Humanise the Service Blueprint: Five Key Design Principles
Service blueprints are a wonderful visual artefact to show how an organisation delivers (or attempts to deliver) for its customers. Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) has an erudite site covering the components of a service blueprint, its benefits and both key and secondary elements.
To this I would add the importance of guidelines, or more commonly known as design principles. This article attempts to identify five key design principles to service blueprinting i.e. the ‘how’. The following principles should be viewed in the context of supplementing your current blueprinting efforts.
1. Start with what’s already there.
On any design engagement, there is usually a plethora of information produced by existing teams. This could take the form of process maps, system architecture diagrams or even a simple listing of support processes. The first task is to understand what’s already been developed before addressing gaps in the existing information which require more information from the business or business users.
2. Context is king.
In a change programme, designing for an uplift in a customer’s experience via the company’s existing channels would require a different method of problem-solving as compared to implementing a new cloud-based solution. Even subtle nuances could make a difference in the overall outcome — for example, designing the mobile application experience for millennials versus boomers.
3. Be cognizant on constraints.
This means designers should strive to understand where design sits in the project lifecycle in order to be most effective. Most design engagements are typically not greenfield (unless you’re in a startup seeking to create a brand new service), hence the mantra to ‘seek first to understand’. Constraints could come from all directions — a legacy system, an as-is process or even an existing strategic goal such as the currently served customer segment.
4. Use data and analytics to augment understanding and drive decision-making.
While designers may not need to be experts in data or analytics, having numbers…
