BLUEPRINTS
So now you have prototyped your service, the feedback you have received is either fuelling your thinking or stifling you in some way. If things have gone well, it’s a great opportunity to take stoke of what you have learned and if it’s been more challenging, you might need to step back and ask yourself why?
It’s also good to remember that not everyone has been on the journey with you, so you want to be able to articulate why you chose this moment, what you thought was broken and then start to create the evidence for why doing this new service moment actually makes sense.
If your asking people to be part of your service, like someone who can help you deliver the service, they are incredible resources for ‘how did it feel to them?’, ‘Was it right, wrong or awkward?’, ‘Did it feel natural?, unnatural?’
Design the visible and invisible...
Prototypes help you design the moments that matter, you’ll need to continue to build, learn and iterate to refine them. As you do so you’ll also want to start to think about the different components that make up each moment. What people will be needed?, How much technology will be used?, Will your space have to change? You’ll want to dissect each of your moments this way.
As you do you will start to see similar elements across your entire journey which you can then combine with your journey map. This deeper journey map is often called a blueprint.
It serves as a schematic for all the different components that are necessary to full-fill your customer journey. This blueprint can also help you share your service design with those who are needed to construct it. This includes front of house people who interact directly with customers, back of house people who handle things outside the view of customers, technology and data, communication channels, tools and resources, artefacts and assets and touch points between all of these components.
– Source: Human-centered Service Design IDEO-U
For example, If you run a chain of hotels and you have prototyped a great idea for business pods that guests can use to go heads down in the lobby, what are the different components you’ll need to pull it off.
You might think about things like individual work furniture and wi-fi access, but you would also want to think about food and drink delivery, cleaning services and printing capabilities for guests.
As you go through this process it’s a good idea to note the places where specific changes are needed. Blueprints come in different shapes and sizes and they can be simple or complex.
Here is a simple example for an airline. This type of blueprint is great for a fairly simple set of moments, but for a large organisation with many stakeholders and components across a journey, blueprints are detailed and comprehensive.
– Source: Human-centered Service Design IDEO-U
So your blueprint is an important artefact to help people see the moments that matter, why they are important and what’s needed to pull them off. It helps you build alignment and understanding across your organisation.
Many service blueprints show a layering of elements across front-of-house, back-of-house, and behind-the-scenes. As such, they can get really detailed and complex depending on the service. Here is an examples to inspire you and broaden your understanding of blueprints.
Creates opportunities to bring service to life...
Even in a highly technical world, excellent service doesn’t go away. Rather, technology creates new opportunities to bring services to life for more people.
As you brainstorm service moments, you might hit on an idea that requires technology to enhance it. This usually elicits a pretty visceral reaction from people—some might feel terrified that machines are going to “take over,” while others might think that technology will solve all of their service problems.
The key is to effectively use technology - not to replace, but rather to augment the human interactions of your service.
To begin thinking about tech in service, consider a spectrum of responsibility.
This spectrum ranges from full - to self-service. In between, there are varying degrees of what could be called collaborative service, where the organisation and users share the responsibilities of the service.
– Source: A service blueprint for an customer onboarding journey ALStarr75
Beautiful ways to tell the story...
Blueprints help you to bring others in to help you build moments of your service, they are instructional, detailed and functional. As part of service design work you also need to find ways to communicate and share the vision of your service, you need to be able to communicate why it is important and what it can become in an authentic, emotional and compelling way.
In communicating your vision your trying to connect to people on a very human level, different from the blueprint we are not trying to share the bits that make up the service but why holistically they are so meaningful for your users and organisation.
As part of this, talk about what you know, what you have tried and learned, what you envision and most importantly what significance your new service will have on peoples lives.
At this stage you want to understand the people your sharing with and what you are hoping to achieve with them, are you looking for buy-in, collaboration or both. Depending on your audience, communicating your vision can be as tight as an elevator pitch or as rich as a video, poster or playbook.
People need to feel the impact of the service especially in large organisations where you might be far from the interactions with customers. Whenever possible bring other into your prototypes, use footage from your prototyping process and explain why and how you did the things you did or even better, have them go through it, ask people to assume different roles and let them actually experience the highs and lows that their customers or employees feel. It’s a great way to communicate what may need to change and why.
Why not read Service Design - Iterate & Improve >