reduced same-day cancellation rates.

    One of two proposed wireframes for the homepage of Sling TV
    Two of two proposed wireframes for the channel selection guide of Sling TV

    Delivery

    We encouraged the team to continue the service design blueprint exercise, continuing to iterate on the customer journey and identify particular pain points within the journey to focus on. The team would then continue to highlight the people, processes, and technology that are attributed to the pain points. We urged the team to adopt a ‘prototype mindset’ which encourages rapid prototyping, ideation, and testing.

    The information gathered from the service design exercise proved an valuable tool the team could use to create hypotheses to validate with customer research, ideate solutions based on those hypotheses, develop low-fidelity prototypes and test with actual users.
    In the few weeks working with Sling TV, I was able to set the team up for future success by demonstrating the value of rapid research techniques, cross-functional collaboration, and a ‘not perfect, just enough’ approach to ideating and testing solutions.