Notes from Day 1 of UXLx 2018 — Lean Service Design

“A service is something someone does for someone else that creates value for both.” — Jess McMullin

Workshop summary

Really nice approach to mapping user journey. We started with small cards with activities and with small dots we found. Having it on a table and not on post-its helped a lot with imagining the path. TL;DR — probably the best journey map workshop I was in last few years.

Making your “persona” likeable really helps when working with Helen all day.

What do I want to remember

• A journey map is an excellent tool for creating a conversation hub between people who usually don’t talk to each other much about users. It creates bridges between silos in the company.

„Lean service map is a remixed journey map that becomes a living hub for teams to work together during the learn-build-measure cycle.” — @jessmcmullin

• It’s great to create two journey maps: one that maps current state and the second one that we want to have as the future state. It can show opportunities for continuous improvement or quick wins.
• Focus less on deliverables, more on the way we work.

• The main issue with journey maps is that they are usually linear. They provide an overview of common experience; they don’t cover all edge cases. But that's probably ok.

The Universal Journey

• Using verbs instead of places makes conversation about journey map activities easier and understandable. Don’t use „restaurant”, use „eating” instead. Don’t use „gym,” use „exercising”.
• One way how to explore service scenarios can be improv theatre or bodystorming. It can help to realize how long can some task takes or what other touchpoints we need to cover.

• Lean service map can have a lot of different layers (usually displayed below each other):
  - Activity layer (activities, stages, touchpoints, sequencing)
  - Empathy layer (thinking, feeling, questions, emotions, stress)
  - Logical layer (jobs-to-be-done and service hypotheses)
  - Solution layer (ideas how to solve it)
  - Measure layer (metrics, KPI, analytics, data)
• Service hypothesis can formalize our assumptions and ideas on why a specific design could work.

Workshop & collaboration related notes

• When doing some workshop activity, let people work alone and then discuss together. Don’t discuss and place post-its (or dot-vote or anything) at the same time, it takes too much time, and nothing gets usually done.
• Don’t compress workshops if you don’t have a full day for them. Spread it out instead, do it part by part, on different days. It’s convenient to create „visibility walls” for your team with journey map progress, so everyone has things that are already finished always on eyes and can go through them.
• Collaboration is not only about collaborative brainstorming; it’s about other phases as well.

Resources

• [book] Sense & Respond
• [technique] Business Origami

My other notes from UXLx 2018

Notes from Day 2 of UXLx 2018 — Designing voice interfaces & Crafting discovery phase

Notes from Talk Day of UXLx 2018 — Things to remember

Notes from Day 4 of UXLx — Designing conversational UIs & Product roadmaps