Nov 23, 2009
Methods help us in a variety of ways throughout the service design process.
Here’s a list of service design methods selected and tailored by a company called Engine*:
*Founded in 2000, Engine is one of the world’s leading service design and innovation consultancies.
1. Path To Participation
What is it?
The path to participation is a diagram or sketch of a participation framework that service interactions can be mapped on. Normally it takes the form of a series of moments drawn as a process.
It can be visualised on different levels; from an operational point of view and as a customer journey.
What you get
The activity itself of mapping the path to participation is the most valuable output of this method, although the resulting diagram can be used at various stages of a service design project to inspire and check ideas.
When to use it
A well designed service will have considered all paths to participation. The path to participation mapping process can help with the design of customer engagement (how do we attract these customers?) and retention (how do we keep them interested?).
The model is generally used during early generative phases of projects to help the team get a better understanding of an existing service, and to make sure they have considered all the points where the service comes into contact with the user.
2. Culture hunt
What it is
The culture hunt is an immersion method in which a designer spends an intensive period of time in a pre-selected group of locations. The aim is to be inspired and gain a deeper understanding of the workings of the particular place of study. Quantity is as important as quality when undertaking a culture hunt.
Activities in the locations may involve observations, ad-hoc interviews, photography and absorbing the atmosphere through taking notes. The trick is to keep the pace up and select stimulating environments.
What you get
The treasure is a collection of observations and insights that can help stimulate ideas. Its best to hunt with two or three others for maximum material.
Culture hunt image capture
When to use it
When seeking knowledge and inspiration on a topic or environment, usually at early stages of the project to stimulate fresh thinking. It?s a high energy, playful and explorative method.
3. Participant journals
What they are
Service design relies heavily on establishing the true needs and practices of both service users and providers. One means of capturing rich, accurate information during a service design project is to equip users and providers with tools called participant probes. These help capture participants’ activities, thoughts and feelings. Journals are an effective and easy to use form of participant probe.
Journals are usually sent to participants with a specific brief on how and when they should be used. Their structure can vary from loose to specific; some are intended to capture a number of experiences over a longer period, while others focus on specific tasks. The very presence of a journal acts as a physical motivator to participants to record their thoughts on a regular basis.
A journal’s information design has a huge impact on how it is used. Exercises that trigger or reveal emotions — both pleasant and unpleasant — can provide useful insight on a variety of experiences over time. Journals must be usable, with any page layout being well considered.
Participant journals are often accompanied with disposable cameras. Images taken help tell the story through the participants’ eyes.
What you get
The journals are returned full of information and knowledge from the participants. Simply put, you get what you’ve asked for. The structure or brief originally set determines how participants respond — and therefore the nature of the data.
Presenting information from the journals to project stakeholders with photos taken by participants helps to build a convincing story. The format of journals allows both easy skimming, and deeper interpretation.
When to use them
Journals are most useful when you need a deep, detailed understanding of the thoughts, feelings or activities of users and other stakeholders. They are used effectively in advance of discovery workshops. Participant journals are usually a good compliment to other design research techniques such as contextual interviews.
4. Contextual Interview
What it is
A contextual interview is spending time with a person in their territory often in their home, social place or workspace combining loosely structured interviews and observations.
This technique stems from ethnography in which ethnographers spend months or even years living and observing people in different cultures. In the commercial context ethnographic work has time limitations therefore it is usually restricted to half a day or a few days.
Ethnographers importantly remind their participant to behave as naturally as possible; to do the things they would normally do with the people they would normally do them with and encourage them not to change their behaviour or put on a show for the researcher. The researcher has the sensitive challenge of conducting an interview without it seeming to be an interview, but rather a chat where questions and answers are exchanged in both directions. The best way to do this is to avoid taking notes (occasionally skirting off to the toilet to write them down before you forget!).
Interviews are often conducted with several different types of people for a particular project in order to achieve a broad array of insights. Finding the right people in a short space of time can be difficult. Cash based incentives are the best way to secure the right participants.
The beauty of good ethnographic work is in understanding the reality of people and not working on assumptions.
What you get
Contextual interviews can help to uncover the unknown unknowns. Spending time with a participant reveals a deep understanding of their behaviour, needs, problems, desire and motivations. The output of an interview is rich and meaningful observations and insights that build a story on the participant. The stories can be supported and emphasised by images and video clips.
When to use it
Ethnographic work is used to reveal subjective realities of how people experience different aspects of their lives, as opposed to market research, which is often conducted to verify and validate.
