Service Design And UX

🗺️ AirBnB Customer Journey Blueprint, a wonderful practical example of how to visualize the entire customer experience for 2 personas, across 8 touch points, with user policies, UI screens and all interactions with the customer service — all on one single page. AirBnB Customer Journey (Google Drive): https://lnkd.in/eKsTjrp4 Spotify Customer Journey (High-res): https://lnkd.in/eX3NBWbJ Now, unlike AirBnB, your product might not need a mapping against user policies. However, it might need other lanes that would be more relevant for your team. E.g. include relevant findings and recommendations from UX research. List key actions needed for next stage. Add relevant UX metrics and unsuccessful touchpoints. That last bit is often missing. Yet customer journeys are often non-linear, with unpredictable entry points, and integrations way beyond the final stage of a customer journey map. It’s in those moments when things leave a perfect path that a product’s UX is actually stress tested. So consider mapping unsuccessful touchpoints as well — failures, error messages, conflicts, incompatibilities, warnings, connectivity issues, eventual lock-outs and frequent log-outs, authentication issues, outages and urgent support inquiries. Even further than that: each team could be able to zoom into specific touch points and attach links to quotes, photos, videos, prototypes, design system docs and Figma files. Perhaps even highlight the desired future state. Technical challenges and pain points. Those unsuccessful states. Now, that would be a remarkable reference to use in the beginning of every design sprint. Such mappings are often overlooked, but they can be very impactful. Not only is it a very tangible way to visualize UX, but it’s also easy to understand, remember and relate to daily — potentially for all teams in the entire organization. And that's something only few artefacts can do. Useful resources: Free Template: Customer Journey Mapping, by Taras Bakusevych https://lnkd.in/e-emkh5A Free Template: End-To-End User Experience Map (Figma), by Justin Tan https://lnkd.in/eir9jg7J Customer Journey Map Template (Figma), by Ed Biden https://lnkd.in/evaUP4kz Free Figma/Miro User Journey Maps Templates https://lnkd.in/etSB7VqB User Journey Maps vs. Service Blueprints (+ Templates) https://lnkd.in/e-JSYtwW UX Mapping Methods (+ Miro/Figma Templates) https://lnkd.in/en3Vje4t #ux #design

💡6 UX mapping techniques in product design Here are some of the most popular mapping techniques used in product design projects to improve understanding, alignment, and decision-making: 1️⃣ Affinity map It's a tool to quickly organize individual bits of information from research into key topics. The tool is primarily used after qualitative research, such as usability testing or discovery research. Use for: Sense-making from open-ended interviews, survey responses, or open feedback. 2️⃣ Assumption map It is a visual tool that helps identify, systemize, and track assumptions about a product development process. It is used to explore ideas and uncertainties related to the project with the goal of establishing a more effective design process. Usually, it's used as part of a kick off meeting to help highlight the key assumptions team members have. Use for: Lean UX, hypothesis-driven development, and de-risking early ideas. 3️⃣ Empathy map It's a summary of the UX of a product in the format of one-page document. It centralizes what a user has said, thought, done, and felt when they interacted with product. The tool is particularly useful during the early stages of the product design process when you're building a profile of your users and want to build empathy with them. Use for: Aligning the team around real user insights and guiding product direction. 4️⃣ Ecosystem map It expands with people, products, or services that the user may interact with during the experience. Use it when you want to reveal the major players and the complexities of the interaction with a product in the format of a document that you can share with your peers. Use for: Products with integration points or when designing for multi-platform experiences. 5️⃣ Service blueprint A way to align how both front-stage and back-stage stakeholders involvement in the user journey. Use it when you want to know what resources are required to operate the service. Use for: Analysing complex systems like healthcare, finance, or SaaS tools with support layers. 6️⃣ Customer journey map A sequential map that outlines the steps a user goes through when trying to achieve their goal. Use this tool when you want to understand your user's end-to-end journey. Use for: UX optimization, such as optimizing particular scenarios of interaction. 📺 Customer journey mapping in FigJam: https://lnkd.in/djJR6by8 🖼️ Maps samples designed by Maze and Nielsen Norman Group #UI #UX #uxdesign #productdesign #userexperience #design

