Before The User Journey: Rich Picture, Service Ecology & Blueprint

Andrii Rusakov
Nov 6 · 5 min read

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

The usual artifact is a whiteboard or paper drawing that supports “As Is” state explanation and has a similar representation to the context diagram.

Rich picture of healthcare facility service

Collaborative Approach

Enhance your rich picture elaboration with real or digital post-its (diagram include icons from icons8.com)
  1. Conduct initial research and start your workshop with Lightning Talks session for the topic exploration.
  2. Ask your team to make notes about people and systems.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Iterate on your rich picture and validate it with stakeholders and subject matter experts.

Service Ecology

Origins

Car-sharing concept from FiAT’s Future Design Group is one of the most well-known examples of service ecology maps.

Service ecology map of healthcare facility service

Collaborative Approach

  1. Conduct initial research and start your workshop with Lightning Talks session for the topic exploration.
  2. Ask your team to make notes about people, motivations, places, etc.
  3. Start mapping exercise with the definition of your ecosystem scope. It is easier to do on the “When” axis.
  4. Facilitate your team while putting post-its to the map. Move between the segments to cover “Who”, “What”, “Where”, “How”, “Why”.
  5. Find out “Motivations” in the “Why” segment and “Enablers” in the “What” segment to decide on the foundations of your service.

Service Blueprint

Origins

Similar to user journey map service blueprint represents experience through the time, but focus on relationships between involved parties instead of individual experience.

High level service blueprint of healthcare facility service

Collaborative Approach

  1. Identify involved parties.
  2. Identify big steps within workflow scenario.
  3. Distribute involved parties on the whiteboard between client-side, service front- and back- stages.
  4. Map main interactions within the big steps.
  5. 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

  • obtain a shared understanding of the challenge environment
  • identify user experiences for further deep dive
  • identify business case opportunities

Literature

  1. Mapping Experiences” by James Kalbach
  2. Soft Systems Methodology: A Thirty Year Retrospective” by Peter Checkland, Systems Research and Behavioral Science (Nov, 2000)
  3. Rich Pictures” by Kaye Stevens
  4. How to Map Your Customer Experience Ecosystem” by Kerry Bodine, Forrester Reports (May, 2013)
  5. Service Blueprints: Definition” by Sarah Gibbons
  6. Service blueprints: laying the foundation” by Izac Ross

softserve design

Design related thoughts from the team of 100+ geographically distributed and multi-domain problem solvers.

Andrii Rusakov

Written by

Principal Designer at SoftServe

softserve design

Design related thoughts from the team of 100+ geographically distributed and multi-domain problem solvers.

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