When should we use user-centred service journeys and why?
It is a great tool to kick off exploratory phases such as changing existing services, defining new propositions or identifying opportunities for improvement.
Products and service projects always benefit from clear scope. Think of this phase as a part of forming, a tool for scoping user-centred workstreams. It can uncover multiple opportunities that you can then prioritise to choose what’s most important to tackle.
Then when the journey is mapped, it is important to remember it is a moment in time. Think of it as an artefact, something that can be drawn on, covered in post-its and added to as you validate and learn more.
When should we use it and why?
Making changes to existing services
When working with existing services user-centred service journeys can be used to understand what is happening before you begin making changes. Often the existing view of the service will be from a business perspective, incomplete or disconnected.
For example, journeys can be broken up by organisational structure. Silos within an organisation can create ownership division and sometimes KPIs can distort the understanding of performance.
By mapping the existing service from a user-centred service journey perspective, you can bring all of the whole offer together in one view. By showing the journey through a user lens you can reconnect with the user’s objectives and better evaluate if the current service meets needs or not.
You can also look at cost and profit from a journey perspective. For example savings in terms of journey progress where you might provide better guidance to reduce the number of service dropouts. This can often be very different to previous views of the organisation and it can bring up unexpected surprise outcomes.
The user-centred service journeys are a great way to demonstrate what is going on now and help change internal thinking of how/why things are done to be focused on users. It is also a useful tool to explain scale and scope. In the past, I have used it to help senior stakeholders understand the enormity of what they are asking for!
When you have used it to uncover what's going on you can then use it as a tool to draw on your proposition and demonstrate how it changes things.
Identifying an opportunity within an existing service
Making a new proposition
When you make a new service idea you can use user-centred service journeys to map out what your offer will be and how it will deliver. It’s sort of the opposite process of an existing service. In the existing service, you are an archaeologist researching existing processes and trying to understand the objectives behind ‘why’ things are done. A propositional journey is crafted from the ‘why’ of the user objectives and is trying to fill in the process to deliver it.
The propositional-centred service journey is a great way to look at the entirety of your offer to see your hypothesis in its entirety. It’s a tool to understand what needs to be validated, help grasp complexity and failure paths early on.
Giving you a view of your service by objective helps you consider how you might deliver these as your offer matures, without losing sight of the real user need. And once again it’s a great tool for sharing with possible partners, to help other people understand what your service does and why.
This map shows how a service was delivered in a single location it was used to form a propositional service change rolled out in one location, that ended up being a national service.
Identifying new opportunities
In this sense, it can be used to identify where the pain points lie in a wider offer and also uncover potential new opportunities via pattern-making, insights or gap analysis.
This kind of view can help expose repeating patterns and opportunities for efficiency gains from modularity and reuse. These could come from business processes that are exposed via mapping or repeating user needs that could be served better they may also be whole stages that you can use across similar services.
From a prioritisation perspective, this allows people to come together around a visual where they can better understand the context where the opportunities lie.
Much like the others you can map cost and value directly to each opportunity and can easily present them in more traditional ways back into decision making processes.
This example shows a propositional opportunity for a stage within a user centred service journey that cuts across multiple services.