It is usually used in the early stages of a project. Often in service design the stories, observations and insights can be fed into a workshop as great stimulus for conversation and picking apart needs, problems and opportunities for innovation.
It can also be used to bring to life the reality of a strategy by understanding it from the end users perspective.
5. Distributed Scenario Brainstorm
What it is
A Distributed Scenario Brainstorm (DSB) is designed to generate creative opportunities for service innovation. This tool is particularly helpful to develop new ideas for services that are situation-specific, such as roadside recovery or holiday packages. These services are usually experienced at different moments and locations and as a result the experiences customers have are usually very dynamic, complex and subjective.
Coming up with innovative ideas for every possible situation and every possible customer can be extremely challenging. That’s when the DSB tool can help. During a DSB session participants use a set of cards depicting a wide range of service moments and personas. By randomly picking and combining different personas and service moments, we can focus on specific issues to generate lots of ideas.
A typical brainstorming session involves several rounds of mini-brainstorms around a set of moments and personas. Once participants come up with a good number of ideas (usually ten to fifteen), they select a new set of cards and start a new discussion. This helps to keep the creative momentum while exploring different scenarios within a service.
What you get
We always end up with a big pile of ideas! We also like to have multidisciplinary groups with people from different areas and backgrounds. We usually have sessions with a mix of service designers, end users and clients. This helps to increase the richness of the ideas and to get buy in from team members — after all, they came up with the ideas themselves!
Writing down the ideas
When you use it
As a divergent thinking tool, the DSB generates ideas in a rather unstructured way. For this reason, we usually use a DSB during the Discover and Generate phases of a project, where the main objective is to challenge existing paradigms and explore new ideas.
6.Graphic Facilitation
What it is
Graphic facilitation is a technique for visualizing or scribbling information. During a group brainstorming or workshop session on any subject matter the graphic facilitator is dedicated to capturing the discussion or presentation in a visual format.
The format of capturing is usually sketching on a flipchart or someplace that everyone can see it. This technique helps to stimulate left-brain thinking — the visual part of the brain. It keeps people’s interest, as there’s always something exciting to look at. It’s visual and it’s fun.
This technique is particularly good for obtaining an overall sense of meeting and having something tangible to deliver to project stakeholders. Capturing what people say in images can beat the overload of post-its often used to take notes.
What you get
During the session you get a visual that [participants can respond to during the session. Afterworlds you are left with an instant visual summary to show the project stakeholders. This can help you save time as there is less synthesis after a session
When to use it
Use it to capture a visual summary of any group session. However this technique doesn’t capture the detail and shouldn’t be used to replace minute taking or digital recording so may not be appropriate in a high level strategic meeting.
7. Co-creation
What it is
Co-creation is at the heart of what we do. We want to design with users in order to see beyond insights and opinions on a situation, an existing design or a proposed solution, and help people discover their own ideas on how to tackle a problem or make the most of an opportunity.
Co-creation is often run in workshops, but can just as easily be done using blogs, diaries and rapid prototyping. We may guide the discussion with questions, provocations and tools, but we understand that the users we are working with are the real experts on themselves. Fundamentally, we’re asking our users ‘what can be done about it?’
What you get
Users gain a sense of ownership of the project and its outcomes, and may even become champions of the project and process within their organisation or group. Co-creative processes are more easily embedded into an organisation’s workings, whether it be a community, a government department or an international company.
Such projects are more sustainable because users gain the capacity to evolve the design in the future, having experienced why design decisions have been made. This, coupled with appropriate tools can even help nurture a culture of innovation and change within an organisation.
When to use it
Co-creation is a powerful tool in many situations, but in particular we have found it to be successful in bringing together the needs and ideas of different types of users within an organisation. We’ve designed schools with students, teachers and local community members and worked with different department heads, ‘front line’ workers and customers when designing service propositions and how they will be delivered. It’s also a useful tool to get people ‘on board’ and help spread the word about the project.
8. Filming
What it is
Filming can add colour and depth to research, or provide us with insights and opinions we may not have otherwise gleaned. It records the ideas, actions and feelings of stakeholders, often with great honesty.
Filming can be deployed in a range of scenarios for a range of purposes. From a user’s diary recorded on their mobile phone to a professional setup for interviews, the key is to find the right specific methods to get what you want. Who does the filming, where, how, with what and how it may be edited together for your audiences should all be considered before pressing Record.
What you get
You get out what you put in — everything has an impact on the way people will react and the things people will do and say in front of a camera.
The project often informs the decision to choose filming — and the options below may make your film more engaging, exciting and ‘real’ with footage of real customers, users, staff and participants talking about their experiences.
