Think Beyond ‘UX’

What Service Design Thinking Can Offer Your User Experience

“What is Service Design?” Most people in the tech industry know what user experience design is…

The focus on everything that affects the interactions a user has with a product or service.

However, many UX designers don’t consider interactions that are happening in the background. This is a problem because many companies sell a service, not just a product, and interactions invisible to the user still affect their experience. Customers interact with most companies from multiple different channels, and apps or websites are only one of these channels. This focus is often called Service Design or Strategic Design, but if this role isn’t defined in your company then it is something that UX designers should be thinking about.

Successful companies, like Airbnb and Uber, do a good job considering customer interactions, not only in their app, but in other channels, like the physical world. In order for designers to realize and reduce frictions in the service, it is important for the whole process and experience to be mapped out. The insights gathered can also influence the design of the app.

My favorite example of this:
I noticed while I was in Singapore that Uber had implemented a new feature in their app where you can input what you are wearing, so the driver can distinguish you from other passersby. I don’t think they have this feature anymore, but the point is they realized there is a moment when a driver is unsure who their passenger is and yells out the window, “Heyyyy, are you Maggie???” to anyone standing in the near vicinity. By incorporating this feature in the app, their drivers will start to yell only at the people wearing a white dress nearby.

There are many service design tools you can implement to map out entire experiences. When utilizing these tools it is important to gather different stakeholders with diverse backgrounds to inform these process maps. You want as many different perspectives as possible, in order to define processes within the service. But the challenge often comes with engaging different stakeholders and getting buy-in. I will briefly touch on this after going through my 3 go-to tools for developing better services.

** I have included links to templates I have created**

Stakeholder Maps

The purpose of a Stakeholder Map is to highlight issues concerning relationships between anyone with a vested interest in a product or service. It can help discern shared and varied interests between stakeholders and understand importance and influence. These maps can help visualize how each stakeholder affects your business, and by analyzing all relationships your team can begin to identify problems and opportunities for your product or service.

How-to: Print a Stakeholder Map template and bring your team together to map all stakeholders with post-its. Put core, internal, and external stakeholders in their correct sphere and draw lines to connect relationships between each post-it. I suggest starting with the user at the center of the core circle and go out from there. This should be done collaboratively with the team to define as many different relationships as possible. Groups can then be clustered by their shared interest or level of influence. You will begin to notice what problems arise from relationships between two stakeholders on your map. For example: Is there a middleman that is affecting the supply-chain?

Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Maps are a useful tool for understanding every moment customers interact with a product or service. It provides an overview of different factors that influence a user experience and is beneficial to highlight gaps, pain points, and opportunities through the perspective of the user. The process itself can also be a good way for the design team and other stakeholders to build empathy for the person they are designing for. This service design tool is commonly considered in user experience modules, but remember to map out how digital channels fit into the whole experience and not just how customers interact with the digital product.

How-to: Print out a Customer Journey Map template. Identify and write down every touchpoint where a user interacts with your company on Post-it notes. Interactions include face-to-face with employees, digital interactions with a website, and physical interactions in shops. This should be done collaboratively and can be successfully created while interviewing a user directly. After all touchpoints have been identified they should connect to a visual representation of the user’s overall journey. You can then write what the customer was seeing, thinking, and feeling during each touchpoint, which will help identify pain points. The process should be detailed enough to understand friction points a customer experiences within a service.

Service Blueprints

While Customer Journey Mapping can be a great way to understand the interactions a customer has with a product or service, a Service Blueprint contains the customer journey as well as all of the interactions that make the journey possible. Service Blueprints help detail individual aspects of the integrated service through visual schematics from the perspectives of the user, service provider, and other relevant parties. They work beyond the customer’s views and are good ways of identifying how every actor interacts with one another. This tool is helpful for gaining a shared bird’s-eye view and awareness of all the moving parts to a service. Every stakeholder should give their input to both identify frictions and offer solutions to all.

How-to: Use a Service Blueprint template, which should consist of partitions made with “line of interaction”, “line of visibility”, and the “line of internal interaction”.

• The “line of interaction” represents touchpoints that happen with both the user and the service provider. Below this line are any actions that happen with the user, but are passive actions they do not engage with.
• The “line of visibility” represents anything that is invisible to the user, including all processes and interactions between stakeholders that develop in the background.
• The “line of internal interaction” identifies internal system processes.

I think it’s easier to start with the interactions a user has with the service, which should be similar to the customer journey map. Include physical evidence of the interaction between the customer and onstage contact person. The team should apply post-its for all onstage and backstage processes that happen from the beginning to an end of a user journey. Then try to uncover what is happening internally between employees and other stakeholders. You will be able to collaboratively identify the most important areas of a service and reveal processes that don’t work well.

Great! Now you know some useful tools to map out processes. However, now it’s the hard part — engaging stakeholders in a workshop.

“A successful service design project requires integrating stakeholders as early as possible in the project development process….Management buy-in needs to be secured to support the process.” — This is Service Design Thinking

Getting Stakeholder Buy-In

“I don’t know what the hell we’re doing.”
This is the worst thing a designer can hear when facilitating a workshop, but it’s a good way to measure that you’re not doing a good job of communicating and engaging stakeholders through these service design tools. Here are some of my tips that I’ve learned through facilitating workshops to avoid this sentiment:

1. Be prepared and make it tangible. Always have a template, post-it notes, and enough markers to go around. You need to give each person a marker and a stack of post-its, because some people will often be reluctant to write their thoughts down. I’ve often found business owners shy away from this and hand the marker to an employee.
2. Explain exactly what you’re doing and why. This may seem obvious, but I have found the best way of facilitating a workshop is to go through exactly what you are going to be doing, for how long, why this process is beneficial (give examples), and why their backgrounds and experiences will be valuable for this method. Keep communication constant between designers and stakeholders.
3. Try not to use “Design Thinking” jargon. Design is associated with creativity, which often feels illusive and exclusive to people that tend to be more analytical in their thinking. I believe that “Design Thinking” is really just a form of business strategy, so explain it that way. Remember that empathy should not be limited to users but also used for all members of the team, so try to understand their perspective and speak their language.
4. Implement the right feedback loops to show, rather than tell, why this process is useful. Collecting data on how customers react to improved services produces advocates in management. By getting feedback from their customers stakeholders can then reference these maps to change additional ineffective processes in the future.
5. If you are facilitating workshops remotely there are online tools out there that can help. I have found that online tools like Mural or Realtime Board make this collaborative process easier. If you are going into a remote workshop prepare thoroughly. It is much harder to engage people when they are not in the room with you. I suggest going further than the templates and add extra post-its and suggestions before the workshop. Always try to make the process fun. Animal gifs are my go-to.

Thinking beyond UX helps us discover frictions behind-the-scenes and in other channels that may be affecting the experience. But in order to do that effectively we need to get collective perspectives on the entire service. I would love to hear additional advice or suggestions on how to get stakeholder buy-in. Also, if you have other service design tools that you think are really useful for designing multi-channel services, please share your favorites.