Service Prototyping
The challenge for a Service Designer is to ensure that stakeholders can see the value of the service experience that has been designed.
If you are new to Service Design and would like to explore the work scope for a Service Designer at a Startup, MNC or a Design Studio in India, check out my book Navigating Service Design.
Often when orchestrating an entire service that comprises multiple touchpoints, key stakeholders do not have the ability to visualize the service experience. As designers, most of us are extremely visual due to which an orchestration of a journey may seem obvious in our heads because we can play out the sequence effectively. This is not the case with people who are not trained to think or construct ideas visually in their minds due to which they fail to understand how the new proposal in the journey would add any value to the customer.
When a Service Designer is assigned to evaluate an existing service for an organization and help the team to improve the service experience, the designer starts by collecting “data”.
Collecting “data” is focused towards understanding the current pain-points of not just the customers but also the stakeholders. The reason for the initial research is to understand if the problem identified by the stakeholders is the right set of problems to work on.
Often business teams use data to state the reason for an experience failure and often negate the softer touchpoints that could be the culprit for resulting in a bad experience.
While proposing Service solutions, a key obstacle that I have experienced as a Service designer is making these softer touchpoints tangible and visible.
How might we make a Service “Experience” visible and tangible?
The most obvious solution is to Prototype the different iterations of the service solution which includes the stakeholder’s proposals as well as the designer’s proposal. Service prototyping is primarily said to be used as a tool for learning or as a tool for communicating.
Why build a Service Prototype?
Service prototype serves as a tool to collaborate with stakeholders and colleagues to improve the experience of an existing service or build a new service from scratch. It is a way to iterate and test a service without investing time and money building the real service.
The prototype can be used for the following purposes—
- Helping stakeholders to experience the service in customer’s shoes.
- Collecting feedback from target customers before investing time and money in executing the final service experience.
- Testing out the prototype with the employees who would be responsible in executing the same.
- Service prototype helps designers to articulate to different stakeholders from different departments regarding the value their collaboration with other departments would provide them.
One key learning I had while working with startups is that though as a designer you propose a well architected service, it has to be still executed and owned by the service providers. If you upset these employees, the chances of your service being executed in the envisioned manner is very bleak which would lead to multiple pain points.
Often Service Designers are much younger to the Senior managers of different departments that the designers work with. If the entire solution is constructed and shared in the format of an SOP ( Standard Operating Procedure) to the senior managers, the design will hit a road block up due to politics, bureaucracy and ego clash. Hence, involving stakeholders is key so that they feel included in the entire service construction.
Service prototype can play a key role of inclusivity for Senior Managers to build the service and share their experiences to the Service Designer.
This is a more holistic method of building service experiences because a Service Designer would receive all the learnings and knowledge transfer from the field engineers and managers. In turn the stakeholders would feel included in the service innovation.
How to build a Service Prototype
Building a Service prototype has to be well planned and the entire team needs to be aligned to the decision. [1]One of key challenge in this quest relates to the selection of tools and established techniques that can provide fast iteration development process to service prototyping by enabling the integration of user comments and suggestions.[1]
For this reason the Service Designer along with the stakeholders should align to the following -
- What should we Test and Why? : which function ,feature integration or phase do we need to prototype?
- What is the Fidelity of the Prototype?
- What is the tool used based on the above factors ?
1. What should we Test and Why? :
It is key to identify which aspect of the customer journey needs to be tested and “Why?”.
It is often advised not to build a service prototype that involves more than 6 to 7 touchpoints. ( A touchpoint is any point a customer interacts with the business; example — sales representatives, mobile app, interactive signages, marketing initiatives, customer support calls / mails or sms it could be anything as complex as a cloud application to people or a small artifact like a barcode.)
Each touchpoint might belong to a different department who has the access to the data as well as the process which is further integrated to their backend systems. In short, a touchpoint is equivalent to a team of 15 to 20 members who might or might not belong within a single department. Hence the research insights and pain-points will become extensive for a single touchpoint itself.
The solution to avoid falling into a whirlpool of issues are the following -
1. Clearly define the scope of the customer journey.
2. The objective of involving each of the touchpoints
3. The scope of study for each of the touchpoints along with the stakeholders involved.
2. What is the Fidelity of the Prototype?
Once we define the scope of prototyping other key factors that play a role in defining the ‘fidelity’ of the prototype are — Project phase, Time, Budget, Resources and the fidelity of each touchpoint itself!
Based on the above factors, as designers we negotiate the fidelity of the prototype. If it is a prototype that has to be quickly created to test out assumptions within the team, we often opt for a low fidelity prototype. If the value of a particular feature has to be communicated to larger decision makers by collecting customer feedback, then we opt for a higher fidelity prototype.
In order to decide the fidelity of the prototype, teams can also use a tool called — The Prototype Matrix.
The above matrix can be used to collaborate with stakeholders to understand how detailed the prototype should be. With an unfinished prototype, people are more open to provide feedback because they assume that the feedback can be incorporated. Where as, if the prototype is polished and high fidelity, users avoid giving feedback thinking that it would be too much effort to address the feedback at this stage.
Depending on how open to change the design is and how much feedback you would want to collect, the fidelity should be accordingly picked.
If what you want to test is very scattered across the matrix, you may need to produce multiple prototypes, each of which addresses your different testing needs.
Prototyping needs high creativity and ability to find workarounds!
