While fonts and color choices are important to take into account, service design puts process and problems into deeper perspectives. Requirements and processes are strategically challenged, to align with business values. Therefore, the problem definition in service design outlines the user experience as well as other perspectives and puts employees, customers and other counterparts into relation.
In a supermarket this means all things from the back office and warehouse to the retail space as well as the cash registers have to be considered.
A powerful tool within the practice of service design is the so called Service Blueprint. I personally would describe a service design map as an extension of a user journey map. The fronst stage processes (1) describe all the steps that the customers can directly observe (e.g. scanning of articles). Back stage actions (2) highlight how the fronst stage steps are interfering and how they relate to what’s happening out of the customer’s sight. The line of invisibility (3) visually divides these two perspectives. Another mentionable part of a service blueprints are so called artifacts (4), also known as physical evidences (e.g. a receipt).
[1]
M. Stickdorn, A. Lawrence, M. Hormess, and J. Schneider, This is service design doing, applying service design thinking in the real world: a practitioners’ handbook. Sebastopol Oreilly & Associates Inc, 2018.
