From Transactions to Relationships: Making Sense of User-Centered Perspectives in Large Technology-Intensive Companies

In this paper we analyze interviews from four technology-intensive companies, focused on service and service development. All companies have during the last two decades introduced interaction design units, and the corporations were selected due to their interest in also expanding the service share of their business. This service shift has been a top-down initiative. However in only two companies, the initiatives have led to the establishment of enterprise wide service development processes, and in the other two companies, the service development is more ad hoc. It is argued that even if interaction design has close theoretical relation to service design such combination has so far been limited. We discuss the shift from product to service view of the offerings within these companies, and relate this to user-centered perspectives. We argue there is a window of opportunity within technology-intensive and engineering focused industries to include user-centered design when formalizing service development.