Services4UX: Why We Need Service Blueprints

If you are migrating from UX Design to Service Design you may have asked: Why service blueprints are needed? In this edition of Design Inox, I explain the most important reasons.

10 reasons why we need service blueprints

Reason 1: See the system including actors, tasks, timing, sequence – Differently from customer journey maps, here we see the different actors involved in the frontstage and the backstage of a service. The actors and tasks are shown in a special diagram called "swimlanes", common in BPMN .

Reason 2: Identify the size of the service system – Like the blueprint of a house, the service blueprint help to see the size of the system, be it small or big. In some situations the service can be split in different blueprints, using a hierarchy (macro, meso, micro). The same thing is done with journey maps, using the concept Journey Map Ops, from Marc Stickdorn (image below)

Reason 3: Share knowledge through boundary object – A boundary object is a special kind of artifact that allows teams to "collaborate successfully without having to understand too much of each other’s worlds. They are simple enough to be easily – even empathically – understood, yet robust enough to provide a good working foundation."(This is Service Design Doing , Stickdorn et al.) The boundary object also serve as a basis for obtaining stakeholder feedback for validation purposes.

Reason 4: Identify service inconsistencies – One of the goals of Service Design is to make services consistent. Consistency in a service means to avoid surprises, dead ends, any kind of rupture that breaks the experience. A service blueprint is useful to see the degree of consistency and to take the appropriate steps to uniform the operations.

Reason 5: Identify points of interaction between users and service providers – The organization is a system that has a boundary, a frontier with the external environment. The service blueprint describe what happens in the "surface" of the service. The surface is where the physical evidence performs its four roles:

1. package the service,
2. facilitate the flow of service delivery,
3. socialize employers and customers,
4. provide a means for differentiation.

Reason 6: Identify opportunities for differentiation – The service blueprint reflects the value proposition of the service in its structure. New business models can be created changing the structure of the service, making it smaller or meeting different user needs, like McDonald's did when created its drive thru restaurant. The service blueprint allow new operating arrangements to be drawn up together with system actors.

Curiosity: The first McDonald's drive-through was created in 1975 in Sierra Vista, Arizona, near Fort Huachuca, a military installation, to serve military members who were not permitted to get out of their cars off-post while wearing fatigues. – Wikipedia

Reason 7: Identifying service gaps – A gap happens everytime the service specification does not meet the service beneficiary needs. The service blueprint enable the stakeholders to see the source of those gaps (Learn more about the concept of quality gaps in this paper ).

Reason 8: Raise awareness of the domino effect generated by dysfunctions in other parts of the system – Probably one of the most useful functions of service blueprints is to demonstrate to the "silos" in the organization how the silo thinking can become a nightmare from the perspective of customers. The blueprint is a 360o view of what happens before, during and after each task performed by the user and by the employees.

Reason 9: Shift ownership from a box mindset to an emergency mindset – The blueprint should be seen from the systems perspective. The service is not the result of aggregated tasks performed by a group of people, inside a shell. The service is a emergent property of all the different parts working together. When we pay attention only to individual parts, we don't see the big picture and this can lead to biased decisions. In the example below, six blind men only see one part of the elephant. The same thing can happen when organizations (or UX Design teams!) don't see the whole picture.

Reason 10: Serves as a starting point for action plans / roadmaps – The future state blueprint can be translated into roadmaps or even product backlogs in agile teams. The sprint backlog can be extracted from the list of desired changes in the service/app (remember: ALL apps are services).

Conclusion

Service blueprints are very useful to enable organizations and teams to understand the current state of the service and also to envision new possibilities for the future. When used with intelligence, in a selfless way, they can empower people to improve services.

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