Service prototyping
Role play
Interviews
Video diaries
Ethnographic research
Presentations
Time lapse footage
A user’s point of view
When to use it
Filming can record lots of ideas very quickly, condense long sequences of time and events into just a few minutes, and good editing and interview technique can produce statements and opinions which can engage project stakeholders.
Filming often requires sensitivity in how it is conducted in order to create an environment where the camera isn’t obtrusive and people can speak and act as freely and naturally as possible.
Organisation is vital — everything in front of the camera, rehearsed or not, is live. Being flexible and prepared makes sure that even the unexpected parts are recorded. Even sending users out with cameras to film what they want can benefit from some guidelines.
9. Conjoint analysis
What it is
Conjoint analysis is a form of quantitative research offering powerful insight into customer preferences, from a simple set of questions.
Participants (usually potential customers or service users) are asked to choose between a couple of packages — or in our case, service variants. This process is repeated several times with different variants.
The participants’ choices are fed through a computer, for a rich picture of preferences in terms of the service’s underlying qualities (for example time of day, cost, and speed). The results are more accurate than if the participant had ranked the qualities separately (without thinking of them in the context of complete services). The ideal service mix is magically revealed, even though it probably won’t have been one that the participant actually saw and ranked.
What you get
Conjoint analysis ranks people’s preferences within each quality (for example, for the quality “time of day”, morning may be preferred to afternoon). But it also reveals the relative importance of the qualities themselves — for example, time of day may play a lesser role in customers’ decision-making processes than speed.
Yellow, not red. Cheap, not expensive. But most importantly, large, not small.
It’s also possible to produce data showing where the biggest changes in sensitivity are, for a given quality. For example, people might object more to a jump from low to medium price, than from medium to high.
When to use it
An obvious prerequisite is that the qualities you’d like to test (the aspects and components of your service) must be known. Towards the beginning of a project (in the identify phase), conjoint analysis can be used to highlight areas in need of the most creative focus.
The technique is also useful later in a project when ideas have started to gel — during the build phase. It can validate the potential popularity of a service before production, shedding light on features to keep or reject, or how best to bundle them.
Lastly, conjoint analysis can help pinpoint which aspects of a service to emphasise in terms of marketing, and at what price point to launch the service.
10. Storyboarding
What it is
Storyboarding is a narrative technique adopted from the film industry and adapted to suit the needs of designers interested in ways to communicate the various features of a service design. Storyboarding can be used to test and evaluate ideas, as well as communicate them to others. Storyboards are normally presented as a series of ‘frames’ that communicate a sequence of events such as a customer journey.
What you get
If you’re using storyboards to represent your polished ideas you’ll get a visual and rich description of a service design that highlights key touchpoints and moments. The tone and quality of the descriptions of course depends on the style and skill of the storyboarder.
A storyboard storyboard!
If you’re using storyboards to explore ideas and check your thinking you’ll have a series of more ‘sketchy’ moments — its often best to draw these on postcards so you can re-order them and play around with the sequence of events.
When to use it
You can use storyboarding at many points during a service design exercise. For example to stimulate a focused discussion around key features; To imagine interactions in more detail; To gain useful insights to stimulate the prototyping phase; To provide the necessary detail to enable people to grasp some of the more complex features of a proposition.
11. Service prototyping
What I hear, I forget.
What I see, I remember.
What I do, I understand.
Lao Tzu
What it is
Service prototypes — mockups of services — allow us to experience and test services before they’re produced. Prototypes provide insight on various service aspects — from desirability and usability, to viability. They can generate deeper understanding than written descriptions or visual depictions, which don’t deal as well with the time-related and intangible aspects of services.
Service prototypes can be rudimentary, comprising of acted-out scenarios with hand-sketched screens or improvised props. Conversely, they can be detailed mock-ups of systems, props, environments, and “trained staff” — to provide more realistic and convincing experiences.
Stop at the barrier
What you get
Service prototypes can support the design process by helping with many questions, for example:
• Is the service functional?
• Is the service desirable for the customer or user?
• Is it easy for them to use?
• Is it strategically desirable to offer this service?
• Is it economically or logistically viable to provide this service?
Service prototyping is suitable for several audiences. Potential service users can help refine a service’s design with their thoughts and feelings of a prototype experience. Project stakeholders from strategists to technical experts can gain understanding of the service — and its workings. Prototypes can also serve to excite clients — and their colleagues — about the proposed service.
Good news
When to use it
The roughest, earliest prototypes may serve mainly to inform designers, during the generation and synthesis of ideas. Learnings from early lo-fi prototyping usually prompt further design iterations.
