Crafting complex services with DESIGN ORIGAMI

Half a year ago I was struggling in a project with the usual way to lay out a customer journey on a wall in a 2 dimensional way.
I got the impression that this way of crafting customers way through a service still comprises too much abstraction.
People not savvy with crafting user journeys still need a lot of guidance from my perspective to put themselves into such a story.
Researching alternative ways of designing a user journey I discovered Business Origami, a 3d version of a journey map.
I discussed the concept with my Design buddy Sean Mc Guire who has a lot of experience in designing cardboards and physical games. He immediately got inspired by the concept of crafting a 3d version and started to design all the important elements you need — cards for touchpoints, interactions, people, locations, devices etc. in a stable to use shapes.
We prototyped the method with colleagues to identify areas for improvement. We applied the concept to a design challenge set on our yearly organization wide DESIGN JAM.
What we learned from using DESIGN ORIGAMI
- You use hands-on and easy to create tangible artifacts to model and understand (complex) services.
- Due to its 3d nature, it makes it pretty easy to shift the focus of attention from details to overview and back.
- People switch into a mode of play once they start to craft the service journey. A “mode of play” shifts the mind towards a more creative approach to problem-solving. This observation is derived from our personal experience having conducted several Design Origami workshops, for customers as well as on conferences.
- It can be done by everyone — you don`t have to be a Designer in order to run a Design Origami workshop. Meanwhile, we inspired product managers, business analysts and even c-level people to use Design Origami for crafting complex services or using this method to explore service challenges.
- It can be used for digital services only or all other services encompassing physical and virtual components.
- It`s research and design. You may use it to analyze all the service elements of an existing service or you may use it to craft a new service from scratch.
- You can actually use it as representation of your intended service journey that is permanently visible for all team members and acts therefore as a kind of big picture that helps all people involved keeping the focus on the service experience.
- It facilitates and invites team members to discuss certain elements or parts of the service journey and therefore enables a quick “redesign”, turning identified learnings into actions.
We (my colleague Sean McGuire and me) are happy to provide this way of understanding and crafting complex services to the audience of the Business of Software conference in Boston, September 18–20.
Join us if you are attending BoS.
