Chapter 8: Using Design Thinking to Improve Customer Experience

Service Design

Service design refers to the planning and organizing of people, infrastructure, communication, and material elements of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and their customers.^[1] A service design blueprint, or journey map, is used to visually display a user’s experience of a service, which includes all interactions and touchpoints that both the customers and employees engage with. Journey maps are useful for visualizing complex or multi-channel service offerings to better understand the causes of root problems, or areas in need of improvement during a specific customer journey.

Service Design is about three things:

1. Customer Centricity. Putting the customer at the heart of everything you do.
2. Co-Creation. Creating services together.
3. Being Holistic. Building interdependent and inter-connected experiences that connect with people on an emotional level.

Exceptional service design is why customers come to your business and not another, and why they keep coming back.

A few of the general principles of service design are listed below.^[2]

1. Services should be designed based on a genuine comprehension of the purpose of the service, the demand for the service, and the ability of the service provider to deliver that service.
2. Services should be designed based on customer needs rather than the internal needs of the business.
3. Services should be designed to deliver a unified and efficient system rather than component-by-component which can lead to poor overall service performance.
4. Services should be designed and delivered in collaboration with all relevant stakeholders (both internal and external).
5. Services should be developed as a minimum viable service (MVS) and then deployed. They can then be iterated and improved to add additional value based on user/customer feedback.

Create Inclusive Customer Experiences

Inclusivity means to create experiences that reflect and enable people of all backgrounds and abilities to engage positively with the company brand and achieve their goals. It is important for organizations to consider inclusivity when designing services. The most inclusive brands do this with equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts. In today’s marketplace, there are customers from all around the globe who are from various cultures and have varied levels of accessibility. Vocabulary syntax and idioms vary within a language based on culture and location. Customers want to find information in their own language. Review the customers’ journey for accessibility which includes things like high-contrast screen text for easier reading for anyone with limited sight and ensuring assistive technology will work for customers who use it. There are also important compliance considerations around this type of accessibility. Lack of awareness can lead to exclusionary experiences.

A company may want to ensure that the team designing customer experiences comprises a diverse group of people so that different voices and perspectives are included.  Listening to customer feedback from diverse perspectives is also important. Design teams must be aware of their own biases, cultural assumptions, and other ways that their own perspectives might not be shared with everyone. Teams should consider the content at the local and cultural levels, and provide several support channels like live chat, video calls, and text-to-speak options.  Teams should ensure the brand is represented through imagery and photos that represent different ages, backgrounds, cultures, and ethnicities. Organizations could ask customers what they prefer and ask for their help in designing the customer journey.^[3]

Connect Employee Experience to Customer Experience

Customer experience and employee experience must be aligned to be successful.  When employees feel under compensated, undervalued,  or taken for granted, they sometimes become angry or resentful toward the organization.  When this occurs their performance may decline, and their interactions with customers may also become less what is expected. A customer who visits a fine-dining restaurant for a dinner out, may not feel happy, welcomed, or satisfied with the experience when they are served by a grumpy, unhappy server. This same principle applies to any organization, whether it’s a hospital, bank, hotel, retail store, etc. Employees drive the experience.

Organizations that invest in employees, so they stay longer, and feel more engaged and appreciated, will benefit from better financial performance overall.  Many of the best practices of customer experience management can be applied, and leveraged in employee experience management.  Managers can use surveys and other feedback tools to gather experiential data from employees. Managers should collaborate with employees to create an employee journey map to find obstacles and challenges that may be preventing employees from thriving.  When promising customers a low-effort, pleasant experience, the organization should consider whether or not the employee experience reflects that promise too. The alignment will also help employees feel more connected and authentic about their work. Employees are the biggest part of the customer experience equation.

Play the YouTube video below for an explanation of Service Design and compare two coffee shops, one that uses Service Design and one that does not.^[4] Transcript for “What is Service Design: A Tale of Two Coffee Shops” Video [PDF–New Tab]. Closed captioning is available on YouTube.

Service Design Versus Design Thinking

Service Design is understood as designing where the outcome is a service. Design Thinking, on the other hand, is a broad methodology that is focused on the needs of the end-user when designing any type of innovation. Service Design and Design Thinking are similar. Both are human-centered systematic and iterative approaches that observe and interpret the needs of behaviors of users with the aim of creating services that are useful, useable, desirable, efficient, and effective. However, Design Thinking is unrestricted by the parameters of a pre-determined solution and can reveal new or different pathways to achieve a goal that might not have been explored otherwise. For example, you may learn something new about customer needs during the prototype stage which may lead to a reworking of the concept and a whole new solution. Design Thinking explores the problem by understanding and empathizing with the user, followed by prototypes of various types of solutions, and bringing the most promising results to test and scale. Design thinking provides a starting point when the way forward is unclear, it helps the team fully understand a problem and arrive at a common goal. and it allows the team to find a tailored solution unique to the organization to achieve that goal.^[5]

Design Thinking

As the world is changing at an accelerated rate, organizations look for solutions to grow with their customers or users, to do new things in better ways to improve their practices, retain and grow their customers, and expand their business. Innovation is a must for these organizations.

