Tag Archive | Service Design Network

Journey maps and facilitation: my take-aways from Marc Stickdorn’s workshop

Feb20

What a way to spend Friday evening it was: about 70 people hungry for Marc Stickdorn’s facilitation exercise and presentation on journey map operations! Futurice hosted this Service Design Network Finland’s event on 31 January. I’ll share with you in this blog post two insights about journey maps and three points from the facilitation exercise that I found most interesting.

Zooming in and out the journey maps

Journey maps on different levels

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Zooming in and out. photo: Raija Kaljunen

Marc Stickdorn states that for agile teams you need journey maps that contain all levels: these are high-level, detailed and micro journey maps. You can zoom in and out on these levels to get into the details of a certain touchpoint. In this way you can map the whole experience of the customer. It is also important to map the touchpoints not provided by your organization. As Marc Stickdorn put it: “The customers have a life outside of being your customer!”

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It’s the whole experience that matters. photo: Raija Kaljunen

You have to take into account the whole ecosystem where the customer interacts with your service. Finding all these touchpoints really requires careful work when creating the journey maps!

Service design as a management approach

“When an agile organization or team shifts to customer-centric management system, it actually brings design into management. For instance, journey map operations can serve as a dashboard for management including real-time KPIs and data”, said Marc Stickdorn.

I found the new roles needed in organizations using service design as a management approach particularly interesting. You always need to have someone at management level responsible for customer experience. Marc Stickdorn introduced a new role needed in organizations: journey map coordinators. These coordinators lead specialized teams who are in charge of different levels of journey maps across the departments. The teams meet in journey map councils weekly, monthly and quarterly and ask this important question:

“Has someone in our organization something that has an impact on customer experience?”

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Building bridges between silos. photo: Raija Kaljunen

This is how you prevent people working in silos and make all projects visible for all. Up-to-date journey maps also serve as a tool to visualize processes and align all ongoing initiatives.

“You get the same language, same tools and same perspective for everyone. This is how you build bridges between silos”, said Marc Stickdorn.

Insights from facilitation exercise

1. Warm-up creates a safe space

Marc Stickdorn gave us hands-on experience on co-creating journey maps for different touchpoints. But before kicking off the workshop, we did a warm-up with a hilarious Danish clapping game.

Danish Clapping, a video by Copenhagen Game Collective

“You need to make people move around and make the room their own. Also make sure that nobody sees from outside to your workshop room – it may be difficult to be relaxed if your boss is staring into the room! And get people to laugh in warm-up – positivity helps always to create a safe space!”

2. Time is the tool for the facilitator

Marc Stickdorn recommends giving precise timings in workshops: 7, 16, 19 minutes and not 5, 10 or 15 minutes – the latter only makes people relax and do nothing first. He also hides the time in the room: “Time is the tool for the facilitator, not for participants! This is called liquid timing.”

3. Three ways of working

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From one pen to many pens and from one page to many pages. photo: Raija Kaljunen

  • You get speed and diversity when you have all participants working individually with many pens and many pages.
  • At the other end of the line you get more completeness and shared understanding with one pen and one page.
  • Between these two you work with many pens on one page.

Hands-on experience is a great way to learn, especially when it comes to facilitation. I learned a lot just by watching how Marc Stickdorn facilitated the evening: how he gave instructions, what kind of materials we had and how he guided us through different phases of the workshop – not easy when you have 70 people in the room!

Thank you Marc Stickdorn, Futurice and Service Design Network Finland for a great and productive event!

author: Raija Kaljunen
Master’s Degree student in Service Design at Laurea University of Applied Sciences

Further reading

Stickdorn, M., Lawrence, A., Hormess, M. & Schneider, J. 2018. This is Service Design Doing. California: O’Reilly Media Inc.

This is Service Design Doing Methods’ library

 

Data Gives Insights, Design Gives Solutions

Oct1
Service Design Network Finland

The New Buzz Word

“Data driven design” has become some what of a buzz word because data is considered to be the new oil. However, many companies struggle to figure out how to take advantage of data and so to speak “strike gold”. At the Service Design Network event: Data Driven Design, two companies K Group and Sanoma Media Finland shared how they have been able to develop successful services thanks to data.

Data Is a Compass

Interestingly both K Group and Sanoma Media Finland referred to data as a compass. Data is seen as a compass for a person who is lost. It gives a starting point where to start to look from. Data also acts as validator to see whether the adjustments made to the service have had a positive or negative effect or perhaps no effect at all. However, K Group noted that for them to say that data acts as a compass for them, it requires a lot of work.  

