- As ideas become more refined, designed thinking
continues to enable the team to creatively address
the complexity of delivering a meaningful experience.
Delivering these experiences often involves far more people
than just the person who's going to buy it at the end.
And if these users, particularly those in a business
or partner businesses are not taken into account,
a great experience might not make it to market.
Developing a service blueprint enables
the team to refine the concept through understanding its
impacts within the business and to communicate the concept
to stakeholders in terms that are appropriate for
their lines of business.
Plus, it's also great for highlighting gaps in
the current design that the team hasn't yet thought about.
Developing a service blueprint does take some time
and some strategic thinking at the start,
but it's also a great tool to refine in a workshop
with your extended stakeholder team.
A service is a relationship between a business
and a user which occurs over time and it might not have
a tangible product exchanged at all.
Building a service blueprint starts with a coherent
service concept prioritized for its fit to people's needs
and the business's priorities.
For example, imagine our service concept is about
speeding access to test results in critical care
situations in the hospital.
And we've targeted that there are some lags or drops
of information between external services
and different parts of the hospital.
As a group, we've also decided that acute cardiac patients
are a good example of this need, so we're focusing
this iteration on understanding how the service
can work in that case.
The first step is to map the stages of engagement
appropriate for this service along the horizontal axis.
A good set of stages are distinct and build on one another.
And they're often the same you'd use for your journey map
like the one we did in a previous movie.
So here, I've got pre-condition and diagnosis
which were the first two of, I think, five that we had
in the first journey map.
Then you create your vertical axis
where you list all the players that are going to be
invovled in the service.
In this case, we have the patient, the carer, the EMT,
the ER doc and others.
And on your map, you want to create a dedicated row
for each of those players.
Once you've listed those players, then you take
your Post-It notes and you start to define all
of the activities that happen during the
different stages of their interaction with the service.
So here, we're using this horizontal axis to fill out
those activities over time.
And this vertical axis is going to make sure that we
think about what each actor is doing.
So in this case, you'll see that we've got a patient
who's experiencing chest pain and these
are all the activities that happen to get the EMT there,
to get the process of data coming into the hospital,
getting the doctor involved and then
beginning the process of diagnosis and eventually, treatment
What's important here, remember,
I was saying this product or service that we're working on
is about the flow of data.
So this orange line here is marking how
data moves through all these different
people in all these different parts of the hospital.
What that allows us to do, is then think about
how will our service impact this experience?
So we look at our service and we think about
what points are we really going to impact here?
So we're going to impact that first point where data
is gathered from the patient, we're going to impact
how it comes through the hospital,
how it gets communicated to the cardiologist
and so on.
We're also going to indicate if there's a point
that is being removed from the overall service
because of what we're doing.
So now, once this matrix is complete, and imagine
it going for the full experience, you can step back
from these details to analyze the service as a whole
and really quickly dive into the sections where
your concept is having particular impact
on the service experience.
So developing a service blueprint is really helpful
when you want to invite those stakeholders into
the team process, because it shows them that the team is
really thinking about all of the different moving parts
that your concept represents and you can then,
invite your stakeholders in to help you refine
your understanding of the business implications,
all the points of delivering your service.
A good service blueprint includes this strong
horizontal flow that's appropriate for your industry.
And it covers the whole user experience.
It also has a clear vertical breakout of all the key players
in the service and how they will interact with it.
And then, you want your service blueprint to
highlight some key moments where experiences will be changed
or new things delivered
and when people step back from that blueprint,
they should be able to see those clear opportunity areas.
The tool does take some practice to use well,
and it can introduce a lot of complexity to the discussion.
You'll see that it doesn't fit on this
whole whiteboard, right?
If you're finding this hard to do, take a step back,
use the horizontal flow over time, to map out
how just one single person, or one user type
interacts with the product over time.
Then do this for all of your other groups seperately
before you knit them together into a full blueprint.