Are you generating enough value for users net of the value to your company? Business value can only be created when you create so much value for users, that you can “tax” that value and take some for yourself as a business. If you don’t create any value for your users, then you can’t create value for your business. Ed Biden explains how to solve this in this week's guest post: Whilst there are many ways to understand what your users will value, two techniques in particular are incredibly valuable, especially if you’re working on a tight timeframe: 1. Jobs To Be Done 2. Customer Journey Mapping 𝟭. 𝗝𝗼𝗯𝘀 𝗧𝗼 𝗕𝗲 𝗗𝗼𝗻𝗲 (𝗝𝗧𝗕𝗗) “People don’t simply buy products or services, they ‘hire’ them to make progress in specific circumstances.”  – Clayton Christensen The core JTBD concept is that rather than buying a product for its features, customers “hire” a product to get a job done for them … and will ”fire” it for a better solution just as quickly. In practice, JTBD provides a series of lenses for understanding what your customers want, what progress looks like, and what they’ll pay for. This is a powerful way of understanding your users, because their needs are stable and it forces you to think from a user-centric point of view. This allows you to think about more radical solutions, and really focus on where you’re creating value. To use Jobs To Be Done to understand your customers, think through five key steps: 1. Use case – what is the outcome that people want? 2. Alternatives – what solutions are people using now? 3. Progress – where are people blocked? What does a better solution look like? 4. Value Proposition – why would they use your product over the alternatives? 5. Price – what would a customer pay for progress against this problem? 𝟮. 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗝𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆 𝗠𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 Customer journey mapping is an effective way to visualize your customer’s experience as they try to reach one of their goals. In basic terms, a customer journey map breaks the user journey down into steps, and then for each step describes what touchpoints the customer has with your product, and how this makes them feel. The touch points are any interaction that the customer has with your company as they go through this flow: • Website and app screens • Notifications and emails • Customer service calls • Account management / sales touch points • Physically interacting with goods (e.g. Amazon), services (e.g. Airbnb) or hardware (e.g. Lime) Users’ feelings can be visualized by noting down: • What they like or feel good about at this step • What they dislike, find frustrating or confusing at this step • How they feel overall By mapping the customer’s subjective experience to the nuts and bolts of what’s going on, and then laying this out in a visual way, you can easily see where you can have the most impact, and align stakeholders on the critical problems to solve.

Candidates aren’t just applying. They’re collecting clues. They scroll through job ads. Skim your About page. Google your Glassdoor reviews. Ask friends. Scroll again. They’re asking: • What’s it really like to work here? • Will I be supported, or left guessing? • Will leadership show up—or disappear after the interview? Here’s the problem: most companies leave too many of those questions unanswered. And when they do answer? The messages don’t always line up. A flashy EVP on the website. A cold auto-reply after applying. An engaging recruiter call. A confusing onboarding. Disjointed experiences break trust fast. Candidates remember every gap. And they’ll walk away before you even know their name. That’s why mapping your employer brand touchpoints matters. Every single interaction is a signal. Every email, tour, policy, and welcome moment adds up. Good or bad, it all speaks. I put together this one-pager to show how touchpoints shape trust. From shallow to deep. General to personal. Quick impressions to meaningful moments (see article in the comment). Because experience design isn’t just for customers. It’s the foundation of how people choose where to work. Want to build trust? Start with the experience. Because a great employer brand isn’t one single moment. It’s the sum of every moment, every message, and every person involved: TA, hiring managers, IT, onboarding buddies, everyone. Which touchpoint do you think gets overlooked the most? #employerbranding #candidateexperience #experiencedesign #designthinking