Prototypes later in the design process (in the model or specify phases) are usually higher fidelity. Detailed interface designs may be tested, and more prototype elements may be “working,” rather than being suggested or “faked”. Prototypes at this level often prompt minor design tweaks, or simply validate a well-designed service.
12. Empathy tools
What it is
Empathy tools, such as clouded spectacles and weighted gloves, help you to actually experience processes as though you yourself have the needs of different users. Using them can help prompt an empathetic understanding for users with disabilities or special conditions.
We are interested in finding out not just what people are saying and doing, but also what they are thinking and feeling. The difficulty is that people don’t always do, think or feel what they tell you.
This is why it is useful to employ some empathetic research techniques. At the same time, empathy tools are a great for designers to use too, enabling us to break out of the trap of designing for ourselves and start to see the challenge from the point of view from the end user.
What you get
Empathy tools are a qualitative research method. Using them to carry out a few observations around the edge of a user group can be highly effective. With empathetic research you might closely observe some extreme users and gain lots of interesting insights which will inspire your service designs.
When to use it
Empathy tools are best used at the beginning of the design process in conjunction with ethnographic research. Sometimes, they become handy again during service prototyping when you are interested in observing users in the environment and context that they will be using the service that is being developed.
13. Shadowing
What it is
Shadowing is a technique that allows you to immerse yourself in the lives of customers, front line staff and people behind the scenes. You usually spend up to a day with people, quietly observing their daily routines and (if possible) participating in their activities. Shadowing offers a vital advantage over traditional forms of research like surveys or focus groups: they let you spot the real moments when problems occur as well as situations where people say one thing but actually do something quite different.
Day shadowing at Walker Technology College
What you get
Shadowing helps you understand how people really use your service, and how you could improve the experience in terms of what they would like the service to offer and not. Spending some quality time with people, allows you to see where problems arise, helping you for getting ideas of how to change it. Besides identifying process steps, resources and touchpoints, you tend to generate a more holistic view on how a complex system works, including the interplay of various stakeholders. We often produce a journey map as a representation of our findings.
When to use it
We normally use shadowing techniques usually at the early stages of a project to gain meaningful insights into people and their experiences of a service. It is never used on its own, but as part of our wider ethnographic research.
14. Relationship mapping
What it is
Relationship mapping is a powerful tool that helps you understand services as systems made of people and their relationships. Services are created and consumed through systems of relationships between people, things and processes. In order to innovate within these systems, it is important to understand the network of relationships between the people and organisations that make a service work — or that fail to make a service work. Relationship mapping helps you visualise those relationships.
What you get
People are an implicit part of a service experience — whether as providers or receivers of the service — and relationship mapping helps you capture all stakeholders involved and understand how they currently work together. We usually work with participants to explore the relationships that they can influence — and those that they can’t. We also ask them to qualify the nature of these relationships in terms of their purpose and what makes them succeed or fail. By the end of the exercise, you’ll end up with a comprehensive map describing the connections between individuals, groups, organisations and society. Visualising a system of relationships as a whole gives participants a “way-in” to redefining those relationships, roles and responsibilities to seeing how changes impact on each other.
A relationship map developed for NESTA
When to use it
We tend to use relationship mapping as part of the discovery stage, where we try to gain as many insights as possible. It is a great starting point for us to identify what changes need to be made in terms of people, roles and responsibilities as well as interactions. The relationship map can evolve from describing the current situation into specifying people’s roles for the new service and can become part of the Service Specification Document.
15. Desktop walkthroughs
What it is
Acting out ideas for service interactions at a lego level! Desktop walkthroughs are very simple exercises in imagining a service experience using small, hand sized toys. A typical desktop walkthrough involves a customer, a member of staff, an environment and some paper touch points. You literally walk through the service moment, taking pictures and ideally with another person, imagining what the various actors are doing, saying and feeling. It can be useful to run the walk through using various different personas, and under different imagined situations.
What about the kids?
What you get
A better understanding of the choreography of the service elements, and insight into any inpractical or illogical ideas and moments. If you’ve been using different types of customers and contexts, you’ll also emerge from the desktop walkthrough session with additional insight into specific needs, and hopefully a little more empathy to you plastic friends. You also get lots of cute photos of the service moments you can use in storyboards or other activities later.
When to use it
Use desktop walkthroughs to check your thinking when designing complex service choreography, or when different people will have very different experiences of the same environment, as well as to inject a bit of fun and 3D focus to otherwise quite flat (i.e paper or screen based) design thinking.
*Founded in 2000, Engine is one of the world’s leading service design and innovation consultancies.
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