Think about your passport. The passport itself is a ‘product’ you interact with, but the experience around the passport is a combination of all the touch-points you encounter: a letter that your passport will expire, your town’s website with information on how to get a new one, the online application tool, a phone call with a civil servant to find out how long it will take because you need it urgently, another letter to tell you your passport is ready, the town hall where you go to pick it up. As a user you’ve already encountered an impressive amount of touch-points and this is only considering the application phase.
It’s clear that this is a complex system, requiring careful attention in order to create a positive experience around it. This is exactly where service design comes into play; designing complex systems into pleasant and flawless experiences for the end-user. Achieving this often also requires us to tackle and redesign the processes of the organisation behind the product or service, or passport in this case.
Designing the back-end and front-end
Designing the internal processes of the organisation that delivers the user experience is a crucial part of the service design process. We often explain it through the metaphor of a theatre. To deliver a great show to the audience the entire backstage needs to know exactly what to do at exactly what moment. Music should be played at the right time, lights need to illuminate a specific location, the decor needs to change in a matter of seconds, the curtains need to open only when the actors are ready.
When applied to the service delivery world it looks something like the drawing below. The audience becomes the customers. The first line staff are the actors that interact with the audience. They are separated by the line of interaction. The back-office employees are the ones delivering the service behind the scenes and are separated by a line of visibility. In the service design process we connect all these dots to deliver a seamless experience. We make sure all processes are aligned to deliver a qualitative customer experience.
The service design toolset
Service design tools help you work in a more human-centered, iterative and collaborative way. They assure that we start from user needs and help us visualise complex systems into sharable output. The tools are not a goal as such, but rather guides to assist you from the research phase, through design and into qualitative implementation over time. Here is a list of the most popular service design tools:
Personas are archetypes of your users, they represent the people you are designing for and help you make decisions based on their needs through the entire process.
Customer journeys represent the sequence of steps a customer goes through when using your service. They're based on a specific user group (a persona) and typically also show the touch-points the user encounters as well as the highs and the lows related to the overall experience. You can make customer journeys of the as-is and of the to-be situation.
Service Blueprints represent the backstage organisational processes that are linked to a customer journey. Again, you can make service blueprints of the as-is and of the to-be situation.
Storyboards are used to represent a sequence of events a user goes through, narrated and visualised in a comic book format.
Co-creation workshops are active, social and creative meetings that end with concrete results, such as prototypes, roadmaps and journeys co-created by the participants.
Stakeholder maps are an overview of all involved parties. It gives a birds-eyed view of connections and involvement of different parties in the delivery process.
Qualitative research comes in many shapes; Semi-structured interviews, usability testing, observations, etc. depending on the outcome that’s needed. These methods capture the needs, desires and goals of your users to allow for tailored solutions.