Service Blueprints: How to Choose What Experience to Visualize

Our research with practitioners who use service blueprints suggests that choosing which experience to visualize is one of the most challenging aspects of getting started with service blueprinting.

In many cases, you will be tasked with creating a service blueprint to help your team evaluate a problematic experience and find ways to improve it. But another common scenario is that where a practitioner new to blueprinting is looking to learn and bring this powerful technique to their organization. In that situation, you will have some freedom to determine what and when you blueprint. This article will provide guidance on selecting the scope of your service blueprints when you have some flexibility to choose what experience to visualize.

A service blueprint is a diagram that visualizes the relationship between service components that are directly tied to touchpoints in a specific customer journey. The scope of the blueprint refers to the experience (or specific customer journey) to be visualized. To define your service blueprint’s scope, first identify the level of scope you’ll need, then prioritize a specific experience you wish to evaluate.

3 Levels of Scope

We think about service-blueprint scopes at three levels:

• Small scope: a targeted service blueprint that focuses on 2 touchpoints or less
• Medium scope: a service blueprint with 5 touchpoints or less
• Large scope: an end-to-end experience with a product or organization

Note: A touchpoint refers to a specific interaction between a customer (or end user) and an organization. Not all customer actions are touchpoints.

In the following table, we outline the 3 levels of scope and multiple examples.

Determining which level of scope is appropriate for your context can depend on factors such as the goal of the service blueprint and the time available for completing the blueprint.

Generally speaking, a small-to-medium scope is best for most situations. This level of fidelity offers specific insights around an experience and, thereby, helps practitioners identify its strengths and weaknesses. Large-scope service blueprints offer a high-level look at an experience, but, rather than highlighting specific strengths and weaknesses, they may highlight a problem area to be investigated (likely with a small-to-medium scoped blueprint) at a later date.

Our research shows that most practitioners creating a service blueprint spend less than 1 month conducting research in support of the blueprint and less than 1 month creating the artifact. That said, an end-to-end service blueprint will surely take more time than a small, targeted blueprint. A large, end-to-end service blueprint often requires a significant team effort. This level of experience tends to have multiple departments playing a role in service delivery (e.g., marketing, sales, IT, and customer support). For such large multidepartmental efforts, you should anticipate a greater time to collect research and build the blueprint.

Small- and medium-level scopes capture focused experiences; unlike end-to-end experiences, need less research and, therefore, can take substantially less time to put together.

After you’ve identified which level of scope is right for you, the next step is to prioritize the experience that you will evaluate. The rest of this article will assume you’re focused on a small-to-medium level scope.

Choosing an Experience to Evaluate

What experience do you want to visualize with a service blueprint? There are usually many possible answers. So many, in fact, that many participants in our Service Blueprinting workshop ask the question: which experience should I prioritize?

Let’s say we work for a university and focus on the student portal. In this portal, students can find and register for classes, set up an appointment with staff, pay bills, apply for graduation, and more. Each of those tasks (which consists of multiple subtasks) could result in its own focused service blueprint. How do you decide where to start? In the following, we discuss several factors to consider.

Which Experiences Are Problematic?

Based on existing data from customer surveys, analytics, and qualitative user research, you may already know that a certain area of your experience is problematic. For service blueprints, we can use qualitative insights from interviews and diary studies to understand why an experience is problematic and uncover where things go wrong. Service blueprinting of problematic experiences enable you to make impactful changes based on research insights.

Which Experiences Do You Control?

As a UX professional, you probably don’t want to spend all your time pointing out flaws in an experience without offering any solutions. When it comes to determining the scope of your service blueprint, select an experience where the touchpoints and channels that you design play a significant role. This approach will identify service strengths and weaknesses over which you likely have decision-making influence. It’s easier to change your own product than to tell another team how to design theirs.

In our university example, if much of your work focuses on course-related tasks in the student portal, finding and registering for classes would be an appropriate experience choice, which will help you identify aspects to change in an upcoming redesign.

Which Experiences Have Planned Redesigns?

Look to your team’s strategic-planning documents, like product roadmaps, to get ideas of experiences to blueprint. This technique enables you to proactively evaluate an experience and get ahead of the design cycle. In turn, future design ideas and solutions can target specific pain points identified from the blueprint.

Which Experiences Require the Least Amount of Research?

Service blueprints are diagrams created with qualitative data (though quantitative insights can be layered in, for instance, to show the scale of certain findings). Picking an experience that you already know a lot about will decrease the research time. To maximize gain and minimize effort, practitioners getting started with service blueprinting should pick a scope that requires minimal and targeted research

Document and Prioritize Potential Options

To determine which experience to blueprint, write down a list of candidates and use a  prioritization matrix to prioritize them.

For example, in our university example, we can write down a list of scenarios in our student portal. Then, we cross out scenarios that we don’t directly control (those can be saved for later). We can prioritize the remaining scenarios based on how much data we have on each and timeline for redesign.  The process of prioritization can involve decision-making stakeholders and others who are knowledgeable about the experiences to be blueprinted.

Conclusion

Deciding what to blueprint can be tricky when you’re just getting started with this activity. First, make sure the level of scope will help you reach your goals. If you aim to improve the end-to-end experience, a large scope is well suited. For a deep look into a focused experience, a small-to-medium scope is appropriate. Then, determine which experience to map by weighing factors like your decision-making influence, the amount of research needed, upcoming redesigns, and known problematic areas.