Service Blueprinting Workshop
The focus of the board is to help your team build service blueprints together at varied depths of detail.
What is a blueprint?
A blueprint is an operational tool that visualizes the components of a service in enough detail to analyze, implement, and improve it. Blueprints show the orchestration of people, touchpoints, processes, and technology both frontstage (what customers see) and backstage (what is behind the scenes).
We have built this template to help remote and dispersed teams build a picture of their current state or to be services. At Xero we have used this series of templates for over 180 hours of workshops in many countries with over 100 people participating - so we think it works well!
Included in this board are ice breaker activities, a context canvas, an empathy map, action plans (a concept we created to capture the service transitions needed to change from current state, to to-be state) and a workshop feedback matrix. We’ve included two bespoke service blueprint templates, one simplified and one more detailed so pick the template that best works for you!
Key reasons to use a blueprint
Visual and transparent - Visualising services through blueprints helps us to understand all the moving parts —their interconnections, dependencies and relationships to products. Visually communicating this knowledge to collaborators and stakeholders takes what was an abstract concept and make it tangible and easier for you to tell that story
Aligning end to end working cross-functionally - blueprints provide a common understanding of how your services are functioning. This is particularly valuable when teams, working groups (locally and globally) come together to deliver on a service vision. Blueprints help ensure that, once built the pieces of experience correctly fit together as intended.
Identifying opportunities - by having visibility of the people, processes and technology, it's very easy to identify what’s working well and what’s not. Blueprints can easily enable us to map how internal processes and procedures are causing pain to the customer and internally. By having this view, blueprints create a single roadmap across go-to-market streams to operate in experiences, not silos or departments.
Prototyping - Service blueprinting is a great process for quickly prototyping service delivery in low fidelity. Service blueprints can be used as canvases to capture insights and explore business feasibility and operational viability for different solutions. Blueprints can also be used as scripts to facilitate and visualise the customer flow and architecture of the service experience.
Level of zoom: helicopter to microscope
The blueprints are designed to be read at different levels of zoom– from a macro level, ‘helicopter’ view to a microscopic, detailed, view.
The helicopter view is enough information to outline the audience group, episode and steps they need to take to complete actions.The most-detailed, microscopic, view is at a touchpoint level. At this stage you can see specifically how a customer interacts with your product or service, the teams or people involved with that interaction and where it sits among the wider objective that the customer is trying to achieve.
The blueprints are living documents in Miro, they are digital in order to remain accurate. It's your responsibility to keep them this way so that they remain useful to us now and into the future.
This template was created by Xero.
Get started with this template right now.
Example Mapping Template
Works best for:
Product Management, Mapping, Diagrams
To update your product in valuable ways—to recognize problem areas, add features, and make needed improvements—you have to walk in your users’ shoes. Example mapping (or user story mapping) can give you that perspective by helping cross-functional teams identify how users behave in different situations. These user stories are ideal for helping organizations form a development plan for Sprint planning or define the minimum amount of features needed to be valuable to customers.
Service Blueprint [Research]
Works best for:
Research & Design
A Service Blueprint is a diagram that displays the service's entire process, including people, objects, tasks, time, and processes.
Empathy Map Canvas by Jack León
Works best for:
Research & Design, Market Research
Empathy Map Canvas is an essential tool for capturing user insights. By visualizing what users think, feel, and experience, you can create more effective and user-friendly designs. This template is perfect for teams focused on user-centered design.
Visual Prototyping Template
Visual and emotional aspects play a vital role in determining a product or service's usability and user experience. To evaluate these aspects of your proposed solution, consider using the Visual Prototyping Template. By creating a model that closely resembles the real product or service, and gathering feedback from key stakeholders, you can assess whether the form of your creation is advantageous or detrimental.
Empathy Map for Food Ordering App
Empathy Map template aids in visualizing your users' experiences. It helps teams understand what users see, think, and feel, ensuring your product meets their needs. This tool is essential for building empathy and designing better user experiences.
Design Research Template
Works best for:
UX Design, Design Thinking, Desk Research
A design research map is a grid framework showing the relationship between two key intersections in research methodologies: mindset and approach. Design research maps encourage your team or clients to develop new business strategies using generative design thinking. Originally designed by academic Liz Sanders, the framework is meant to resolve confusion or overlap between research and design methods. Whether your team is in problem-solving or problem space definition mode, using a research design template can help you consider the collective value of many unrelated practices.