This week’s class was dedicated to one-on-one tutorials, looking at our healthcare projects as we near our final design critique and final hand-in. I had managed to get to the early stages of my final screen designs, so I had work to show my lecturer and get feedback on. My lecturer was happy with my progress so far and advised me to carry on with the path I am on and finish my app design. It was a useful session, getting feedback on my work is always useful and I left with increased confidence in my work so far and motivated to finish the app.
As we didn’t cover any new content this week, for this blog I have decided to continue looking at Service Design as I continued to read the book: “This is Service Design Thinking”. This book is split into three sections, Service Design Basics, Service Design Tools and Service Design Case Studies and this week I am looking at Service Design Tools.
Service Designers use several different tools when completing their work, a significant number of these tools are shared with User Experience design and other design disciplines. Tools such as personas, journey maps, ideation, storyboarding and the importance of storytelling and narrative cross over with UX design and our tools I am very familiar with. The tools I want to look at in more detail are some of the tools that I have not encountered before and whether these might be of use to me in my projects whether they be service design or UX design.
In the early stages of the design process, most of the tools used in service design surround getting the most information on how a current service works or the area a new service would fit within. A tool I have not used myself is creating a stakeholder map, often for my projects within UX design the stakeholders are the user and the business I am designing for. However, as service design looks at a much bigger picture, there is the possibility of many more service stakeholders. To look at a service fully it is important to know who all these stakeholders are and a stakeholder map is a useful way of adding structure to this task. Finding all the stakeholders of a service can be a challenge, while interviews and information from the service provider will provide a lot of the information required, you need to check that no stakeholders have been missed. Often these stakeholders that the service provider forgets can be key in the service experience for a service user and they need to be found and looked at in as much detail as any other.
Another tool covered in this book that I found interesting is expectation maps, these are created to map the expectations of service users when interacting with the service. Expectation maps are a useful diagnosis tool for seeing what issues require attention from a service user perspective. They offer the designer a way of discovering these issues and giving these issues a hierarchy of importance which can give the design process direction. I feel an expectation map could beuseful in a UX design project if developed from an empathetic perspective. They could provide another way alongside other design tools to get accurate user needs for a project. With user needs being a key aspect of any project any tool that can help a designer discover these user needs is going to be useful in the design process.
The final tools I want to look at are the tools used in service design to prototype services, within UX design prototyping plays a key part in the process and with tools such as Figma it is possible to not only prototype digital products but to share these and test those with users. As services involve a lot of people-to-people interactions which are key to the service as well the importance of the physical environment the service is provided within. Therefore, there is no digital tool that can accurately offer a prototype of a service. The tools that do try and offer a prototype of a service include desktop walkthroughs, service staging and service roleplays. Of these tools service staging and roleplays involve going out and creating prototype services as accurately as possible and acting out the service process. This takes time and a budget to create and carry out, and therefore for me, they may be out of reach in many projects.
A desktop walkthrough on the other hand is created in your workspace (on your desktop) often using Lego figures and other physical props to build a 3-D model of the service environment to assess and analyse how a service works. You can also add in and test improvements to the service and see how they may play out in reality. I find this a really useful way to make ideas and the service itself more realistic in your mind as often a service requires a lot of imagining and playing out scenarios in your head, a desktop walkthrough allows you to make these scenarios real and potentially spot issues that your mental models may have missed.
While these service prototyping tools may not be necessary when designing an app or other digital product designed to be used anywhere, they could offer context when the product is designed to be used in a specific location, such as an ordering machine in a fast food restaurant and could offer insights into issues you may not have noticed if you simply looked at the digital design.
Looking at service design tools has shown the similarities between service and UX design, which is great for me as it opens up another design avenue for me to potentially work in during my design career. As with most things there is also things from service design I can take into my UX projects, I especially think that expectation mapping could be useful to UX projects as not only does it involve looking at things from a user’s perspective but it also gives you a clearer idea of the need of the user and what your digital product needs to do.