To explain her field of study, Miso Kim tells a story about a bad ser­vice encounter.

A few years ago, Kim and some friends pur­chased tickets to see a movie inside a New York museum and were then ush­ered into a small room with no seating.

“Then a pre­view of a movie with the same title as the one we were sup­posed to see started to play on these small screens,” she recalled. “The movie con­tinued to play and we were just standing there waiting, not knowing what to do next. Everyone was quite con­fused, and then people started saying, ‘Well maybe this is it, this is the movie we were sup­posed to watch.’ We had no idea where to go or what to do next.”

Even­tu­ally an employee entered the room and opened a cam­ou­flaged door on a wall, revealing a beau­tiful the­ater that screened a “won­derful” movie, Kim said. But this was after a handful of people, frus­trated by the lack of infor­ma­tion, left the waiting room altogether.

“The room was nice, the carpet was clean, the screens were clear—the phys­ical objects in the room were nicely designed, but there was some­thing missing from the whole expe­ri­ence, from a ser­vice design per­spec­tive,” Kim said.

When people tell these sto­ries about having a bad ser­vice expe­ri­ence, it’s almost like they’re indig­nant, like they take it per­son­ally.
—Miso Kim, assis­tant pro­fessor in the​_Col­lege of Arts, Media and Design

Kim, who earned her doc­torate in design from Carnegie Mellon Uni­ver­sity and has worked in Cisco Sys­tems in the Sil­icon Valley, joins North­eastern this year as an assis­tant pro­fessor of expe­ri­ence design in the Col­lege of Arts, Media and Design.

Read the entire story at new @ Northeastern.

Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University