Meet the faces of the future, as AI helps take Personas from paper to reality. Personas can be a powerful tool to bring customers, suppliers, and other constituents to life. But personas are more than just profiles; when done well they become the heartbeat of targeted strategies. But most personas are dry and dull – lacking that empathetic spark. Here’s where generative AI tools, specifically image generation tools like MidJourney and Dall-E 3 can really help. If an image is worth a thousand words, then a great image can take the place of lots of verbiage. Here’s are two partial examples of Personas we used during our Revision3 web redesign back in 2007: 🔻Nancy is a 24-year-old web drifter. She is the assistant manager of the local Starbucks, spends her days making coffee and her nights either drinking and listening to head-banging music, or getting stoned and surfing the web. She spends hours watching videos on YouTube, rates them and forwards the funny ones to friends. Wants to be perceived as more wired, more connected and more in the know than her friends. 🔻Jake is 17 years old, and a senior in high school. He’s been a user of technology since he was 7. He knows how to program and has been an early adopter of many social networks. He is constantly connected to friends via IM and services like Twitter, Facebook and others. An early adopter of new web technologies, he’s always connected. Jake does not watch regular TV at all, but is a rabid fan of the Totally Rad Show and Diggnation, because they speak directly to him. Jake wants to participate and will quickly adopt anything on the web. He’ll be quick to drop anything that feels artificial or irrelevant as well. Gets most of his news via Digg, Reddit and Fark. Thinks Slashdot is for his parents. Imagine creating an empathy map around what Nancy and Jake think, feel, hear, see, say, and do based on the text description. Now look at the images on this post. I asked DallE 3 and MidJourney to “imagine” Nancy and Jake. I’ll bet that empathy map is a whole lot easier now! Now take it one step further. What if we used AI to create a true AI interactive video persona that our staff, our designers and our developers could talk to. That could really bring a persona to life, with a clearer understanding of how our customers, suppliers, and partners. It also changes the internal discussion. Instead of just “customer A”, you’re not only talking about Nancy – but having a real-time conversation with Nancy as you build. And that will lead to better products, services, and events. What do you think? Have you used AI to help build personas? How did it transform your approach? Share your stories and tips in the comments, and if you have a GenAI persona image, share it too! ⬇️ #ai #creatoreconomy #product

Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day everyone! It's a great day to remind people, that, accessibility is the responsibility of the whole team, including designers! A couple of things designers can do: - Use sufficient color contrast (text + UI elements) and don’t rely on color alone to convey meaning. - Ensure readable typography: support text resizing, avoid hard-to-read styles, maintain hierarchy. - Make links and buttons clear and distinguishable (label, size, states). - Design accessible forms: clear labels, error help, no duplicate input, document states. - Support keyboard navigation: tab order, skip links, focus indicators, keyboard interaction. - Structure content with headings and landmarks: use proper H1–Hn, semantic order, regions. - Provide text alternatives for images, icons, audio, and video. - Avoid motion triggers: respect reduced motion settings, allow pause on auto-play. - Design with flexibility: support orientation change, allow text selection, avoid fixed-height elements. - Document accessibly and communicate: annotate designs, collaborate with devs, QA, and content teams. Need to learn more? I got a couple of resources on my blog: - A Designer’s Guide to Documenting Accessibility & User Interactions: https://lnkd.in/eUh8Jvvn - How to check and document design accessibility in your mockups: a conference on how to use Figma plugins and annotation kits to shift accessibility left https://lnkd.in/eu8YuWyF - Accessibility for designer: where do I start? Articles, resources, checklists, tools, plugins, and books to design accessible products https://lnkd.in/ejeC_QpH - Neurodiversity and UX: Essential Resources for Cognitive Accessibility, Guidelines to understand and design for Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, Autism and ADHD https://lnkd.in/efXaRwgF - Color accessibility: tools and resources to help you design inclusive products https://lnkd.in/dRrwFJ5 #Accessibility #ShiftLeft #GAAD

Why Buyer Personas Are Often Useless (Unless You Do Them Right) Buyer personas. Every marketer talks about them, but how many of us actually use them to drive real results? Too often, buyer personas are treated as an exercise in check-box marketing: Create a template, fill in some basic demographics, and call it a day. But this is a recipe for wasting time and burning calories. The real power of buyer personas lies in the depth of insight they provide about the emotional, psychological, and behavioral triggers of your target audience. When done right, personas become your roadmap for everything—product decisions, messaging, marketing strategies, and sales enablement. But when done wrong, they’re useless. So, how should you approach Buyer Personas? 1. Go Beyond Demographics It’s easy to create personas based on age, job title, and income. But that’s not what actually drives a purchase decision. You need to understand why your customers buy your product—what pain points are they solving, what motivates them, and what stands in their way. 2. Focus on Behavior and Needs Instead of just a “one-size-fits-all” persona, segment by behavior and customer journey stage. Are they early-stage prospects or ready to buy? How do they interact with your product? Behavior speaks volumes. 3. Constantly Evolve Your personas shouldn’t be static! The market, technology, and customer needs evolve—so should your personas. Continuously gather feedback from your users, sales teams, and customer support. Buyer personas done right can drive growth, shape product development, and create hyper-targeted marketing strategies. But done poorly? They’re just another file on the shelf. #growthmarketing #buyerpersonas #marketing

