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Card sorting helps uncover user’s mental models for better information architecture, and understand how to organize information in a way so that other people can find it. In an open card sorting exercise, users are asked to cluster the cards based on affinities, and assign the name they want to each of the groups. While in a closed card sorting exercise, users are asked to organize the individual cards into predetermined categories. Card sorting can be either moderated or unmoderated by the facilitator, it can be counducted on paper or using digital tools.

The diary study is a research method inspired by cultural probes, in which participants are asked to monitor and report specific data over a defined period of time. The diary can be analog or digital, request to simply log specific information or even take photos and videos. It could help with remote research, and facilitate self-reflection prior to an in-depth interview

The ecosystem map is a synthetic representation capturing all the key roles that have an influence on the user, organization and service environment. The ecosystem map is built by first displaying all the entities, and then connecting them based on the type of value they exchange.

The emotional journey is an extension of the usual experience journey map (or customer journey map) that associates an indication of the emotional status of the user at each stage of the experience. The emotion can be represented by a curve floating from moments of frustration to delight, or by adding emojis and pictograms to the specific steps of the journey.

The empathy map is a canvas split into four quadrants (says, thinks, does, and feels), all positioned around the user. Filling the map allows to produce an overview of who the user is, and to identify inconsistencies in the perception of the same user from various team members (and so intervene to mitigate the conflict).

The interview guide (or discussion guide) is a logical sequence of topics and questions that help the researcher conduct an interview session. The guide is organized in sections according to the different topics that need to be explored during the research; each section comes with a detailed set of questions that help cover that topic. While during the interviews the conversation may go in many different directions, the guide helps the researcher remember all the key aspects to explore.

Issue cards are used to promote discussion, to suggest new avenues of exploration, to structure thinking, and to spark ideas. They can be especially useful when the group feels stuck, or is unable to move away from familiar thinking. The basic concept behind issue cards is to isolate a specific element into each card, and then use the cards as starting point for a 1:1 or group conversation. An issue card can contain an insight, a picture, a drawing, a feature, a keyworkd, a description, etc. based on the specific need. They act as prompts to suggest new interpretations of a problem and induce considering a different perpective; they can be used in many different ways, from identifying priorities to discussing relationships or simply facilitating the conversation.

The journey map is a synthetic representation that describes step-by-step how a user interacts with a service. The process is mapped from the user perspective, describing what happens at each stage of the interaction, what touchpoints are involved, what obstacles and barriers they may encounter. The journey map is often integrated an additional layers representing the level of positive/negative emotions experienced throughout the interaction.

Writing notes during observations sessions help make the most out of that research activity, making sure to capture insights as well as data concerning what’s happening around (e.g. how many times an action is repeated, how long it takes, steps covered, etc.). Preparing a dedicated support such as a printed grid or notebook with specific investigation areas to fill during the session could be valuable to guide the researcher by suggesting data points to capture, and so avoid to forget any important aspects.

Each persona is a reference model representative of a specific type of users.Technically, they can be called behavioural archetypes when they focus on capturing the different behaviors (e.g. “the conscious chooser”) without expressing a defined personality or socio-demographics. The more the archetypes assume a realistic feeling (e.g. name, age, household composition, etc.), the more they become real personas, fully expressing the needs, desires, habits and cultural backgrounds of specific groups of users.

A key part of research preparation consist in the identification of the right mix of participants for the sessions, especially when the research is qualitative. The recruiting screener is a short questionnaire that can be circulated through your own networks, specific communities or specialised recruiting agencies, to help assess if a candidate is compatible with a set of defined criteria. The answers help exclude respondants that don’t match the recruiting criteria, as well as balance different variables within small groups of selected participants.

The research plan is a document that clarifies how to approach the research, touching upon research goals, selected methodologies, types of participants and tools used, timeline and locations. This planning activity needs to be done upfront, before starting the actual research, and help maximizing the effort and modeling the activities in the best way possible, according to the specific research purpose. The plan becomes even more important when the research requires to travel in the field, or coordinate different teams in various locations.

Service Safari is a research tool that helps designers develop interesting insights and inspirations by experiencing a service in first-person, as they were ‘in the shoes’ of a user. While pretending to be a user, designers can understand in detail all the aspects of the interaction with the service, observe how other people in the same space/environment behave, and eventually intercept the opinions and perceptions of other users. After having gone through the service, journey maps help generate a documentation of the experience that can be used for ideation and comparison purposes. Often times, the safari could be replicated going through the competitors’ service as well.

