Design or improve a service

A research method in which the team uses real services, their own or competitors’, and notes what works and what fails.

Output

Notes and photos of real services, with what works and what fails

Avoid

Mistaking your experience for that of all users: it is a starting point, not a conclusion.

A trained person poses as a customer to experience a service and evaluate it against defined criteria, without the staff knowing they are being observed.

Output

An evaluation of the service against set criteria, seen as a customer

Avoid

Using it to monitor or punish specific employees.

Accompany a person during an everyday activity in their own setting, like shopping or getting around their neighborhood, and talk about what happens in the moment.

Output

Notes and observations of an activity seen in its real context

Avoid

Turning it into a tour led by you: let the person set the route.

A method for representing a person's path through a service, step by step, with their actions, touchpoints, emotions and pain points.

Output

A step-by-step map of the journey, with actions, touchpoints, emotions and pain points

Avoid

Drawing it from the office without talking to anyone: it will be the team's opinion, not the real experience.

Every moment a person interacts with a service: with another person, an object, a space, or an interface.

Avoid

Improving one channel while the others contradict what it promises.

A diagram that shows, step by step, the actions of the person, of frontstage and backstage staff, the support processes, and the physical evidence of a service.

Avoid

Making it so detailed that no one can read it: start with the key steps.

The distinction between what the person sees of a service (frontstage) and what happens behind it to make it possible (backstage), separated by the line of visibility.

Avoid

Dressing up the frontstage to hide a backstage that doesn’t work.

A map of all the people, organizations and systems involved in a service and what they exchange: information, money, products or trust.

Output

A map of the actors in the service and what they exchange

Avoid

Drawing only your organization: the service also depends on others.

A model that explains service quality as the distance between what customers expect and what they perceive, and looks inside the organization for where it arises.

Avoid

Measuring only satisfaction without asking what the person expected.

A technique for turning a problem or an insight into an open, optimistic question that invites ideas: “How might we…?”

Output

Open questions that invite ideas

Avoid

Putting the solution inside the question (“How might we build an app that…?”).

A group session to generate many ideas about a problem, leaving judgment for later.

Output

A long list of ideas about a problem

Avoid

Letting the most senior person speak first.

The collective creativity of designers and people not trained in design, applied throughout the whole process. It is a specific case of co-creation.

Avoid

Inviting people to co-design when the solution has already been decided.

A template to see whether an offer fits a customer type: on one side, their profile (jobs, pains and gains); on the other, the offer’s value map.

Output

A canvas with the customer profile and the value map

Avoid

Filling the profile with assumptions and taking it as valid.

Four questions for redesigning an offering against its industry: which factors to eliminate, which to reduce, which to raise and which to create that nobody offers.

Output

A strategy canvas with the new value curve

Avoid

Only adding: without eliminating or reducing, the offering gets more expensive.

Each person spreads a limited number of dots (stickers or marks) among the displayed options; those with the most dots move on to the next phase.

Output

A selection of ideas ranked by support

Avoid

Voting in turns and in full view, because the first dots sway everyone else.

A method that sorts requirements or ideas into four groups for a specific release: what must be in (Must), what should (Should), what could (Could) and what won’t this time (Won’t).

Output

A prioritized list in four groups

Avoid

Marking almost everything as a must.

A scale prototype, made with cardboard, building pieces, or figures, on which the team moves the characters step by step to rehearse a service from start to finish.

Output

A model of the service and a list of changes

Avoid

Polishing the model: it takes time away from playing.

Building quick, incomplete versions of an idea, from a paper sketch or a cardboard mock-up to something that works, to answer a design question before developing the idea.

Output

Prototypes, from a sketch to something that works

Avoid

Polishing the look when you don't yet know if the idea works.

The team, and sometimes users, act out a situation with simple or cardboard objects to imagine how a product or service would work.

Output

Acted-out situations that show how an idea would work

Avoid

Turning it into theater without a design question.

Ideating in the real place, or a similar one, and acting out the situations and ideas there with your body, instead of imagining them from a meeting room.

Output

Ideas tried out physically in the real place

Avoid

Doing it without research data: you would be acting out your assumptions.