Service design improves the experiences of both the user and employee by designing, aligning, and optimizing an organization’s operations to better support customer journeys.
Digital tools help distributed teams compile journey maps into digital formats, collaborate synchronously, and integrate external data in their journey maps.
Customer journeys are collections of touchpoints between users and organizations. A touchpoint is defined by a combination of channel, device, and user task.
Organizations must create omnichannel UX strategies that optimize the end-to-end user experience of completing a task across devices and interaction channels.
Our research with UX practitioners found 3 main areas of frustrations with service-blueprint projects. Here are recommendations for overcoming or alleviating these problems.
Customer Experience (CX) and User Experience (UX) are two common terms that mostly mean the same thing, but have different connotations. Whatever your preferred term, it's important to consider design at 3 levels of experience.
A service design perspective is needed to avoid fragmenting the long-term customer experience by individual (but uncoordinated) touchpoints, provided by siloed internal teams.
When you are in the early stages of designing a user experience flow, use scenario mapping to work out how different personas will use the proposed design to solve their tasks.
When conducting research for customer-journey maps, use qualitative methods that allow direct interaction with or observation of users, such as interviews, field studies, and diary studies.
Friction and Flow are two concepts in interaction design that assist users in their tasks, whether this is to prevent errors or to encourage completion. As designers, it's important to use both as and when required in the user journey. This video explains when you might need to consider adding friction into the user journey.
How storyboards fit within the UX design process, and the steps needed to make a successful storyboard to visualize a workflow, customer journey, or user story.
People make decisions based on the information that is most readily available to them. Understanding how the availability heuristic works will help you design for the way people think.
Diary studies are a longitudinal research method used to understand user interactions at different touchpoints, which is especially useful for omnichannel user research. Participants record their reactions as experiences unfold throughout the customer journey.
A service blueprint visualizes the relationships between different service components — people, props, and processes. Four key elements comprise a framework for service blueprinting that can be scaled to any scope or timeline.
User journeys should be managed like products — by people and teams with specialized, journey-dedicated roles who continually research, measure, optimize, and orchestrate the experience.
Pain points are problems that occur at the different levels of the customer experience: interaction level, customer-journey level, or relationship level.
Collaboration is one of the 5 key components of omnichannel user experience. Collaboration between normally disparate devices or channels creates new ways to interact.
Asset maps display and organize the screens and elements users encounter along workflows and journeys. They provide a systematic way of analyzing the consistency of an organization’s experience across channels.
To deliver high-quality omnichannel experiences, companies must develop an operational ecosystem that enables crossfunctional collaboration and quick reaction to customers’ needs.
Set yourself up for journey-mapping success by educating yourself on the basics, defining objectives, building a crossfunctional team, collaborating on the map, and optimizing your presentation.
Users rely on social media to find out about new products or companies, conduct research, engage with content, make purchases, and seek customer support.
How to design a journey-mapping workshop that leads participants through current-state assumption mapping, pain-point identification, and future-state visioning.
Before beginning any journey-mapping initiative, teams must decide between (1) a current-state or future-state map, and (2) an assumption-first or research-first approach. A hybrid approach for each decision works well for most teams.
The most common pain points with service blueprinting are setting expectations, determining scope, and communicating insights, according to 97 UX professionals.
Evaluate your journey map to identify low and high points, failures to set expectations, unnecessary or too long steps, channel transitions, and moments of truth. Use this information to find opportunities for improving the journey.
There are 7 activities that act as a foundation for every UX exercise during a workshop or collaborative team meeting. By understanding these, you can create almost any other exercise you need.
Service blueprints are the primary tool for service design, but practitioners often misunderstand how they relate to journey mapping, who should be involved in the process, and how to sell their value to the organization.
UX practitioners associate the term “service blueprinting” with an artifact, framework, or collaborative tool. Those surveyed used service blueprints early on or near the end of the product-design lifecycle.
