My first elective for my UX Certification course at Southern Methodist University (SMU) focused on designing customer experiences and exploring the world of service design. While there was no central theme to the course, most of our hands-on activities focused on autonomous vehicles and how we could design better experiences for them.

Territory Mapping/Ecosystem Mapping

Our first exercise was a territory map to get a visual of the different relationships that could be involved in designing a service. We explored the different people who would be affected by autonomous vehicles. In particular, we looked at the ties between individuals and government agencies and how they might be impacted with the new technology.

Journey Map

Journey maps help designers to focus on the customer, fix assumptions, and find solutions to alleviate valleys or enhance peaks in customer experience. It is a chance for a designer to get a fresh perspective on a service.

My partner and I were given a detailed story to draw a journey map from for a client buying a car. I found it to be very helpful to get a quick visual of where the trouble areas were for the client. Taking this data, it looks the best opportunity to alleviate a valley is in stage three; if my partner and I had been asked to focus on this experience, this is where we would have started.

Storyboard

For the rest of our class, we were tasked to design an experience for an autonomous vehicle. My group was given the project of developing it as a service for a restaurant that uses autonomous vehicles in a date situation. We decided to focus on a service where restaurants would provide a vehicle for customers who were stuck in an awkward date that wanted to get away. We acted it out as a group, and then storyboarded our interaction to better think through the experience and help refine our ideas.

Business Model Canvas

Continuing with our idea of how a restaurant could use an autonomous vehicle, we created a business model canvas for our idea. This gave us a great chance to visualize our business plan and see all the important connections in a meaningful way.

One of the things we noticed was the number of partners our service would need. It also helped us to tailor features to something feasible that could work within a business plan.

Service Origami

Our next step was to create a service origami of our service to really see the benefits both for the business and the consumer. We were able to add features and components we may have missed beforehand. It also allowed us to get a shared view of the system and the different moving components within it.

Road Mapping

The final stage for our idea was to create a roadmap of what we felt would be the most feasible features to rollout at stage 1, what would be rolled out at stage two and improved upon, and then the same at stage three. We made sure to improve each feature at each rollout to make it more valuable both for the customer and the business.

Service Blueprint

Our final activity was creating a service blueprint for an airline from a prepared story. We were given a highly detailed story of a customer attempting to check in to his flight. From there, my group and I worked to create what we felt the service blueprint would be for the interaction. We quickly found many pain points that we could tackle in order to help alleviate the valleys in the experience.