🚫 WCAG Levels Are Not a Grading Scale There’s a common misconception in digital accessibility: that WCAG levels A, AA, and AAA represent a “good, better, best” system. They don’t. ✅ WCAG levels are not about quality—they're about scope. • Level A addresses critical blockers for access. • Level AA covers common barriers that impact many users. • Level AAA includes enhanced requirements aimed at specific user needs—not a gold star for perfection. 🔍 Not every AAA criterion is feasible or appropriate for every website or document. That’s by design. AAA is not “better,” it’s more specific. If you got caught up in this misconception, I hope this brought some clarity. 💡 True accessibility is about meeting user needs, not chasing a letter grade. #DigitalAccessibility #WCAG #InclusiveDesign #AccessibilityEducation #A11y #UX #DocumentAccessibility #Chax

Great journey maps start from the intersection of user touchpoints. A customer journey map shows a customer's experiences with your organization, from when they identify a need to whether that need is met. Journey maps are often shown as straight lines with touchpoints explaining a user's challenges. start •—------------>• finish At the heart of this approach is the user, assuming that your product or service is the one they choose to use in their journey. While journey maps help explain the conceptual journey, they often give the wrong impression of how users are trying to solve their problems. In reality, users start from different places, have unique ways of understanding their problems, and often have expectations that your service can't fully meet. Our testing and user research over the years has shown how varied these problem-solving approaches can be. Building a great journey map involves identifying a constellation of touchpoints rather than a single, linear path. Users start from different points and follow various paths, making their journeys complex and varied. These paths intersect to form signals, indicating valuable touchpoints. Users interact with your product or service in many different ways. User journeys are not straightforward and involve multiple touchpoints and interactions…many of which have nothing to do with your company. Here’s how you can create valuable journeys: → Using open-ended questions and a product like Helio, identify key touchpoints, pain points, and decision-making moments within each journey. → Determine the most valuable touchpoints based on the intersection frequency and user feedback. → Create structured lists with closed answer sets and retest with multiple-choice questions to get stronger signals. → Represent these intersections as key touchpoints that indicate where users commonly interact with your product or service. → Focus on these touchpoints for further testing and optimization. Generalizing the linear flow can be practical once you have gone through this process. It helps tell the story of where users need the most support or attention, making it a helpful tool for stakeholders. Using these techniques, we’ve seen engagement nearly double on websites we support. #productdesign #productdiscovery #userresearch #uxresearch

“Personas are pointless.” I used to disagree. Then I agreed. Now? "It depends." Once, I spent six weeks building a set of personas (you can see one below). Blood, sweat, and not-so-fun tears. I put everything I knew into them which, to be fair, wasn’t much back then. I couldn’t sleep the night before the big reveal. And then... ↳ "Oh yeah, we already knew that." ↳ "This isn't our exact focus anymore" ↳ Nods but no action A big old flop. So, can personas be pointless? Absolutely. - If they’re made in isolation - If they aren’t tied to real decisions - If they don’t change how people work But when they do work, it’s because they’re built for decision-making, not lamination. Here are 5 ways to make personas actually useful, based on years of trial, error, and one too many sad personas gathering dust in Google Drive: 1. Run an “Information Needs” workshop before you start Ask your PMs, designers, and devs: “What do you wish you knew about our users to make better decisions?” Document their needs → design your research to answer them → bake those answers into your persona. 2. Build proto-personas collaboratively to surface assumptions early Before you do any research, map out what people think they know. Use sticky notes color-coded by: - Assumption - Analytics - Existing research This reveals gaps, misalignment, and gives you a jumpstart on where to dig deeper during interviews and information to include in your personas. 3. Anchor personas in journey stages, not personality traits Forget personality sliders or random hobbies. Instead, map: - What users are trying to accomplish - What frustrates them at each stage - Which tools they use and why If your persona doesn’t help answer: “What would break their flow here?," rewrite it. 4. Activate personas through workshops, not PDFs Don’t “present” personas, use them. Host an ideation workshop where teams solve for a key need or pain point. Or run a mini-hackathon based on persona insights. 5. Embed personas into rituals and review them quarterly Add a persona lens to roadmap planning: “Which persona does this initiative support?” Post them in your workspace, tag bugs/features with persona names, and revisit them every quarter to update insights. So no, personas aren’t inherently pointless. But pointless personas are everywhere. Always ask yourself: “Will this persona change what we do next?” // If you're struggling to put personas together and don't know what "bad" or "good" really look like, watch this video where I share and diagnose all the problems (and good parts) of the personas I created through the years: https://lnkd.in/etMeeSS9