While empathy maps, experience maps, and customer journey maps all focus on the user, service blueprints focus on the intersection between the user and the business. This tool can help a business identify strengths and weaknesses and use that information to improve the services they offer.
What is a Service Blueprint?
Service blueprints give a company an overview of the products and services they offer and how users interact with them. By making note of user actions and employee contacts, a business can get a picture of how they are doing with customer interaction and where they can improve. Service blueprints can also be useful as a first step before designing a new product or service.
Empathy in the Design Thinking Process
Empathy is the first phase in the Design Thinking process and it means setting aside your own beliefs to learn what the user’s world looks like. Empathy is at the heart of user-centered design, and one way to build empathy is through creating empathy maps, personas, user journey maps, and service blueprints.
The traditional empathy map has four squares with labels–thinks, says, does, and feels–with a circle in the center labeled user. The Thinks box has notes on observations of the user’s facial expressions and body language. The Says box contains direct quotes of what the user said during the session. The Does box has descriptions of the actions the user takes during the interview, the Feels box is filled with responses to questions about emotions.
Empathy maps are used to create user personas, another valuable tool in user-centered design. While empathy maps are created from the responses of real users, personas are descriptions of fictional users of a product. They are brief, only one or two pages, with a photo, vital statistics, a short bio, and other information relevant to the project. These descriptions are made from empathy maps of real users who participated in surveys and interviews. Personas are then used to put together scenarios and journey maps. Scenarios are the settings for the journey maps, which are stories told about users and their journey through accomplishing a goal.
Empathy maps, personas, scenarios, and journey maps help designers make user-centered design decisions and create features to support the user’s needs and desires as expressed through the persona and scenario. This helps the designers avoid self-referential design, which is a situation where the team ends up designing the product they would like instead of focusing on the user, but they don’t tell businesses how they are performing. For that you need a service blueprint.
Creating a Service Blueprint
The next step in the empathy-building journey is to look at how the user interacts with the business and its services, and to do that you can create a service blueprint. The service blueprint comes after the customer journey map, and it can give a business valuable information for improving or understanding a product or service, as well as a foundation for designing something new.
Team Effort
You can create a service blueprint by yourself, but like the other forms of mapping, it is a useful group activity. Gather a team from across different parts of the organization. This will help with getting the results out across the board.
Define Goal
Before you begin, it is important to determine why you are making a service blueprint. Is this in preparation for developing a new product? Perhaps the company wants an idea of what is working and what is not. Having a clear goal is important for creating an accurate map.
Gather Research
Unlike empathy maps, personas, experience maps, and customer journey maps, service blueprints are looking at the company more than the user. Gathering research can be a bit easier because they are based on internal research, not user research. You can also create different blueprints for different services, depending upon what you want to look at.
Create the Map
Once you have the data you need, schedule a service design workshop. Get everyone on the team together to transfer the touchpoints to Post-It notes and set up a whiteboard. Label the board down the left side with the following information:
- Title of the service blueprint
- Name of persona, title of journey map, and date
- Time—duration of customer action
- Evidence—physical location and equipment employees use
- Customer actions—what the customer does when using a service
- Front-stage employee contact—actions that happen where the customer can see them
- Back-stage employee contact—actions that happen where customer doesn’t see them
- Support processes—support for the employees performing the service
Place the Post-Its in the proper category and in chronological order across the board. After that part is finished, analyze the blueprint adding the items below.
- Line of interaction—direct interactions between customer and company
- Line of visibility—separates activities the customer can see and those they can’t
- Line of internal interaction—employees who have contact with customers and those who don’t
- Arrows—indicate relationships and dependencies
- Policies and regulations—rules that impact service
- Emotion—represents employee emotions using red and green faces
- Metrics—numbers associated with the blueprint
Refine and Distribute
After you finish creating the blueprint, turn it into a form that can be distributed throughout the organization. You can create a spreadsheet or use one of the digital collaboration tools like Adobe XD, Sketch, or Figma. You can access a useful template here.
Where to Learn UX Design
If you would like to learn more about UX design and research to switch to a new career, one of the best ways to do that is to sign up for classes. You can choose classes that meet in-person or online to learn design software and other applications. Some people prefer to attend brick-and-mortar sessions when learning new information, but that isn’t always available. Live online classes have a similar set-up with a real-time, remote instructor who can answer questions and take control of your monitor—with permission—to show you how to do things. Training is part or full-time and available weekdays, weeknights, or weekends.
The best way to prepare for a career shift to a field like UX design is to enroll in a bootcamp or certificate program. These are intensive training courses that run from a few weeks to a few months and another plus of training is that you will leave class with a professional-quality portfolio that you can show to prospective employers.
Conclusion
It’s easy to learn UX design and start a new career. Check out Noble Desktop’s UX design classes. Choose between in-person sessions in NYC at Noble’s location or sign up for live online UX design coursesand attend from anywhere. Use Noble Desktop’s Classes Near Me to find other UX design bootcamps in your area.