Design Thinking / Service Design

Service design is a process in which the designer focuses on creating optimal service experiences. This requires taking a holistic view of all the related actors, their interactions, and supporting materials and infrastructures. Service design often involves the use of customer journey maps, which tell the story of different customers’ interactions with a brand, thus offering deep insights.

Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider, authors of the bestselling book This is Service Design Thinking, provide five basic principles that underlie service design:

  1. User-centered, through understanding the user by doing qualitative research
  2. Co-creative, by involving all relevant stakeholders in the design process
  3. Sequencing, by partitioning a complex service into separate processes
  4. Evidencing, by visualizing service experiences and making them tangible
  5. Holistic, by considering touchpoints in a network of interactions and users

Process of the Service Design Workshop

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Scope: Detailed project plan, prioritized scope of work, UX/UI mockups, your most optimal business decisions.

Duration: 1–5 days, In person or remote

Before the start checklist

  • Is it human centric problem?
  • How clear is the solution? (if clear – no need)
  • How ambiguous and complex is the challenge?
  • Is exploration safe for the organization?
  • Can we get the feedback from target audience in the short terms?

Problem Identification

  • History about the problem
  • Market potential (volume, growth etc)
  • Existent solution and what's missing

Challenge Definition

Identify a driving question that inspires others to search for creative solutions. Define better the current state & challenge the current understanding of right.

  • Briefing
  • Stakeholder mapping
  • Research board
  • Challenge reframing

Challenge Researching

Inspire new thinking by discovering what people really need.

  • Desk research
  • Persona description (jobs to be done, pains, gains)
  • Customer journey
  • Stakeholder interview
  • Expert interview
  • Ethnography (+auto-ethnography, journal)
  • Substitute analysis (blue ocean)
  • Reference wall
  • Observation
  • Interview Recruiting (direct, ad-hoc, snowball, social networks...)
  • In-depth interviews
  • Research triangulation
  • Extremal users

Solution Ideation

Push past obvious solutions to get to breakthrough ideas.

Prototyping

Build rough prototypes to learn how to make ideas better.

  • Clickable prototypes
  • Agile / Scrum
  • Value Proposition Canvas
  • Scenarios & Storyboards
  • Sprint Questions

Testing

Refine ideas by gathering feedback and experimenting forward.

  • User Testing
  • Surveying
  • Product Analytics
  • A/B Testing
  • Focus groups
  • The mom test
  • Ritual Dissent

Publicizing

Craft a human story to inspire others toward action.

  • Paper / article
  • Presentation

Read more

Design thinking workshops done

  1. Improving the crypto wallet authorization experience with security level selector
  2. Getting more insights from the Ethereum Carbonvote
  3. Make clear the potential value of the Tribute incentive
  4. Encoding seed phrase to the picture (steganography)
  5. Tennagraph Plugin
  6. Internal Docs Process

Examples:

  • IDEO – first apple mouse, design thinking, 700 people
  • L2 Thinktank (acquired by Gartner for $134M)
  • Human Ventures (12 products, 2 acquired)
  • Whatever Elon Musk does
  • Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works
  • YCombinator selecting best to the investor pipeline
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