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.

Think Beyond ‘UX’ was originally published in Masters of Experience on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How to Make ’em, Use ’em, and Abuse ’em

Interaction designers have been employing the use of Personas as a design thinking tool since the 1980s, but they were not in wide use until Alan Cooper popularized them in 1999 in his book The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Using them can be a valuable tool, but using them incorrectly can hinder exploration within design process.

Personas were created to help designers understand and think specifically for a small subset of users. By identifying individuals, designers were able to focus on the primary user and make design decisions that fit these individual profiles rather than trying to design for a broader audience. Personas promote user-centered design when our natural tendency is to be self-centered, users have varied needs and desires and personas can help explain their complexities, and act as a proxy with designers and stakeholders.

Over the last couple of decades there have been many different techniques to developing personas, but the objectives are the same, to conceive of a customer that your team can champion and understand how this person would interact with your product or service. I’m going to highlight a few of the different ways of developing personas below.

Techniques for Developing Personas

Cooperian Persona

Developed by Alan Cooper, where insights are found from collected research and quantitative and qualitative data and constructed into fictitious characters reflecting very specific goals. This tool fits into a part of Alan Cooper’s larger methodology, Goal­-Directed Design. This is one of the most research-based way of identifying a persona, but a common critique of this method is that these personas can be unconvincing because they are composites of various interviewees and can seem both disjointed and unbelievable (referred to as the ‘Frankenstein’ effect).

Ad-Hoc Persona

Developed by Donald Norman and based on a designer’s own intuition and assumptions. Norman believes that personas should be used as a tool to help designers communicate and therefore did not need to be ‘real’, only realistic. These types of personas can be discovered by questioning the main stakeholders, leaders, and members of the design team about their perceptions of the primary users. The main purpose is to help expose misconceptions and varying ideas about the target users within the design team and stakeholders, but should be used with other methods to understand users.

I recently helped run a workshop where we did a cross-persona exercise. We had 5 different businesses in the workshop and each owner had to do a persona for another company based only on the company’s mission statement. The results were really interesting because the business owners had very set ideas in their minds on who their target customer is and they were very surprised on what the other other companies thought their target customer was.

Pastiche Persona

Mark Blythe and Peter Wright favor these personas, which are developed from existing fictional characters from television shows, books, and films (e.g. Ebeneezer Scrooge and Bridget Jones). They can open up new thinking and design insights, because the characters are richly complex and embedded culturally within society. The method of using Pastiche personas investigates and demonstrates some of the issues with using data-driven personas, by illustrating how rich characters can produce new insights on user needs and desires. This method should be used with caution because Winnie the Pooh is not really related to your target market, but could develop some interesting creative outputs.

Behavioral Personas

Another way of creating personas is to not base them on demographics, but rather on grouped goals, motivations, and behaviors. Taken from qualitative insights, they focus not on who the user is, but rather what they do and why they do it. This is more valuable, because characteristics and behaviors don’t necessarily align with one another. Goals can change throughout the journey of a product or service, so a person can fit into multiple Behavioral Personas. They are a better way of understanding the user by what they are trying to achieve, their hidden motivations, and their behavioral patterns. The design team then should be able to align their product or service journey with the user’s goals.

How We Use Them

So now that you have used on of the techniques to develop a persona, what do you do with him/ her/ Winnie the Pooh?

The key to utilizing a persona is understanding at what point during the different stages of the research and design process when you should be using your intuition. Personas can be used within the context of different design thinking tools, such as a customer journey map, a service blueprint, or within a storyboard. As interaction designers we often use stories as a way to understand how a customer interacts with a product or service, so this is where personas may come in handy.

Susan really hates going to the post office ,but needs to send in her tax forms. She drives there with her two kids in the backseat and needs to find a place to park the car. She finds a space after 10 minutes, parks, and takes her kids out of the car. She walks in the door to the post office, with each kid in one hand and sees 8 people in line so she walks over to the self service kiosk…

The goal is to step outside yourself as a designer and understand your product or service through your user’s eyes. However, you should try and think about the behavior and what need she is trying to fill. Is Susan in a rush? What is she doing there? What are the pain points in her journey?

The Problems with Personas

The biggest downfalls with using personas is not basing them on the right attributes from the start. They tend to focus on characteristics, and are often created with little insight into the behavior of the people they represent. This is why I recommend behavioral personas unless you have a strong persona based on many iterations and a large amount of data. However, even when based on a lot of qualitative and quantitative data your persona is likely to go from being a very flat version of a person to a very stereotypical version of a person.

You do not know your user just because you named her Susan.

The use of stereotyping has been widely documented throughout a variety of persona studies, which is why creating personas should be a supplementary design tool to other design techniques and user testing. Stereotypes including, cultural, gender, socioeconomic will often be used to explain predictable sets of behaviors and attitudes throughout each of these methods after personas are identified. Stereotypes hinder the design process and exploration by prejudicing our understanding of behaviors and reactions of generalizations of user groups.

In a recent workshop I ran there were three Ad-hoc personas created that were all women in their late 20s, all working in finance, and all dieting in preparation for their wedding or because they were worried about finding a relationship.

Personas can be a good way to help designers remember to put aside their own needs and behaviors and to think about the user’s needs and behaviors instead. However, they need to be supplemented with additional user testing and research.

The Problem with Personas was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Isn’t there a better word than “user”? I see my classmates cringe at this word as it is hesitantly written on the flipchart. Some of our industry leaders have even disclosed their distaste for it. So lets look through our thesaurus, shall we?…

Newspaper companies call their customers “readers”, while Starbucks call them “customers”. At the end of last year Facebook reportedly started referring to users as “people”. Disney was on the forefront of this idea and has referred to their customers as “guests” as far back as 1975 in a Walt Disney World booklet:

“…we all work from exactly the same script, speaking the same language…the language of Disney show business…Just like any show, we have an audience, not a crowd, but we go even further. Our audience is composed of guests, not customers.”

So what is the value of referring to your users — *cough* — I mean audience by another name?

Designing with empathy is the best way to create a successful product that people enjoy using. As experience designers we use several different empathetic tools to understand customer needs and emotions, such as personas, user journey maps, or storyboards. These tools help designers and stakeholders recognize customers as humans with emotional connections to the product or service. By using language that helps promote customers as people and not as an “abstraction” we will design better products and services that speak to their needs.

Language Can Affect our Behaviors

There is a connection between the language we use and our behavior. A really fantastic TED talk by Keith Chen highlights the link between the language we speak and our ability to save money. Speakers that use languages without a concept for the future (ones that don’t distinguish between the past, present and future) are statistically proven to be much better at saving money, are 20–24 percent less likely to smoke, 10–17 percent less likely to by obese by the time they retire, and 21 percent more likely to have used a condom in their last sexual encounter. Essentially, the way you perceive time is affected by your grammar, which in turn affects your behavior.

In a 2010 talk, Mike Kruzeniski, the design lead at Twitter, but at the time of his lecture was UX Creative Director for the Entertainment Experience Group at Microsoft, spoke about the importance of using language to unite members of the design team and engineers by asserting the importance of the emotional and experiential aspects of the design. By using the analogy of the “soul”, “heart”, and “body” instead of prioritizing by “pri 0”, “pri 1”, and “pri 2” respectively, he was able to rally engineers and other members of the team around the visceral concepts of the design, or the “soul”.

The idea of user-centric design is to consider people first, but the result is an abstraction away from the real emotions people have towards a product or service. So that leaves me to ask this question:

Are we user experience designers or human experience designers?

Can Language Help Create Empathy? was originally published in Masters of Experience on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.