Collaboration Is Key

Both companies emphasized the important of collaboration. Sanoma Media Finland described well the challenge of a designer, an analyst and a developer working together (see picture below). All three have very different working styles and practices and yet all three are essential to develop the best service possible. To solve this issue, Sanoma Media Finland decided to change their way of working and started to follow Futurice’s Lean Service Creation process. It is not all smooth sailing yet, but they feel that they are on the right path.

Data Driven Services

K Group has great amount of data about their customer as they have 3,5 million loyalty members and 5 million customer encounters daily. Thanks to their rich source of data they have been able to create customer driven services such as K-Ostokset (K-Ruoka mobile app): “A service, that gives the user an overview of his/her grocery purchases and a better understanding of the impacts of the purchase decisions.” The other customers for K Group are their K store merchants. K Group has developed a service for the merchants that collects data about the merchant’s K store customers, the market and the area and puts the information in such a format that the merchants can make educated decisions on how to improve their store’s profitability and customer experience. Evidently, as shown by these two examples, data has become an essential part of service development.

K-Ruoka mobile app

Written by Lyydia Pertovaraa

Links:

https://www.kesko.fi/en/

https://www.k-ruoka.fi/artikkelit/k-kaupassa/mobiilisovellus

https://www.leanservicecreation.com/

https://sanoma.fi/en/

https://www.service-design-network.org/chapters/finland

The Four Joys of Taking Part in a Book Club

Sep16
Organizer: Service Design Network Finland
Time and Place: 11.9.2019, Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences, Pasila Campus
Book: Palvelumuotoilun Bisneskirja, 2019, by Mikko Koivisto, Johanna Säynäjäkangas and Sofia Forsberg (only available in Finnish)

1. Join a Book Club and Actually Finish Reading a Book on Your Reading List

Case in point: Ever since I heard about the much buzzed about Palvelumuotoilun bisneskirja (The Service Design Business Book), I was eager to get my hands on it. Needless to say, I never got around it. It wasn’t until I saw the advertisement for the Service Design Network’s Book Club featuring the book, that I decided to finally read it. There is nothing like a set deadline to boost your motivation.

2. Discuss with Interesting Participants in a Relaxed Setting

It was great to exchange views about the book with other service design enthusiasts. The consensus was that the book outlines well why a business should invest in service design. Several recent business cases were featured in the book to help comprehend how service design is implemented in practice. The book also described the different stages that a company goes through when transforming to a service design-led organization. One of the participants said it well: “It is easier for a company that is born now to be inherently customer driven than for a company that has a long history to transform its well-established processes and ways to be more customer centric.” The book was also really reader friendly, thanks to the clear illustrations and jargon free writing. It is now on my recommendations list for anyone who wants to learn about service design especially from a business perspective.

3. Gain Fascinating Insights from One of the Authors

One of the book’s authors, Mikko Koivisto (pictured in the middle), took part in the book club. Koivisto shared that the cover and the title of the book were decided even before any content was written. This was because the publisher wanted to start promoting the book straight away. And even though there has been interest for an English version of the book, Koivisto said that it will have to wait for now. All the authors are quite busy at the moment and translating the book into English would require also updating the content to better serve an international audience.

4. Host the Next Book Club

Naturally the next step is to host the next book club. Yep, I got asked to host the next one and I gladly accepted the challenge. So, get your calendars out and mark yourself busy for the 2nd of December from 5pm to 7pm. The next book club will take place in the Helsinki Central Library Oodi. Details of the book will follow. Stay tuned and I will see you there!

Written by Lyydia Pertovaara

Links:

https://www.palvelumuotoilunbisneskirja.fi/

https://www.service-design-network.org/chapters/finland

Scaling service design

Nov2

Day one of 10th global service design networks conference kicked off today  by a presentation how to scale service design in government and was ended by the afternoon´s breakout sessions concentrated in social innovation and people power. Louise Downe started by going through themes emerged inside the last 10 years in the field of service design (SD).  Focus has moved from the legitimacy of service design and how to define, what service design is all about, into scaling service design. But still, even today, legitimacy of SD is still recognized as a common problem organizations face, when they start applying service design. Free tip Louise gave- don´t waste your time on this, focus on doing it.  kuva sdn

Louise  and other keynote speakers made really good points by highlighting that the fast pace of technology development has outstripped the speed of design. Design can´t keep in the pace of technology development. It´s not about designer´s ability to design services, but about the ability to scale the design as the transformation is never done. Therefore it´s critical to understand, there are no big fixes, but many little things to be combined. When you scale SD, all the little things become bigger and ultimately the end result and experience can go completely wrong. Continue reading →

Unleash Your Inner Beast

Sep26

Be empathetic, gather courage and nurture creativity to make Breakthroughs.

