Before The User Journey: Rich Picture, Service Ecology & Blueprint
Digital age realities force organizations to make a shift in approaches to their challenges. The ability to “solve problems right” is challenged by an essential need to “solve the right problems”.
The user experience can’t be isolated from an environment where the interaction takes place. Experience designers, same to their colleagues from other creative fields, need tools and skills for understanding and mapping those environments.
NN/g Design Thinking 101 describes the generic design approach with understand, explore and materialize stages. Google Design Sprint, IDEO Design Thinking and IBM Enterprise Design Thinking frameworks are aimed to structure divergent and convergent thinking processes. However, we still need to remain flexible with exercises for reaching our goals.
Empathy to the users can be increased with understanding details of the surrounding environment. Investigate and map the service before deeper dive into experiences within.
This article proposes modifications of original Rich Picture, Service Ecology and Service Blueprint exercises for collaborative mapping and illustrates them on simplified healthcare facility service example.
In the cases with distributed team structure, you may leverage to digital collaboration tools like Miro or Mural
Rich Picture
Origins
Rich picture technique is a part of the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) developed by Peter Checkland and Brian Wilson aimed to help analyze complex situations with multiple views on a problem. It should build understanding and describe a situation in terms of Structures, Processes, Climate, People, Issues, Conflict.
The usual artifact is a whiteboard or paper drawing that supports “As Is” state explanation and has a similar representation to the context diagram.
Collaborative Approach
Rich picture creation can be conducted in a collaborative way as an exercise during the project discovery workshop. Also, it makes sense to focus on people, systems and actions during the first iteration.
- Conduct initial research and start your workshop with Lightning Talks session for the topic exploration.
- Ask your team to make notes about people and systems.
- Define three different colors of post-its to map people, systems and actions. Place post-its with people and systems in two piles. Feel free not only write on post-its but add drawings as well.
- Let your team work with these piles by taking each post-it, placing it on a whiteboard and defining relationships schema. Align and write actions on separate post-its, add them to the schema.
- Iterate on your rich picture and validate it with stakeholders and subject matter experts.
Service Ecology
Origins
The service ecology map helps people to build an understanding of how their challenges fit into a bigger environment. It is essential to define the boundaries of the map to remain focused on your project’s strategic goals. The exercise helps to map service and involved parties, investigate entities relationships, and elaborate on service enhancement.
Car-sharing concept from FiAT’s Future Design Group is one of the most well-known examples of service ecology maps.
Collaborative Approach
Conduct this exercise with your project discovery team to bring a shared understanding of the service. Invite subject matter experts and involved parties to your session. Prepare with preliminary research and workspace with whiteboard and post-its.
- Conduct initial research and start your workshop with Lightning Talks session for the topic exploration.
- Ask your team to make notes about people, motivations, places, etc.
- Start mapping exercise with the definition of your ecosystem scope. It is easier to do on the “When” axis.
- Facilitate your team while putting post-its to the map. Move between the segments to cover “Who”, “What”, “Where”, “How”, “Why”.
- Find out “Motivations” in the “Why” segment and “Enablers” in the “What” segment to decide on the foundations of your service.
Service Blueprint
Origins
The idea of the method to explore issues inherent in creating or managing a service was originally proposed in the Harvard Business Review article “Designing Services That Deliver” by Lynn Shostack in 1984. Service blueprint has been evolved during that time and nowadays version is described in NN/g and Cooper methodologies.
Similar to user journey map service blueprint represents experience through the time, but focus on relationships between involved parties instead of individual experience.
Collaborative Approach
Service blueprinting is a collaborative approach to the diagram creation that can be summarized as following steps:
- Identify involved parties.
- Identify big steps within workflow scenario.
- Distribute involved parties on the whiteboard between client-side, service front- and back- stages.
- Map main interactions within the big steps.
- Feel free to add any relevant dimension like support processes or interaction channels.
Read more about service blueprint modifications for real-time alignment and flow sequence in article Alignment Tools in Experience Design. Collect and Represent Picture of Reality.
Summary
Focus on the user experience and environment around it helps to distinguish the right problems to solve. Empower your team collaboration with service investigation exercises to:
- obtain a shared understanding of the challenge environment
- identify user experiences for further deep dive
- identify business case opportunities
Literature
- “Service Design: From Insight to Implementation” by Andy Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie, Ben Reason
- “Mapping Experiences” by James Kalbach
- “Soft Systems Methodology: A Thirty Year Retrospective” by Peter Checkland, Systems Research and Behavioral Science (Nov, 2000)
- “Rich Pictures” by Kaye Stevens
- “How to Map Your Customer Experience Ecosystem” by Kerry Bodine, Forrester Reports (May, 2013)
- “Service Blueprints: Definition” by Sarah Gibbons
- “Service blueprints: laying the foundation” by Izac Ross