Design thinking is one of several approaches to innovation and is a process for creative problem-solving. Design thinking has a human-centered core and can be applied to a wide variety of problems with variable solutions as outcomes, including products, programs, processes, services, and more. Design Thinking is widely used in the services industry by companies such as UPS, Airb&b, IBM, Uber, and Intuit.

The design thinking framework helps inspire creative thinking and strategies that lead designers to create user-friendly products that solve real problems. There are five stages to the design thinking process, shown below in Figure 8.1, which include empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing. They are not always completed in a linear fashion. They can be done in any order, and then redone as needed.  Different stages might spark new ideas or showcase new findings in the user journey that will inspire new iterations of phases that have already been completed.

Empathize

In order to deliver innovative, customer-centric solutions that customers want and will buy, begin with empathy. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and try to imagine what the customer might be thinking or feeling, what needs they may have, and what their desires are.  To do this you might observe the customer or interview the customer, and create a customer journey map.

You might ask yourself and your customers how they want this product or service to work. As designers (or design thinkers), we should always do our best to leave our own assumptions and experiences behind when making observations. Our life experiences create assumptions within us, which we use to explain and make sense of the world around us. However, this very process affects our ability to empathize in a real way with the people we observe. Since completely letting go of our assumptions is impossible, we should continuously and consciously remind ourselves to assume a beginner’s mindset. It’s helpful if you often remind yourself never to judge what you observe, but to question everything—even if you think you know the answer—and to really listen to what others are saying.^[11]

A great way to put yourself in the customer’s shoes is to create story maps for the various personas (customer segments) your company provides services to. A journey map is a detailed visualization that depicts the experience of a user-based persona as they use a specific product. It depicts the steps your customers take when interacting with your product or service.

A customer journey map specifies three elements:^[12]

1. The points at which prospective and existing customers interact with your brand.
2. What the customer seeks at each point.
3. The path they take from one point to the other, as they move towards buying your products. A map can be illustrated for an online experience, retail experience, or a combination of these.

Define

Designers will analyze their observations completed throughout the empathy stage, and work on synthesizing that information.  Forming a problem statement that is succinct is an important part of this phase that ensures a human-centered approach by focusing on the end-user. A problem statement is important to a Design Thinking project because it will guide you and your team and provide a focus on the specific needs that you have uncovered. A good problem statement should thus have the following traits. It should be human-centered, broad enough for creative freedom, and narrow enough to make it manageable.^[13]

Ideate

The solution-finding stage is where the team comes together to brainstorm creative solutions to solve the defined problem(s). When facilitated in a successful way, Ideation is an exciting process. The goal is to generate a large number of ideas — ideas that potentially inspire newer, better ideas — that the team can then evaluate and reduce into the best, most practical, and innovative ones.

Ideation Will Help You:

• Ask the right questions and innovate.
• Step beyond the obvious solutions and therefore increase the innovation potential of your solution.
• Bring together perspectives and strengths of team members.
• Uncover unexpected areas of innovation.
• Create volume and variety in your innovation options.
• Get obvious solutions out of your heads, and drive your team beyond them.

In Ideation sessions, it’s important to create the right type of environment to help create a creative work culture with a curious, courageous, and concentrated atmosphere. Instead of using a boardroom with the CEO sitting at the head of the table, Design Thinking and Ideation sessions require a space in which everyone is equal. There are hundreds of ideation methods used to spark innovative ideas. Some methods are merely renamed or slightly adapted versions of more foundational techniques. Here you’ll get a brief overview of some of the best methods:^[14]

• Brainstorm
• Braindump
• Brainwrite
• Brainwalk
• Challenge Assumptions
• SCAMPER
• Mindmap
• Sketch or Sketchstorm
• Storyboard
• Analogies
• Provocation
• Movement
• Bodystorm
• Gamestorming
• Cheatstorm
• Crowdstorm
• Co-Creation Workshops
• Prototype
• Creative Pause

Prototype

Without testing a new idea, designers would have a tough time actually solving the problem comprehensively. At this stage, small-scale, inexpensive versions of the product are required. This sets the stage for decision-making conversations around what works and what doesn’t. Prototypes can be sketches, models, or digital renders of an idea. These scaled-down prototypes can then be used in order to observe, record, judge, and measure user performance levels based on specific elements, or the users’ general behaviour, interactions, and reactions to the overall design. For instance, when developing software, a design team may produce a number of paper prototypes that the user can gradually work through in order to demonstrate to the design team or evaluators how they may tackle certain tasks or problems. When developing tangible devices, such as the computer mouse, designers may use a number of different materials to enable them to test the basic technology underlying the product. With advances in 3D printing technology, producing prototypes is now often a more instant and low-cost process, and as a result, this has allowed designers to provide stakeholders with accurate and testable/useable replica models before settling upon a particular design.^[15]