I would like to Thank our energetic lecturer Katja Tschimmel for sharing her knowledge and experiences on Design Thinking. Thank to Virpi Kaartti for providing great support during the Study and Thank to all my fellow students for such an amazing ongoing experience. 

This blog is covering two parts. 1) My perspective and highlight on Design Thinking and Innovation 2) Learning during Laurea contact sessions.

 

My perspective and highlight on Design Thinking and Innovation

 

I have gained a little insight about the potential of Design Thinking and how design thinking approach can lead to create innovations to improve existing conditions and make impact.

I can already feel that Design Thinking is slowly transforming my approach towards solving problems and my realization that empathy is so much central towards design thinking.

Design Thinking is powerful, a great methodology which provides framework for understanding empathy, nurturing creativity and using early prototyping towards breakthrough innovations.

Also, keeping an open mindset to grow and learn at the same time paves the way to unleash our true unknown potential, including creativity hidden among all of us.

Here, I would like to emphasize and highlight on key aspects of Design Thinking.

Continue reading →

Service Design Network Conference at Helsinki

Sep15

On 3th of September a seminar organized by SDN Helsinki took place at Maxine restaurant. I had a pleasure to be part of the organizing team. The seminar was sold out so we were very pleased.

The day started with interesting topics and keynote speakers. Mikko-Pekka Hanski, co-founder at Idean, pointed out how companies are changing from service providers to customer experience makers with customers.

Tarja MeristöTarja Meristö, futurologist and principal lecturer, told how the customer needs are changing in the future and how services are used then.

FJORD Teemu ÄijäläTeemu Äijälä, Service Design Director from Fjord, presented many interesting examples of living services e.g. Amazon Echo and Dash Button. Äijälä spoke about the fact that customers’ expectations do not compare with similar services. Expectations go across the industries. Customers compare e.g. a visit to doctor to a shopping experience through Amazon.

FJORD Teemu Äijälä

Kamil Michlewski, Brand stategy consultant, academic and author, told how design attitude is rising and why Silicon Valley, IBM or MCKinsey are suddenly all into design. Big companies are hiring more service designers and investments made to service design have grown remarkably.

Kamil Michlewski

Continue reading →

An exceptional pharmacy

Jun16

2nd of June Service Design Network Drinks was organized by Diagonal and a pharmacy Ympyrätalon apteekki.

Do you use pharmacy services only when you are sick or have a hangover? Traditionally pharmacy has been seen as a place taking care of sick people. Now the focus is turning also towards healthy people who want to take care of their well-being. The focus is on the well-being.

Mr. Mikko Koivisto a leading service designer from Diagonal told about the process how they managed to renew traditional business like pharmacy.

SDN Drinks

The project consisted of three parts: customer understanding, concept phase and design and implementation. During the customer understanding part many service design methods was used e.g. mystery shopping, interviews, observation, shop-along, customer journey map, personas and benchmarking.

Customers and employees of the pharmacy was involved at the ideation phase that produced new service ideas. The goal of the concept phase was to produce visualisations of the ideas and concepts discovered through research. The ideas were tested at pharmacies. The employees of the pharmacy were educated to a new service concept and they took it as their own. A manual was produced to summarize all the key elements of the new concepts and services. The manual was also a practical tool to communicate the concepts to the other apothecaries of the (YTA) Yhteistyöapteekit pharmacy chain.

hyvinvointibaari

palvelut

At the moment Ympyrätalo pharmacy offers over hundred different kinds of services. An apothecary Tiina Vaitomaa said that the most popular service at the moment is a salt therapy. It is especially common among singers who have to take good care of their voice.

SDN Drinks2Mrs. Vaitomaa told that the key to success is to do co-operation with other companies because alone it is difficult to succeed. Mrs. Vaitomaa is an exceptional brave and innovative apothecary. She advises to innovate and test new things. One of the most important thing is to find multi-talented and committed employees. In the future consume of the services increases significantly and Ympyrätalon apteekki is already ready for that change.

