Putting the customer back in the center of SOA with service design and user-centered design

Abstract

This article introduces a methodology used for designing the online presence of a Swiss SME providing Cloud Services. The Web application used for the purchasing and administration, backed by a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), has been designed to be customer-centric using a combination of different techniques borrowed from the fields of ethnomethodology, service design and user-centered design. The tools employed include service blueprint design and affinity diagram analysis followed by prototyping and subsequent usability evaluation. This collaborative methodology explained with the help of the applied research project use case is seen to yield excellent results in terms of customer-orientation. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.