The stakeholder map is a representation of all the stakeholder involved in a project, aimed at clarifying roles and relationships. Depending on the specific need, the map can be created as a simple quadrant with two axis (level of influence and level of interest or engagement in the process), or as a more complex motivation matrix (detailing what each stakeholder brings to each of the other ones through the service project).

The synthesis wall is a key support in the moment of debriefing and analysis of the research outcomes. The team writes down all the relevant notes from the research on single post-it notes, and organize them on the wall in order to start identifying clusters, relevant themes, important insights that can inform and inspire the design process. The wall could be set in a structured way, listing all the notes under each interviewee (helpful to identify personas and transversal patterns), or under each step of the journey (helpful to analyse an experience and its pain points).

A system map is a synthetic representation that shows in one single frame all the different actors involved in a service delivery, and their mutual links (e.g. flows of materials, energy, information, money, documents, etc.). The system map clarifies how the different service components and roles are connected one to the other, highlighting the values they exchange.

Brainstorming is a common technique used to generate ideas. The brainstorming is often organized by first allowing each participant to collect their own thoughts individually, then start sharing and building one on top of each other idea, in order to get to a broad set of possibilities (divergent moment). In the final part of the brainstorming, the goal is usually to cluster, analyse and prioritise the different items in order to identify the most promising solutions or directions, and define next steps (convergent moment).

The concept walkthrough allows to gain feedback on a service idea at very early stages, by walking some users or experts through the new desired experience and ask to comment. The concept walkthrough only needs some low-fidelity mock-ups, sketches or images to support the explanation.

The evaluation matrix allows to weight different ideas, rating them based on a set of defined criteria, in order to identify the most promising ones. A common set of criteria includes the level of complexity related to idea implementation, and level of value they will bring to the user and to the organization.

Experience principles are inspiring values that help create a shared experience vision within an organization, by applying then consistently across several projects and initiatives. They are based on research, and incorporate insights about what users expect from the relationship with a specific organization or service.

Hypothesis generation is a quick exercise that allows to reflect on all the already-known assumptions and insights related to user needs and behaviours, share them amongst team members, and derive initial ideas for service experiences or features that could be offered.

Start by putting a topic, idea or problem at the center of a blank surface, and then write down other words, signs, drawings around it. Write them as they come to your mind, always showing the connection with the initial point, or how they are linked one to each other. Let your mind free to explore, diverge and connect points, growing the map bigger and bigger - there will be time later on to review and rationalise it.

The tomorrow’s narratives is an envisioning technique based on the idea of writing fictional articles that simulate the moment in which the product or service will be launched in the maket: how will the service be introduced to its potential users? What values and features will be highlighted? Who is going to talk about it? Writing and sharing these fictional articles with the project team (e.g. during ideation workshop) help explore different possibilities and align on a common vision. The article could be replaced with simulated blog posts, ADV posters or movies, TED talks, etc.: any form of communication that help projecting in the moment in which the service will be available to its users.

Experience prototypes allow designers to show and test the solution through an active participation of the final users, that interact with mock-ups of specific service touchpoints. There could be one (or more) prototype for each touchpoint, to collect input on that specific interaction as well as on the overall flow from one touchpoint to the other.

The role play is a representation technique often used during co-design sessions; it allows to explain a service or product idea by acting out an exemplificatory scenario of use. The role play typically requires to define some roles (e.g. the user, the service employee, etc.) and prepare rough prototypes or other materials that can facilitate the performance. While a team is acting out their story, the rest of the audience learn about the idea, understand the high-level sequence of actions required and get to know the hero moments.

Rough prototypes simulate specific service components with the goal of better explaining a service idea in front of other team members, and start discussing the specific requirements of each touchpoint. Rough prototypes can be simply built with paper (e.g. a flyer, a wayfinding signage, a mobile phone interface, etc.) or with pre-assembled interface elements (e.g. wireframe kits, UI kits, etc.). They are a powerful tool during co-design sessions, to allow everyone to visually translate specific thoughts into tangible objects and interfaces, and make design considerations.

The service image is aimed at presenting a concept in a memorable way, by helping the audience immediately understand, perceive, immerse into the envisioned experience. The service image is often realistic (e.g. a montage of different photos and scenes, or a post-produced photo realised ad hoc) and focused on a hero moment that is able to encapsulate the core value of the service experience. The service image may be used in public presentations as well as in the landing page of the project website, becoming aclear visual reference and contributing in shaping the service brand.

