Service Design

STORYBOARDING

Now it’s time to go from those moments that matter to generating ideas. We all want to come up with a winning idea from the start, but that’s not usually how it works. You need to invite others into the process and just start generating, think of wild ideas, think of things outside of the box, think of things that inspire you and write them down.

When you are creating a new service, you can’t do it alone. A service is made up of all the people that interact, think about employees, customers and the people moving around behind the scenes. You want to understand how to bring them in, bring in those perspectives and have those show up in your prototypes, people support what they create.

When you bring people in to the process early on and when they start seeing those ideas move forward towards implementation, they are much more likely to back you up.

Now that you’ve surfaced moments that matter, it’s time to come up with ideas (brainstorm!) about how to bring them to life.

This phase of ideation, or brainstorming, should be familiar to you as part of the design-thinking process. It provides you space to think boldly and creatively about your moments that matter.

Start with a brainstorm around one particular moment, and remember to invite others to the session.

A couple of important notes:

As you get more comfortable with brainstorming and prototyping service moments, it will become natural to start working on several moments all together. This is a great way to consider the holistic customer journey and link together moments that matter

As I’ve mentioned before, brainstorming (and prototyping) should be done with users and those people who are ultimately responsible for delivering the service moment to customers. I can’t stress this enough; inviting others into your design process is one of the keys to making it a success

Ideation techniques...

There are so many different ideation techniques, here are a few brainstorming methods you could try.

Sacrificial Service Concepts

This is a great way to invite others in and spark reactions, get people to think wildly, and foster discussion. As the name implies, come up with three to five concepts that you are “sacrificing” – ideas that you know just won’t work. By definition, they’re meant to be wild, raw, and to push the edges.

With these concepts in hand, invite others to talk about them. Give them permission to build and add their own ideas. As the conversation continues, tangible concepts will start to emerge, which can inform your service prototypes in exciting new ways.

Extreme Prompts

Another way to invite others to participate is to provide extreme prompts. These prompts encourage people to stretch their thinking beyond what’s top of mind. They’re also a great method to brainstorm moments that aren’t inherently unique or have been part of your journey for some time. You might begin by asking:

What’s the slowest/fastest way that we could deliver this moment?

What’s the most dangerous, or absurd? What could we do if we only had $10? $10,000,000?

What would happen if we combined this service with ____ (completely unrelated service)?

Constraints

Sometimes putting design constraints on your moments can help you challenge assumptions and generate new ideas. If you feel like people are getting stuck during your brainstorm, use these constraints to push them outside their normal modes of thinking. For example, you might ask:

What would this moment be like if it were all digital?

What if it were done only in person? Or over the phone?

What if we removed certain elements of the space?

Take a look at the ideation section under design thinking for some more ideation methods.

Time to reflect...

Now you have generated ideas for your moment, it’s time to reflect and consider which ones:

Excited people and got them to want to do more

Seemed easiest to pull off

Seemed great at first, but became clunky or difficult as they were discussed in more detail

Generated the most questions

As you look through your ideas, it’s likely that some will rise to the top in terms of excitement and impact, even if they still carry big questions. These ideas are the ones to prototype.

One last note on service brainstorms: Everything, even ideas that seemed boring or flat, might have the potential to turn into something magical for customers. Be sure to have some way to keep track of all of the ideas (and their corresponding feedback) that your team generates. They will serve you well as you continue designing your service.

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.

Seeing service in this way allows us to think of technology as a tool that helps organizations shift responsibility along the spectrum.

For instance, when airlines and hotels gave customers the power to research and book their own travel, they shifted responsibility for that moment toward self-service. When Amazon rolled out grocery delivery services, they shifted responsibility toward full-service, taking on the transportation of groceries to your home.

This concept of shifting responsibility isn’t new. Sometimes it makes for a terrific experience: As consumers, we can hunt around, compare, or try things out without feeling pressured by someone waiting to assist us. Sometimes it goes bad: When customers can’t get to the right choices, or the service slows down because the technology isn’t responsive enough to meet the different needs of people.

To get started, we’ll go over four questions that can help you think about augmenting your service with technology.

