Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
private issues (a) alone or (b) with a queue closely behind. Particularly in tourism, the concurrence
of different customer segments in the same locations can lead to confl ict situations (e.g. when
children use the same spa as romantic couples). Understanding how various involved actors
interrelate with each other provides valuable information for the design of holistic services
within service ecosystems.
Three basic service design tools
Service design is a young and emerging practice rooted in various disciplines. Therefore, a vast
number of methods and tools can be used to understand customers, to identify touchpoints, to
map customer journeys, to create ideas, to test and prototype service concepts and to ultimately
implement them in organizations. These methods and tools derive from many different
disciplines, such as market and design research, ethnography, design thinking, service marketing
and management, psychology, sociology, architecture, change management and many more. It
depends on the project how a design team is set up and which disciplinary backgrounds the team
requires. Depending on the characteristics of the team members involved, the team can draw
from a vast toolset. The following three tools only serve as an example of the most common tools
of service design: personas, stakeholder maps and customer journey maps (for more tools see:
van Dijk
et al
. 2010). These tools should be understood as dynamic tools that a design team can
use in various stages of a service design project to improve existing services, to innovate new
concepts and to communicate new ideas. Such tools should be iteratively developed in parallel
and not be understood as stand-alone approaches. There are various free templates available to
start working with the following three basic service design tools.
Personas
Personas visualize stakeholder groups as empathic stereotypes. They are mostly used to exemplify
the main customer groups and should be based on both ethnographic fi eldwork and quantitative
data. Personas represent fi ctional profi les, described as real characters with which all participants
of a service design project can engage. Typically, a persona includes a name, age, gender, educa-
tional background, social and family background, hobbies, and other interests. At least a persona
should be envisioned by a simple sketch or photo of the person's silhouette.
Effective personas can bring to life abstract statistical data and help a service design team to
focus on authentic wants and needs of real people. Mostly, they are developed by assembling
research insights of customers and segmenting them into groupings of common interest, the
so-called data-driven personas. However, sometimes they are generated the other way around: in
a workshop setting, personas are generated based on sheer assumptions of the participants and
only later tested and iterated with qualitative and quantitative data, the so-called assumption or
ad-hoc personas. Personas can vary from strong visual representations to text-based profi les based
on storytelling.
Stakeholder maps
Stakeholder maps visualize all stakeholders involved in the provision of a service and the
interrelations between these stakeholders. This might include staff, customers, competitors,
partners and other stakeholders, but also involves products, places and whatever might be of
interest for customers related to a respective service. In this way, the interrelations between these
various groups can be illustrated and analyzed. A stakeholder map thus visualizes the system in
