Service Design | Journey Mapping | Alstarr75 Human-centered Product & Service De

JOURNEY MAPPING

Services are made up of moments that, when combined, create a holistic journey for your customers or users. To begin your process of Service Design, you must be able to map out these moments.

Journey maps are at the heart of service design, they illustrate the different moments of an interaction the user has with a business or organisation over time.

They help you to see how all your different moments add up to deliver your overall service, and give you a starting point to think about how you might design any one moment to make it better.

Expanding the journey...

Journey maps can come in many shapes and sizes. They help you see the holistic journey with users and shine a light on new service moments that you haven’t considered or existing moments that are ripe for re-design.

All good journey maps help you see and answer a few key questions.

– Source: Human-centered Service Design IDEO-U

What are your key customer interactions?

Good journey maps are not isolated to a single interaction but look at a series of interactions over time. They can begin when customers first become aware of the offer, and end well after it’s delivery.

This allows you to see where a customer may be delighted or fall down in the process, and understand the ripple effect of any single moment on the entire journey.

– Source: Human-centered Service Design IDEO-U

How are customers feeling and behaving?

Moments on a journey map are not just about what the
organisation is doing or delivering. They also include how customers feel and behave at different interaction points.

The best journey maps capture what can be done to make customers feel things that you want them to feel.

– Source: Human-centered Service Design IDEO-U

Where will additional resources be needed?

Most journey maps serve as a starting point for you to begin visualising your service moments and they can be deepened and expanded to help you see the components like people, technology and artefacts that will be needed to bring those moments to life.

Journey maps are great for getting grounded...

Initial journey maps are great for getting grounded on where your service stands today. To fuel the design of new service moments you need to gather insights about:

The people who use your service

The people who provide your service

Other experiences that can inspire new ways of thinking

You can start by observing people as they move through your service, then go deeper by talking to them learning about what they liked and didn’t like and why?

Then talk to the people who deliver the service, what are they most proud of? What challenges do they face?

Finally, check out competing services to understand your customers options and look to organisations outside of your industry with top notch service experiences, they can help to push your thinking about what’s possible.

Combined with quantitative data, insights will help you get more clarity around existing moments to see what is and isn’t working. They help to expand your journey map, you may see moments in your existing journey that you might not of considered as important before, you may find moments that are just broken for customers or employees and you may uncover opportunities for new moments that can differentiate your service.

Understand what is before, what could be...

Before you design, you have to understand what is before thinking about what could be. For Service Design, this means gathering information about the people who use and deliver the service and getting inspired by other services in the world. This information will help you build a current-state customer journey map and provide fuel for brainstorming and ideation in the future.

Design research is a rich field, with many different ways to engage in it. The following provides you with fundamental methods and tips for gathering information through experience, observations, interviews, and inspiration.

Experience the service:

Put yourself in the shoes of a customer and go through the entire service journey. There’s no better way to understand the people you’re designing for than to take a walk in their shoes. Assume a specific persona and assign yourself a task (e.g., a person going to happy hour with friends or a weary traveler stopping in for a quick bite and a drink).

Take stock of your feelings during every moment that you experience, starting from the time you initially contact or see the service all the way through to after you’ve left or stopped using it. Pay attention to seemingly small moments, such as finding the right place to stand in line or the moment you see the pastry case or menu. After your experience, take a moment to write down your notes and capture your personal journey.

Observe others:

When you experience, you allow yourself to be fully immersed in the moment. When you observe, you step back and get wildly curious about the different elements in play. Your observations should include both customers and employees.

Be on the lookout for customer needs that differ from the need(s) you had during the experience. For example, some customers come to a coffee shop in the morning for a quick grab-and-go experience, while others come to socialize or work.

Also look for moments of strong emotion, positive and negative, and hacks that people perform to get around an obstacle in the service.

Tips for Observing a service:

Sense your way through the service and the environment by sight, touch, smell, and taste. Note not just what people say or what you see, but also how things sound and smell and how objects and surroundings feel to your touch. Often these senses give customers a reaction or feeling even if they can’t articulate it.

