service design Articles & Videos

  • Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking

    Empathy maps help UX teams visualize user attitudes and behaviors, building a shared understanding of end users while highlighting gaps in existing user data.

  • State of UX 2026: Design Deeper to Differentiate

    UX faced instability in 2025 from layoffs, hiring freezes, and AI hype; now, the field is stabilizing, but differentiation and business impact are vital.

  • User-Ecosystem Thinking: An Anthropologic Approach to Design

    The NN/g UX Podcast featured coauthors Mike Youngblood and Ben Chesluk, who are challenging the traditional, outdated model of “users” in UX.

  • How Service Design Will Evolve with AI Agents

    AI will force the transformation of service design by introducing new actors, shifting user dynamics, and redefining success metrics.

  • Journey-Centric Design Lessons Learned: From Culture Change to Process Governance

    Real organizations share what they learned while adopting journey-centric design so other organizations can avoid the same pitfalls.

  • 13 QR-Code Usability Guidelines

    To be effective, QR codes need clear, brief, contextual information and must lead the user to relevant pages.

  • Digital Interactions in Healthcare Customer Journeys

    In healthcare, the employment of digital interactions and digital tools has been haphazard, creating fragmented experiences for consumers.

  • When to Use Empathy Maps: 3 Options

    Empathy maps are a powerful, flexible tool that can be used to plan for future research studies, capture insights during current user research, and communicate research insights from research that has already been conducted to others.

  • Omnichannel Journeys and Customer Experience: Study Guide

    Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about what omnichannel customer journeys are, how to conduct research to evaluate them, and how to design journeys effectively.

  • Exploring the Boundaries of Unmanned Restaurant Services: Irreplaceable Human Services Are Still Needed

    Unmanned restaurant services are gaining varying degrees of adoption in China. Still, there are glitches in the whole self-service flow and areas where human services cannot be replaced.

  • Intranet & Enterprise Design: Study Guide

    Unsure where to begin? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about intranets and enterprise to help you derive an excellent design.

  • Service Design: Study Guide

    Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about service design and blueprinting.

  • UX Mapping Methods: Study Guide

    Unsure how to get started using UX mapping methods? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn how to visualize UX insights and ideas into mapped visualizations.

  • Service Blueprints: How to Choose What Experience to Visualize

    Start with a small-to-medium experience, that is known to be problematic, comes with existing data, will be redesigned soon, and that you can control.

  • UX vs. Service Design

    User experience is focused on what the end user encounters, whereas service design is focused on how that user experience is internally created.

  • Three Levels of Pain Points in Customer Experience

    Pain points are problems that occur at the different levels of the customer experience: interaction level, customer-journey level, or relationship level.

  • Vote By Mail: Mistakes Are Too Easy

    The design of vote-by-mail materials (made imperative by the COVID-19 pandemic) have UX issues that make the voting process unnecessarily difficult and error prone.

  • Refine, Remodel, Rebuild: 3 Strategies for Experience Improvement

    To improve customer experience, solutions range from low to high investment and impact, based on budget, risk tolerance, readiness, and unmet needs.

  • A Guide to Service-Blueprinting Workshops

    Service-blueprinting workshops require thoughtful planning and hands-on facilitation.

  • Orchestration in the Omnichannel Experience

    One of the 5 key components of a successful omnichannel user experience, orchestration creates a personalized customer journey.