Today started the second part of the module by Roberta Tassi about service design tools. This three-days second part will face the shift from the research phase to the implementation of the insights into the project.
There are many different methodologies and tools that can help service designers to synthesize their research insights and to translate them into innovation boosts of their projects. For each project’s phase and elements of interest, there’s at least one specific tool: personas, customer journey map, system map, service blueprint, and so on. An example of them is the value proposition canvas: starting with a short statement, you can use this tool to describe the value offered by the service in simple words. To ensure that there is a fit between the product-service idea and the market, it gives a detailed look at the relationship between customer segments and value propositions, highlights roles involved, pains, and gains, and how the service eventually matches with the proposition and its pain relievers and gain creators.
By using these tools, the service designer creates the visual narratives of his or her project. Here’s another important point. These tools should not be seen as single-purpose, inflexible, and rigid. They are powerful, flexible, customizable, descriptive, generative, envisioning tools that serve service designers to face complex projects and come up with innovative solutions. Depending on the type of project and on the phase of that project in which you are, you can use a tool to describe and analyze an as-is situation, or to ideate a brand new element of a service. For example, the user journey map works well both to describe a current situation of a specific user-system relation and for designing a new interaction between a potential user and a new service.
From a certain point of view, we can also say that the service design tools can make the entire process more “scientific”, creating tangible resources and evidence of the design process. Usually, they are also used as a deliverable to the client; not all of them, just the ones that fit specific delivery needs. Don’t worry if you used many tools and put so much effort into it to end up not showing them to the client: what’s important is that they enabled you to create a beautiful and innovative service.