Text and pictures by Laura Rinta-Jouppi SID student 2014

The Course for Human-Centered Design: How Might We Enable More Young People to Become Social Entrepreneurs?

May12

The Course for Human-Centered Design (provided by Ideo.org and +Acumen) is a seven-week curriculum, which introduces the concepts of human-centered design and how this approach can be used to create innovative, effective, and sustainable solutions for social change.  This course has been developed to educate those, who are brand new to human-centered design. No prior experience is required. However, I would recommend this course for anyone looking to improve their human-centered design skills.

What is Human-Centered Design? 

Human-Centered Design (HCD) is a creative approach to solve any kind of problem. The process starts with the people for whom the solution is designed; and ends with e.g. new product or service that is tailor-made to suit these people’s needs. HCD is all about building a deep empathy with the people’s needs and motivations, generating a lot of ideas, creating prototypes, sharing the ideas and solutions with the people; and eventually taking the new innovative solution out in the world. Please see the below video describing the concept of HCD.

Our team and design challenge

Continue reading →

Co-Designing Open Innovation activities with Samlink

Apr9

On 10th of February 2015, a Finnish IT Service Provider Samlink asked external help, ideas and insights by involving multidisciplinary professionals into Designing Open Innovation Activities mini workshop. The event was organised and hosted together with the Service Design Network Finland. The purpose was to ideate what different kind of Open Innovation models, frameworks and activities Samlink could provide in future. Samlink, the company that I work myself too, also wanted to share knowledge for the community.

Visualising who we all are

Visualising who we all are

About thirty participants entered the event from Aalto University, Laurea University of Applied Sciences, start-ups, bigger ICT-companies, freelancers, entrepreneurs, etc. People with diverse backgrounds attended the event: service & systems architects, developers and service designers, innovation managers, and so on.

CEO of Samlink, Pentti Unkuri, opened the event by presenting some facts about Samlink and trends that are affecting in financial services. Security director of Samlink, Jari Pirhonen, discussed how information security should taken care when designing services.

Next, Mahnoush Mojtabaei from Aalto University explained Open Innovation in her speech ‘The Brave New World of Open Innovation’.

Continue reading →

Service Design Global Conference 2014 Experience

Oct12

SDNThis is my experience from the Service Design Global Conference 2014 in Stockholm 7-8th October with the topic Creating value for quality of life. Because I arrived to Stockholm already on Monday 6th October for participating to pre-events the experience for me was three full days of inspiration and learning. Those days included many interesting talks and speakers and most of them were very inspiring. Couple practical workshops where I had the opportunity to try new methods. Meeting new people and have great discussions with them. Sharing ideas and knowledge and learning from others. The best part was that I could do all that with many of my fellow students what made this experience even better for me. I was surprised how much energy you can get from the people who share the same interest: Service Design. Here are some of my takeaways from the conference.

WorkshopHow we can improve quality of life with the Service Design? and how we can make the difference with it? First of all it needs lots of changes in organizations. Good question was that where should Service Design belong in organization and the answer was simply: everywhere. We should start from the top when we want to start change in the organization, but at the same time we need to prove the power of Service Design for all levels. One suggestion was that we could start introducing Service Design with some small easy project which is easy to make it real fast after ideation. That would be practical way to show how it works and that it really works. Stop thinking, start doing someone said in the panel discussion and I believe that is what we need to do.

We need also good measurements to show the results of the Service Design. We heard many interesting ideas about that and I found particularly Nathan Schedroff’s talk about total value very interesting. We should remember that the customers appreciate more qualitative values when business looks more about quantitative values. In the end of the day quantitative values; price and function, is only the top of the ice-berg when we are looking the total value.

panel discussionRelated to changes in the organizations, very interesting topic in the conference and I think a hot topic in otherwise also at the moment is the employee engagement. Before we can make difference with the Service Design we need corporate culture which enables employees to do so. I think it is quite obvious for many that happy employees means happy customers. And eventually that means better results for the company, but how many companies really put efforts to that? We heard very inspiring talk from Mark Levy from Airbnb when he told how they are doing it at Airbnb. Especially I liked the goldfish rule which he presented that love your customers and employees like yourself, do little extras and give little bit more.

This blog post is a part of SID course The Current Topics in Service Design and it’s written by SID student Minna Myyryläinen.