The creativity aspect of building a service prototype rests with the designer’s ability to recreate an experience with the available props, budget, time and available resources.
In order to prototype a higher fidelity of service experience, there are multiple touchpoints and not everything is digital! Unlike an app prototype that could be built out using only Adobe XD , Invision, Framer, Figma to name a few platforms, a service experience cannot be prototyped easily.
The touchpoints could be a combination of physical space, people, digital applications, signages, processes or artefacts. In a service experience each touchpoint works in cohesion with the rest of the touchpoints within the ecosystem. There is constant exchange of data from the front-end to the back-end systems.
A service blueprint illustrates this the best.
From the above example it is evident that a service prototype is an integrated ecosystem that is dependent on data sharing which means a robust “ integration” across the touchpoints. To recreate this with dummy prototypes is a challenge!
Apart from the above challenges, unlike a product or an application prototyping, a Service Prototype will have to be designed to measure “key moments” in a customer journey. An example could be as simple as the sales representative being proactive and keeping customer’s Purchase order documents filled and ready for them to have a hassle free buying journey.
This part of the service could either have the customer delighted or worried knowing that the representative has access to most of their personal details.
A Service prototype should have the ability to capture intangible moments to iterate before the final service execution.
There are multiple tools that could be used to design a service prototype based on the fidelity as well as the complexity of the integrations.
3. What is the tool used based on the above factors ?
Service prototypes could range in budget based on fidelity. Based on the tool used it could be as cost effective as a paper and cardboard prototype to as extensive as a prototype using MVP products, projectors, staged experience spaces as well as real stakeholders.
[1] These solutions should bear the capability to mitigate the risks connected with unforeseen problematic issues based on the service design specification, or aspects of it delivery.[1]
A tool box was listed out in a conference paper -‘Innovation by Service Prototyping’. The paper further classifies the tools based on fidelity, effort required to build it as well as the evaluation criteria of the service.
The main objective of the paper being to enhance the user experience while keeping the service prototyping simple.
The focus should not be fixated on building a beautiful prototype but the end value it could be adding to the decision makers.
How to communicate the results of a Service Prototype learning ?
Service Prototype itself is a tool to communicate the service experience to the stakeholders. The prototype is also used to test out certain assumptions, collect feedback from user segments as well as the employees. The data collected is often in different forms like quotes, interviews, surveys or quantitative data.
As a service designer we have to identify patterns to conclude the study, but the tricky part is communicating these patters to the concerned decision makers. Visualization plays a key role in this effort because if the findings are not articulated clearly, the results of the prototype will have no impact and the decision makers would go ahead based on their previous assumptions.
The choice of visualization tool depends on the target audience. Recently, I had a conversation with our inhouse UX researcher. He would often share his research findings in the form of research documents which was a google doc of 100 pages with content. What we realized is that though the research was conducted thoroughly, the key decision makers do not have the time to read through the 100 page document to understand if they are making the right decision. The researcher being from an academic background was only exposed to communicating with academicians.
With the help of a UI designer, we decided to visualize the data into a 5 page presentation. The toughest part of the exercise is picking the right information and discarding others. Because to the researcher every detail is important bit not for the decision maker. The exercise was designed to first sort the research findings based on hierarchy of importance and then build a presentation that narrated the findings sequentially.
Just like a ‘T’ shaped individual, I could call the presentation ‘T’ shaped because in the first 5min we covered the breath with the overall findings and if a decision maker wanted to delve deeper into a specific topic, the presentation was designed to dig deeper as well.
[5] If designers do not keep in touch with user input, there is a risk of ending up with self-centered rather than user-centered design (Pruitt & Adlin, 2006).
Often as people we are looking for data points that would confirm our bias based on our world view. This is where effective communication of multiple world views learned through the service prototype plays a key role in making decisions that not only aligns with business goals but also enhances a user’s experience.
My Future Work
While working with corporates, I had the opportunity to build high fidelity prototypes to visualize fintech services, smart retail and grocery services. While working with large service companies who have the budget, I was able to orchestrate and build multiple prototypes that had interactive screens, multiple projectors, immersive technologies like AR and MR to help recreate the actual service.
Apart from the availability of immersive technology, I had access to plenty of resources who were working on individual touchpoints. As a Service Designer, I was orchestrating teams of 20–25 people for an individual touchpoint for a 5 to 6 touchpoint per service prototype.
Currently while working with a startup, there is definitely certain restrictions with the availability of resources, new age technologies or budget. This is where the true creativity of a designer plays a crucial role. Luckily I was introduced to a prototyping tool called Protopie by a colleague.
I am planning to explore how Protopie could help me create a service experience with limited dependencies. I will keep you posted and share my experience with creating service prototypes with Protopie ( Tony Kim — CEO of protopie has many articles written to help you start using the application )
Until then, if you are a service designer and have have build similar prototypes please feel free to write to me at ( juneza.niyazi@gmail.com ) or if you would like to publish your article on service design, write to our SDD India medium page called — ( Service Design Case Studies ) Service Design India.
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References :
[1] 10.1007/978–3–319–61240–9_13.pdf (springer.com)
[2] blomkvist-holmlid.pdf (servdes.org)
[3]prototype_0.pdf (danskdesigncenter.dk)
[4](PDF) Innovation with Service Prototyping (researchgate.net)
[5]Microsoft Word — Segelstrom SDC09-final.doc (servdes.org)
[6]Designing for Service as One Way of Designing Services (ijdesign.org)
