As AI becomes central to service delivery, traditional service metrics must evolve — new measures will assess AI-to-AI performance, human-AI collaboration, data quality, and user trust.
AI is reshaping service design—no longer just a tool, it’s now an active agent. Future services must compete on how well they interact with AI, not just humans.
Managing journeys requires a continuous practice of 3 interdependent competencies: collecting insights, analyzing them to drive design strategy, and orchestrating journey experiences for users.
Service design is an active effort to design a service solution for a customer need, while journey management is an ongoing effort to improve or sustain the quality of an existing service or journey.
Empathy maps 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.
Our Beijing-based user research team conducted a field study in automated restaurants that serve diners with no staff. Current designs have some advantages, but the UI is too complicated for customized ordering.
Our research with UX practitioners found 3 main areas of frustration with service-blueprint projects. Here are recommendations for overcoming or alleviating these problems.
What does it mean to be a "designer?" Let's broaden the definition, based on the purpose, not the discipline. (Keynote by our Chief Designer, Sarah Gibbons)
What's the difference between service blueprints and customer-journey maps, and what are the goals of service blueprinting? These and other common service-design questions are answered.
A service design perspective is needed to avoid fragmenting the long-term customer experience by individual (but uncoordinated) touchpoints, provided by siloed internal teams.
The 5 components of a journey map and the benefits of using this qualitative method as part of a UX design process to discover, document, and share the bigger picture of what users want.
Workshops are a useful tool in the user-experience design process, but mistakes are common when the workshop facilitator didn't prepare right, causing the team to waste time.
Human-Centered Design (HCD) is not about following processes. It’s about being mindful of HCD principles. Keep focus on people and the entire system to solve the right problems.
A service blueprint visualizes the relationships between different service components — people, props, and processes. Four key elements comprise a framework for service blueprinting that can be scaled to any scope or timeline.
Service design is the activity of planning and organizing a business’s resources in order to (1) directly improve the employee’s experience, and (2) indirectly, the customer’s experience.
UX mappings are visual representations that depict different processes and have different goals, yet they all build common ground within an organization.