What are the goals of the service?

Think about this through the lens of the customer, external service providers (if applicable), and your business itself.

Is scaling a goal? Technology can help you scale the delivery of your service way beyond one-to-one human interactions. But at the same time, your users may still need or crave a human touch.

Is personalization a goal? If so, you’ll likely need to capture data about user patterns and behaviours to deliver meaningful insights to your customers.

At what moments in the journey can technology play an augmenting role?

When thinking about this question, the most important part to consider is the “why” for your moments. Why will adding technology to a moment be a meaningful addition to the overall experience?

What types of interactions are your customers accustomed to using, and what types of interactions do they value?

Depending on your target audience, your customers will have different familiarity with digital interactions. They may also place more value on specific types of interactions over others.

To help you home in on the expectations of your customers, look at the apps that they regularly use. This can provide clues that help you choose the appropriate interaction channels for each moment in your customer’s journey.

What are the implications of using technology?

Technology can sound great, but it can have significant implications when it’s implemented. For example, your organisation might need IT support and infrastructure that it’s never had before. Or it might present ethical questions around customer data and privacy that you’ve never had to consider before.

Think about these four questions for your service.

REMEMBER: When it comes to technology, the goal isn’t to replace human capacity; rather, it’s to enhance your service beyond what human capabilities can do on their own. Keep these four questions in mind as you design your service.

Journey map to understand the relationship between service & customer

Prototyping and measuring services...

After you have brainstormed ideas for moments across your journey, it’s time to prototype and test them to learn more. Service prototypes can come in all shapes and sizes, they can be as simple as storyboards and sketches, or more developed like role plays, pop up kiosk’s or physical spaces. As with any prototype, you're trying to spend a little to learn a lot.

Let’s look at some unique qualities and mindsets that can help you think about, build and measure the potential impact of your service prototypes.

Tips to Prototype Service:

Design only the details that matter - This is a tried and true rule for all prototypes, but it is especially important for services which often contain many different components.

Don’t fall into the trap of over designing, recognise what pieces of your prototype are essential, those are the ones you design, leave the others behind.

Factor in the before and after - Think about the feelings, motivations and behaviours that transpire, not only in the moment but surrounding the moment.

Act out your service - Because so many service moments involve human interactions, it is essential to role play these to see what is working and why?

Typically this is done with groups of people who will ultimately be part of your service, your employees and customers. You can also get creative and assign roles to the non-human parts of the experience, with the assets, technology and space.

Think about moments over time - Unlike some other prototypes, moments of a service must reflect the passage of time. As users progress through their journey, how will their attitudes, mindsets and behaviours shift.

Allow people to be their best selves - When designing behaviours or language in your prototypes, try to use principles and guidelines, not hard scripts. Human interactions are best when people are authentically themselves.

Think about how flight staff deliver the safety speech before their flights, though each one delivers the same topics many bring their own unique personalities and senses of humour to their delivery making a routine part of the flight experience more delightful.

As you build your prototype for your service moment you want to track both quantitative and qualitative measures. Focus on the one question you're trying to answer or the one thing you want to learn.

This might mean tracking quantitative measures such as service
efficiency and quality to see if the moment is working or not, in this case you might measure average wait times, number of tasks handled or customer satisfaction ratings.

However, if you are designing your service as an expression of your brand values or a unique differentiator use a more qualitative eye, this means observing and diving deeper into the character of the prototype. Do the emotions that people feel as they experience your moment align with what your organisation stands for? How about for your employees? Measuring the effectiveness of your prototype in this case
can give you a sense of how your prototype effected the people
involved.

– Source: Human-centered Service Design IDEO-U

Prototyping your ideas is a crucial step in Service Design. Stretch yourself to brainstorm different ways that your service moment can come to life.

You can also act out your storyboard with a role-play to collect evidence on what is working and what needs further refinement.

REMEMBER: Your prototype could be a sketch, a storyboard, a video or a role-play of the service, find what best suits you, your team and your audience.

– Source: Storyboard to communicate and idea ALStarr75

Why not read Service Design - Service Blueprints >