Focus on one object or person through the service to zero in on different touch points. If you’re observing a healthcare provider, this one thing might be a patient’s chart. If it’s a coffee house, it might be a coffee cup. You can even follow a single person through a service, such as an employee or customer.

Identify workarounds where they exist. The world is full of Scotch-Taped, propped-up, glued, Velcroed, and handheld solutions that we come up with to make a product or service work better for us. This might be a pen tied around someone’s wrist, a suitcase used as a makeshift desk, a saltshaker to hold open a book. All of these signs point to a pain point or need that might be better addressed by the service you offer.

Interview to dive deeper:

To understand how other people feel about the service journey, interview customers and employees. Again, you want to be wildly curious and dive as deep as you can to gain insight into what they think and feel as they go through the service.

This will help you round out your understanding of the different needs people may have, their pain points, and the places they ascribe value. If you can chat with an employee, find out what the company values or how the backstage elements come together to produce the service. You should find that you’re asking “why” more than any other question.

Tips for interviewing include:

Plan your interview questions by identifying topics you want to learn more about, based on your experience and observations of the service. You should start broad (e.g., questions about the person’s life, their values, and their habits) and finish with deeper questions directly related to your project. However, don’t force yourself to unerringly adhere to your plan. The conversation could take an unexpected, interesting turn–go with it!

Deepen your conversation by using open-ended questions. It’s the difference between asking “do you go to the spa frequently?” and “why do you decide to book a spa appointment?” When in doubt, ask why and encourage specific details. Remember to leave space for comfortable silences and avoid interjecting with your own opinions or emotions. This is all about them.

Partner with your interviewee by speaking to their role in the design process. You want them to feel like an empowered co-creator. They are a fundamental contributor to your success. Be transparent and tell them the value of their contributions.

Get inspired:

Once you’ve thoroughly researched the service, start to look for other services that can inspire your thinking. Look at similar services within your same industry, but also look outside your industry to see what else is possible.

We often refer to this as analogous inspiration. When working on an airline service, it might be obvious to research other transportation services like rail travel or Uber, but what if you looked for something wildly different? What can you learn at an Apple Store to fuel your thinking about creating memorable travel experiences? How might a web service draw inspiration from high-end concert venues?

Think about where you’re likely to observe the activities, behaviours, or emotions you identified. When observing for analogous inspiration, focus on the key elements you’re targeting, but also stay open to unexpected, impromptu moments.

General tips and guiding questions:

As you gather more information, introduce yourself, state your objective, and describe the project you’re working on. Ask permission before taking photos or recording video. It may also be helpful to let a manager or employee know that you will be making observations for a design project.

The time and type of day (e.g., weekday/weekend) could affect your observations. A restaurant may be slow on Tuesday at 7 p.m. but bustling on Friday at the same time. A slow service moment can be a positive, however, as it can open up space and time for you to chat more with employees.

Guiding questions:

Where and when do you sense that people have emotional needs that aren’t being met?

What changes the way people start or continue their service journey?

How might you address workarounds that people have created when their needs aren’t being met?

Generate insights:

Now that you’ve got a good amount of data–observations, photos, emotional impressions, and quotes–it’s time to start connecting the dots in a meaningful way. This is also known as synthesis, and it’s best done soon after you gather information. It can also be helpful to grab a few other people with fresh eyes to help you see things that you may miss.

Often, designers write findings on Post-it notes and put them on a board. Then, with everything up, they start to cluster the notes together to group related observations. To move toward insights, you must get to the “why,” or the underlying motivation, behind a theme or pattern you’ve identified. Therefore, insights are generated after you’ve considered the data holistically. To do this, look across everything you’ve gathered and ask yourself:

Have any patterns and/or themes emerged?

Is there a consistent pain point for customers or employees?

What feels significant?

