How to Improve Product & Service Design with the AEIOU Framework

Across every economic sector, businesses offer one or both of the following: goods and services.

Goods are tangible objects, such as grain, clothing, or computers. Services, like cab rides or hotel stays, are intangible. Unlike goods, services can’t be owned, and they’re often produced and consumed simultaneously.

Because of these intangible qualities, it’s even more critical for companies to clearly define and continually improve their services.

“I define service as the business of people helping people,” says Harvard Business School Professor Ryan Buell, who teaches the online course Transforming Customer Experiences. “The best leaders in every kind of organization get out of bed every day thinking about how they can help their people be more helpful—to the clients, or customers they serve, [or] to their colleagues.”

Buell’s recommended approach for improving service products is an analytic framework called AEIOU, which is explored in-depth in Transforming Customer Experiences. Through AEIOU, you can further hone service products for the betterment of your customers, employees, and business.

Utilizing the AEIOU Framework

“When the context around a service organization shifts, the question isn’t, ‘How could we do what we do just as well?’ It’s, ‘How could we do it better?’” Buell says in Transforming Customer Experiences.

To answer that question, he turns to the AEIOU framework, which helps businesses reimagine their service design and customer experience through five key lenses:

• Activities: What customers and employees do at each stage of the service process
• Environments: The physical settings where services take place, such as stores for retailers, planes for airlines, or hotels for hospitality providers
• Interactions: How customers and employees engage with one another
• Objects: The tools and technologies your company uses to deliver the service, including digital platforms such as websites and apps
• Users: All the individuals involved in the service process, including customers and employees, plus various stakeholders, like managers

AEIOU improves your service product by enhancing the customer and employee experience. In service businesses, these are closely connected, so creating positive outcomes for customers begins with creating positive experiences for employees.

AEIOU in Practice

By examining your service product through the AEIOU lenses, you can more effectively identify areas for improvement. For example, say you operate an ice cream shop and want to enhance your service offerings. Before a service can be improved, it must be clearly defined, which is often done through a service blueprint. At an ice cream shop, a typical service blueprint would include a variation of the following steps:

• A customer enters the store
• The vendor engages with the customer
• The vendor offers samples
• The customer places an order
• The vendor scoops the ice cream
• Both parties move to the register
• The customer pays for their ice cream
• The customer leaves

With this service blueprint in mind, imagine you’re introducing a new seasonal flavors initiative. While the flavors are tangible goods that require their own quality control measures, the process of providing those flavors is a service experience.

To evaluate this new initiative's effectiveness, consider the following questions you might seek to answer using the AEIOU framework:

• Activities: Are staff members encouraging customers to try the new flavors? If so, does it slow down the process?
• Environments: Is there a noticeable shift in seasonal decor? Is signage for the new flavors clear and visible? Are customers noticing the changes?
• Interactions: How are customers responding to invitations to sample new flavors? Are they trying them more or less than their usual favorites?
• Objects: Are there physical elements, such as signage and display materials, that support the new offerings? Was the installation process smooth? Are there new sundaes featuring the seasonal flavors, and are they being promoted effectively?
• Users: Are the average customers open to trying new flavors? Do staff members seem enthusiastic about them? How does the seasonal rollout impact team morale?

Answering these questions will give you a clearer insight into the initiative’s effectiveness and broader business impact.

Related: Customer Experience Management (CXM) Strategies that Drive Brand Loyalty

Embracing Curation Over Augmentation

While AEIOU analysis is a valuable tool for improving your service or product design, it’s important to remember that not every addition is an improvement. When refining a service, Buell recommends prioritizing curation over augmentation.

As outlined in Transforming Customer Experiences:

• Augmentation is the process of non-strategically adding service features to your initial design. This often results from market pressures to keep up with competitors’ offerings. Augmentation can dilute your company’s unique brand identity while straining employees’ energy through an overly complex service design.
• Curation is the strategic process of defining which design elements to add to your service’s value proposition and which to remove.

When conducting an AEIOU analysis, Buell stresses the value of targeted curation. More service does not equate to better service, and by understanding how changes to your service product affect its core components and participants, you can avoid pitfalls like employee burnout and customer dissatisfaction.

“My rule of thumb is that if we’re going to bring something new into our operation that enhances its value, let’s take away two things that create less value,” Buell explains in Transforming Customer Experiences. “Doing so will enable us to keep our operation focused and simple, and close the gap between employee capability and operational complexity.”

Reimagining Service Design with AEIOU

The intangible nature of service products demands a high degree of structural analysis. By conducting an AEIOU framework analysis on an established service blueprint, you can create a more effective and intentionally curated service product—one that benefits your customers and employees, strengthens your brand, and demonstrates your leadership's efficacy.

To explore more methods for improving your service product design, consider taking an online course like Transforming Customer Experiences. Through interactive exercises, in-depth analysis, and real-world examples from international businesses, you’ll unlock new methods of leadership and expand your management skills.

Ready to transform your customer experience and build lasting loyalty? Explore Transforming Customer Experiences—one of our online leadership and management and entrepreneurship and innovation courses—and download our online learning success guide to learn more about how an online program can benefit your career.