Test

Gather feedback from real users.  Because design thinking is iterative, many designers roll out multiple prototypes to test different change factors within their idea. Designers should expect to go through a series of changes, edits, and refinements during the testing stage. It is not uncommon for the testing phase to “restart” some other design thinking processes such as ideation or additional testing or an entirely fresh approach. In order to achieve the best learning results from each test, here are some areas of a test that you should take into consideration:^[16]

• The prototype
  Remember that you are testing the prototype, not the user. Your prototype should be designed with a central question in mind — a question that you will put to the test in the testing stage.
• Context and scenario
  As much as possible, try to recreate the scenario in which your users are most likely to be using the product. This way, you can learn more about the interaction (or disruptions) between the user, the prototype, and the environment, as well as how problems might arise as a result of that interaction.
• How you interact with the user
  Make sure your users know what the prototype and test are about, but do not over-explain how the prototype works.
• How you observe and capture feedback
  While collecting feedback, make sure you are not disrupting the user’s interaction with the prototype. Find a way to collect feedback in a way that freely allows you to observe what is happening (for example, by having a partner in the test, or by recording an audio or video of the test).

Play the YouTube video below for an explanation of the five stages of the Design Thinking process.^[17] Transcript for “What is Design Thinking?” Video [PDF–New Tab]. Closed captioning is available on YouTube.

Service Prototyping Techniques

The service prototype has the objective of replicating, as much as possible, the final experience of interacting with the service, in order to test and validate all the design choices. The complexity in the simulation is due to the fact that the service only exists once it’s delivered, and while testing the experience of using a specific touchpoint (such as a mobile app) could be relative, verifying the whole journey touching upon different service components is always challenging (especially when there are physical places or interactions with service staff involved). ^[18]

Below are a few examples of various prototype techniques.

Storyboarding

Service storyboards are sketches/visualizations of future usage scenarios depicted with illustrations and small texts. They mainly focus on the service concept, but can also illustrate some parts of the service processes and systems across several instances. Focusing on the value of the service for the target users or situations, storyboards are typically short and show little detail. They can also be created collaboratively with the users.^[20]

Service Advertisement

Service advertisements are visualizations of the service concept or value proposition through posters, digital ads, landing pages, videos, etc. Such ad prototypes use short slogans, catchy images, and texts to sell the service offering from emotional and factual points of view. It is recommended to include specific calls to action in these prototypes to see how the users interpret them.^[21]

Video Prototype

Videos are usually created to generate interest and demonstrate how exceptional the new product will be. The purpose of a video prototype can be to get buy-in, potential investment, or validation. Conceptual videos focus on vision at a high level to create anticipation. This prototype can also be used as a guide while creating detailed features during the development phase.^[22]

Role-playing Prototype

Role-play prototypes (also called Bodystorming) are enactments of services that allow one to explain a service or product idea by acting out a scenario of use. The role play typically requires defining some roles (e.g. the user, the service employee, etc.) and preparing rough prototypes or other materials that can facilitate the performance. While a team is acting out their story, the rest of the audience learns about the idea and understands the high-level sequence of actions required. After or during the experience, participants can come up with new ideas and test them by changing the experience.^[23]

Experience Prototype

Experience prototypes (also called Low-Fi prototypes or Mock-ups) allow designers to show and test the solution through the active participation of the final users, who interact with mock-ups of specific service touchpoints. There could be one (or more) prototype for each touchpoint, to collect input on that specific interaction as well as on the overall flow from one touchpoint to the other.^[24]

Service Walkthroughs

Service walkthroughs (or simulations) tend to mimic the environments of the intended service contexts and can include some props and mock-ups. The service providers and service users role-play as they provide and receive the services from start to finish to test the cohesiveness of the entire experience.^[25]

Live Prototyping

Live service prototypes are somewhere between early prototypes and pilots. They are set in the intended contexts and involve the actual users and providers. In cases of redesign projects, live prototypes can require transformations of the existing services, but the service concepts, processes and systems that are being represented should still be rough and subject to iterative adaptations. Users use the prototypes during their regular service interactions and are typically not aware that they are interacting with a prototype.^[26]

Rough Prototyping

Rough prototypes (also called Paper prototyping or Rapid prototyping) simulate specific service components with the goal of better explaining a service idea in front of other team members, and start discussing the specific requirements of each touchpoint. Rough prototypes can be simply built with paper (e.g. a flyer, wayfinding signage, a mobile phone interface, etc.) or with pre-assembled interface elements (e.g. wireframe kits, UI kits, etc.). They are a powerful tool during co-design sessions, to allow everyone to visually translate specific thoughts into tangible objects and interfaces, and make design considerations.^[27]

Attribution

The section on the Five Stages of Design Thinking is adopted from Chapter 7: Design Thinking in the Leading Innovation, 2nd edition, OER ebook authored by Kerri Shields and published on eCampus Ontario.

References

(Note: This reference list was produced using the auto-footnote and media citation features of Pressbooks; therefore, the in-text citations are not displayed in APA style).