User Experience - From a Participant to an Activist
Mikko Sääskilahti, Anna Hebda · 2013
At a time of wireless networks and instant interaction it should be obvious that in most product and service development cases customers and users would have a creative role, but this is not yet happening. On the other hand, in some cases customers have an essential role in service design and even in production. In this paper we raise the question why some companies have strong interaction with their customers and why some companies don’t involve users in their processes. In the field of co-creation we also introduce a new concept called user activism. The aim of our research is to define possible ways of user activism and its role in a particular branch of business, namely, food and gastronomy. During our research we tried to understand what the potential of co-creation is and what consequences might be observed when consumers are not engaged. We found the food and gastronomy business fruitful for the examination of customer and user involvement in co-creation activities because of the close link of food and gastronomic services to everyday life. As a summary, we came up with two extremes where, at one end, co-creation and user involvement are in the heart of business, which leads to user activism. At the other end, the food product and service design are often still based on the company or owner idea and do not reflect consumers’ needs and creativity. In between these two extremes we also identified some crowdsourcing cases as well as more experimental and artistic types of service production.