Service Design: Designing for Experience Over Time

Overview 
This training program helps you leverage methods of design thinking in order to produce new and compelling service and system designs. It serves as a foundation for thinking about the behavioral touchpoints a user may have with your company, and how those touchpoints can be better designed to support a more comprehensive and purposeful brand experience.

The training program's primary emphasis is on diagramming and storytelling. You'll learn to create quick, low-fidelity representations of ideas, so you can test these ideas and improve upon them. By embracing diagramming, storytelling, and rapid prototyping, you'll be prepared to introduce a culture of making into your company or organization. You'll understand how to visualize complex ideas, how to minimize complexity, and how to simply illustrate changes in a complex system. 
 
Grounding Principles

Experience. The experiences people have shape their views and perspectives, and the experiences people have with your brand shape the way they think about, judge, and interact with your company. Experience happens over time, and our curriculum focuses on the development of time-based artifacts that help tell stories of behavior. You'll learn to think about narrative structures, and consider products and services in a larger, experiential context.

Empathy. Often, we look internally at our own company’s processes, attitudes, and perspectives. Empathy means looking outwards, exploring the emotions and perspectives of our users and customers, and trying to see the world through their eyes. Our curriculum emphasizes forms of active empathy: exploring novel situations from a perspective of vulnerability in order to feel what customers feel.

Prototyping. Artifacts ground ideas in reality so that they can be critiqued, examined, and improved. Prototyping is a form of iterative making, in order to see ideas come to life. Prototypes can be collaboratively evaluated, and can be applied to products, services, and systems. Ideas can be developed at a variety of fidelities, and our curriculum emphasizes quick prototyping at rough stages of fidelity, in order to drive rapid improvement. 

Skills Developed 
You'll learn these practical skills: 

1. Scenario development and storyboarding. Written and visualized scenarios act as the underpinnings for time-based interactions. You will learn to craft believable, future-facing stories of how people use new services and systems. 
2. Customer journey mapping. Journey maps act as visual representations of how a person explores a service over time, showing connection points between people, products, policies, and interactions. These visuals can be used to illustrate both the problem (or existing) state of a service, as well as the future (or ideal) state of a service design. 
3. Service slices. Many services include human touchpoints, and these touchpoints often shape how we feel about the entire service experience. You will learn how to create various “slices” of a service in order to show information flow, sequences of interactions, and the power dynamics between actors in the system. 
4. Rapid prototyping. You will learn to visualize your ideas in two and three dimensions, showing how new service touchpoints will actually manifest. You will learn to prototype at different levels of fidelity, and to critique designs in order to improve upon them.