Service Design

At Pivot, we believe in the value of curiosity and collaboration. We’ve seen first-hand how bringing together a diverse group of participants to share their knowledge, explore and discuss a wide set of ideas and perspectives, and participate in the Discovery & idea generation process can unleash their creative juices and collective powers. Whether we’re kicking off a project, reframing a problem, building personas, mapping a system or user journey, or co-designing and testing concepts, every session is carefully curated to enable knowledge exploration, project progress, problem solving, and better project outcomes.

Personas are fictional characters representing a cross-section of real users of a service, with an emphasis on how and why they do what they do. As we explore common needs, paint points, emotions, and patterns of behavior, we consider how these characteristics impact users interactions with a service at various touch points. Personas allow us to get into the weeds of your audience, see the world through their eyes, illustrate lived experiences, and bring an empathetic lens to our work. After further validation, we refer back to our personas throughout the design process to ensure all decisions are based on real needs, rather than assumptions, resulting in more targeted, superior service experiences.

Interviews are one of the most flexible and adaptable research methods at our disposal, designed to uncover intimate insights into the lived experiences of users and validate assumptions. Interviews provide Pivot’s researchers with a first-hand account of users’ thoughts, emotions and behaviours––before, during and after every interaction and touch-point––revealing how services fit into their everyday lives. Interviews are an invaluable opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of the end-to-end user journey and are critical to determining the true nature of the problem, identifying opportunities, and shaping our efforts in finding a more meaningful service solution.

To truly understand a service, is to understand the entire value chain and the people within it. Pivots Service Designers work closely with stakeholders to understand their backgrounds, roles and responsibilities, the structure of their team, and the processes, tools and technologies they use along the way. We seek to understand all of the direct and indirect touch points with customers, the needs they’re supporting, the pain-points they’re resolving, and the impact they have on the users’ experience. As our learnings become more multi-dimensional, we can begin to visualize and map all of the complexities and interconnected components that make up a service flow and pinpoint areas of opportunity.

When understanding users, the context in which the service experience occurs is critical. If the physical or social environment can impact the user's experience, there’s likely to be fundamental shifts in our research and how we’d design for them. In the field, we have the opportunity to observe users’ interactions in real time, validate if what they say they do is what they actually do in real life, and empathize with their emotional state before, during and after the service experience. It’s our opportunity to gather specific contextual details, learn the unexpected, and address problems and behavior that we otherwise would have never encountered or understood from a desk.

One of the first areas of investigation begins with taking advantage of all readily available internal customer research data. A plethora of insights can be found by tapping into social media chatter, sifting through direct customer feedback, auditing online reviews and ratings. We also look to outside sources, such as industry reports, white papers, and market research. Suffice it to say, not every detail will be useful and no single source of information will tell us all we need to know to understand the entire user experience. But, with patience, perseverance and an open mind, patterns will emerge and a clear picture will be revealed.

To truly understand the current state of a service, it’s imperative we look outwards at the entire ecosystem it inhabits—from the competition, to the industry challenges and future trends, through to the external market driving forces. Pivots Service designers leave no stone left unturned, and as they’re exploring each and every angle, they carefully consider the potential impact on the way a service is delivered and experienced. It’s an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of similar services, compare strengths and weaknesses, identify unmet needs, and look to other industries that can provide inspiration too. This strategy allows us to imagine the realm outside of the possible beyond what already exists, combine existing ideas, pull from outside sources, and co-create solutions that produce a superior service experience.

Journey Maps are one of the most valuable tools an organization can have at its disposal. Based on insights provided by real people, Journey Maps provide structured visualizations of a user’s service experience, telling an engaging and detailed story of their interactions and emotions over time. Capturing every detail and emotion in and around each touchpoint is critical to developing a holistic understanding of the entire journey and all of the factors that influence the experience. Organisations gain an objective view of how customers actually experience their services versus how they think they do, accompanied by a prioritized list of problem areas and tangible opportunities for improvement and innovation.

Experience Mapping involves visualizing the broader context of human behavior and how not one, but many services and providers fit into a person's life. The entire service ecosystem is increasingly more interconnected and complex, and organisations must fundamentally recognize that people interact and connect with many products and services. At any given time a users’ experience with one service can impact their relationship with another, but with an understanding of how they’re connected comes a significant competitive advantage. Mindsets shift toward solving problems that can impact everyday lives, rather than at individual touch points, leading to more strategic and innovative opportunities to be at the centre of the ecosystem.

Service Blueprints are detailed visualizations of the service value chain and delivery process. While often incorporating the perspectives of end users, the primary focus is on the actors, mechanisms, and processes within the organisation and their roles and responsibilities as part of the service experience. The service experience is organized into chronological stages and further deconstructed into individual service touchpoints and their impact on the experience is critically assessed. Service designers provide organizations with a comprehensive understanding of what is required to adapt to the needs of users while keeping service delivery efficient and meaningful, and the process of improving existing processes or designing new ones is simplified.

While journey maps and service blueprints allow us to improve existing service experiences and processes, they’re also the perfect launch pad for reimagining the future state. Whether you’re redesigning existing services or creating entirely new offerings, it’s an opportunity to think outside the box and develop a shared vision for what we’re offering, the need we’re solving, what the ideal experience should be, and what’s required to make it possible. It’s an iterative approach that gives teams the ability to explore the feasibility of the blue-sky experience, test hypothetical service models, adjust and redefine the experience into realistic implementation timelines, and incrementally move their vision to reality.

Fundamental to the principles of service design, Co-Design brings together a diverse group of stakeholders in a collaborative setting to reflect on the research and participate in the idea generation process. In the context of the research, we explore potential directions, solutions, and opportunities for how the project goals can be achieved––and we gain a range of perspectives in the process! Pivots moderators employ a variety of creative tools and techniques to help participants ideate and conceptualize possible scenarios, give rise to new ideas, give candid feedback, and refine ideas. It’s an opportunity for teams to come together and rally around a shared vision and common goal.

Service Prototypes allow service designers to simulate service experiences and test the viability of design solutions. They can take many forms and range in effort and complexity – from low fidelity prototypes such as storyboards and story mapping where we engage in informal role play, through to full scale service staging which involves recreating real world environments and touchpoints with end users and stakeholders actively participating in the experience. Either way, the goal remains the same: to test potential service concepts, empathize with our personas, incorporate new ideas, and quickly iterate and refine design solutions in a way that is meaningful and efficient.