What surprised you compared to your original assumptions

A good insight is actionable; it serves as a springboard for design. Accordingly, a good insight has the following three characteristics:

It is authentic, having been generated from real observations and interviews of the service

It is non-obvious, going beyond what someone would expect when thinking about the service

It is revealing, offering a glimpse into the “why” underlying how people think, feel, and behave during the service

Some of the observations may not feel significant after you analyze them this way. That’s okay. The goal is to filter out less relevant bits and to keep only those that feel most compelling. The insights you settle on will serve as fuel for new ideas to improve your service and a guide to help you begin to design and build service prototypes.

Be curious and non-judgemental...

Look at the first image below, what do you notice and what does it tell you about what the service values.

– Source: Human-centered Service Design IDEO-U

Now look at this second image, build on your ideas by looking closely at the elements highlighted for you.

– Source: Human-centered Service Design IDEO-U

Here are the observations I made, how do they compare with yours.

– Source: Human-centered Service Design IDEO-U

Remember: to show up with a curious and non-judgemental mindset. Think about what you see, and why it may tell a deeper story about what you’re observing.

– Source: Getting my assumptions out of the way! ALStarr75

Start broad and finish deep...

Gathering insights is a key part of design research. So how to get started, one tip is to start broad and finish deep.

For example, if you want to get to know somebodies grocery habits, you might think you want to start in the kitchen. I would start in another part of the house, get to know who they are, what they value, who they live with, what they care about and then move the conversation towards the topics of groceries and what they shop for.

One of the things to look for is themes, and try to look for them in two buckets, moments of delight and moments of frustration. Most design opportunities revolve around these two things, you're looking for things that can amplify delight or eliminate barriers and pain points.

Tips to pick what matters – The moments to design

You can’t always design your whole service to be great, there is usually not enough time or money to do so. With a solid journey map you have an end to end visualisation of each moment the customer experiences. Now you can start to decide which of these moments really matter.

In psychology we have what is know as the ‘Peak End Rule’ which theorises that when it comes to experiences people remember the peaks and the end, the rest tends to blur into the background. In the world of service design this means that you work to ensure all of your moments are functioning well and serve a clear purpose, then focus your energy on designing a hand-full of your unique moments that provide emotional value. These are the moments that have the potential to differentiate businesses and cultivate loyalty, they are the ones that matter.

How do we determine which moments matter?

The process is more art than science, to get started analyse your journey map through three lenses. These lenses will help you prioritise and find opportunities to focus your energy.

Operational – Throughout your journey moments should be assessed to see if they are operating well, working ok or failing altogether. How well are you delivering on the functional needs of your users?

Especially important are moments that influence others or transition moments when people or information are being moved from one place to another.

Opportunities to be unique – Unique moments are ones that can differentiate your organisation, this might mean that you create a moment that no one else offers, or it might be a moment that everyone offers but that you fulfil in a unique way that matches the personality or values of your brand.

Drivers of high value – The purpose of delivering a great service is to provide value to the people you are serving and to your organisation. In addition to thinking about those places where your customers are benefiting most from your service, where are the moments when the value of your service, the reason people feel good about paying for it is most clearly felt.

These are often the moments that can hold high emotions for users or employees, for instance you might use ‘Spotify’ because it provides access to vast libraries of music, but the moment they provide a highly curated personalised play list to you, you really feel the value.

Using these lenses you can see that there are different ways to surface the moments that matter on your journey, you may want to fix moments that are functionally mediocre, you may find moments that can be unique to your organisation and what you are known for and others can be places where people clearly feel the value of your service.

Under pinning all this is a business case, knowing you have limited resources, you may want to prioritize moments that seem straight forward or cost effective to pull off but provide significant benefits.

Let's sum up, steps to create your journey map...

Write down some assumptions about your service

Participate in the service as a customer

Observe others (customers / employees) as they interact with or provide the service

Interview people about the service

Generate insights and identify patterns and themes

Map out the customer journey based on your observations and insight

Add in the customers emotional state

Surface possible moments that matter, using the three lenses

Select moments that matter that you’d like to redesign

Write out more details about your chosen moments that matter

– Source: Example journey map and moments that matter ALStarr75

Why not read Service Design - Storyboarding >