The service prototype has the objective of replicating, as much as possible, the final experience of interacting with the service, in order to test and validate all the design choices. The complexity in the simulation is due to the fact that the service only exists once it’s delivered, and while testing the experience of using a specific touchpoint (such as a mobile app) could be relatively, verifying the whole journey touching upon different service components is always challenging (especially when there are physical places or interactions with service staff involved). The more the service expands across different touchpoints, the more the service prototype needs to be orchestrated as a big ‘mise en scène’, with a specific plot to follow. Touchpoints could be simulated with different levels of fidelity but at this stage are typically quite well-defined.

A user scenario is a story that describes, in an exemplificatory and narrative manner, how the user is going to interact with the service during a specific situation of everyday life. Writing user scenarios require to identify a specific context in which the action takes place, as well as characters and needs that defines the attitude of the user. The scenarios can be first written as stories, describing the experience step by step, and then supported with drawings, pictures or clips of the experience, adding a visual layer to it.

User stories are a technique coming from the Agile methodology, used to describe the requirements of a digital service from a user perspective (in contrast with product-based requirement documents). The user stories detail all the elements and interactions that enable the envisioned user experience with a mobile app or website, and connect the work of the design team (developing interaction flows and UI components) with the process of back-end and front-end development, enabling a better integrated workflow in sprints (rather than a water-fall development process).

The business model canvas is a synthetic chart providing an overview of the service in terms of value proposition, infrastructure, types of customers and financial model. It helps understand what activities are needed in order to build and deliver a service, and identify potential trade-offs.

The goal of the offering map is to clarify what the service provides to the users, detailing the value proposition into more specific clusters of features. There’s not a standard model for this tool: the offering could be described with words, images or through a simple graph. As services grow in complexity, the offering map can also become more articulated, showing distinct macro-areas of offer, and then narrowing them down into more specific areas and functions.

A service blueprint is a diagram that displays the entire process of service delivery, by listing all the activities that happen at each stage, performed by the different roles involved. The service blueprint is built by first listing all the actors involved in the service process on a vertical axis, and all the steps required to deliver the service on the horizontal axis. The resulting matrix allows to represent the flow of actions that each role needs to perform along the process, highlighting the actions that the user can see (above the line of visibility) and the ones that happen in the back-office (below the line of visibility). Roles can be performed by human beings or other types of entities (organizations, departments, artificial intelligences, machines, etc.) USE IT TO

The service roadmap is the outputs of planning processes and visually describe a high-level timeline for the progressive process of development, delivery and evolution of a service solution.The goal is to identify the minimum set of features needed to be ready for the first release, and then the following enhancements that could be made to achieve greater impact. The roadmap takes into consideration the effort needed to develop and build specific service components, as well as the time required for potential testing, pilot and beta phases. Once the first MVP of the service is ready, the roll-out can start, with the need of addressing both communication and distribution issues, as well as a continuous development and integration of additional functions that were initially left aside. Service Roadmaps have two main features: a time dimension, that allows a firm to make a detailed, practical and achievable plans; and the use of layers that typically include market, product, service and technological perspectives. In general, Roadmaps should answer three essential questions: Where are we now? Where do we want to go? and How can we get there?. While standard formats and recommended guidelines exist, service roadmapping is a flexible approach in their structures and their development processes. Service roadmaps are a useful tool for later project phases, specially when a handover, or the communication and transfer of generated information, insights and results, occurs.

The service specifications are written guidelines that clarify all the requirements and objectives of each specific stage of the service experience and touchpoint. The service specifications typically mention also the design principles that inspired the entire project, defining the foundation of the overall experience. Each step in the experience and touchpoints are then described in detail, including drawings, pictures or any other relevant material that can help understanding the specific indications. The service specifications can be used to engage experts within the design and development process (briefing them on specific activities) and to coordinate the implementation of the service (giving guidance on how the different components are used).

The success metrics are a set of criteria defined alongside the service development as key factors that will define the success of the project itself and of its final implementation. It’s always important to distinguish amongst these two levels (project and final service outcomes) as they generate different types of values. Once the metrics are defined, it’s also important to identify a strategy for their measurement (how data is collected and when), keeping in mind the importance of accessing that information in several moments of the process, and being able to use it to adjust the workflow and features developed.

The value proposition canvas is a framework that helps designers ensure that there is a fit between the product-service idea and the market. It gives a detailed look at the relationship between customer segments and value propositions, highlights roles involved, pains and gains and how the service eventually matches with the proposition and its pain relievers and gain creators.