In summary

What are some advanced Service Design prototyping methods and tools?

In this video, I'll share five advanced prototyping methods that I use already today in my Service Design work. And five prototyping methods that I want to play with more in the future.

Let's start with the 5 prototyping methods that I use a lot today in my service design work.

Method number 1. Conversations as prototypes.

In service design, we often say that it's really nice to prototype in as low fidelity as possible, which means making shitty, very shitty first drafts, so that we can get the idea out very quickly.

And sometimes, the quickest way to get an idea out is just to talk about it.

This works especially well when you're testing your new service idea, a big strategic decision with key decision makers. So instead of making a whole service blueprint, a slide deck or whatever else to show the idea, you quickly get on the phone or get to meet the person and ask a very precise question.

A question where you can test how far decision makers are okay to go.

For example, if you're working with a big organization that has many different user groups, and you're trying to make a new service, you might go to the decision maker and test his willingness in this way.

So we have this new idea for a service, but we will absolutely not serve this traditional legacy target group that we usually have.

That's okay, right?

What we do in such a question is that you are really precise on one aspect. Here it was to clarify if we really have to include all the usual target groups or if we are allowed to leave some legacy users on the side.

And in that question, we're quite bold by saying we will absolutely not serve these people. This is a very emotional question just to see how ready people are within your organization to take some bold actions.

And you tested that just with a tiny conversation.

The lovely thing about this way of working is that you don't even have to set up a meeting to have this question or this test.

It's a, by the way, question. That you can ask whenever you bump into that person. It's super fast to ask, and you will get an answer quite quickly. Or the person will say, Hmm, I have to think about that. Let's meet back another time.

Prototyping method number two. Prototype the end result at the start of the project.

This is a thing that I love to do, especially again, in very big organizations.

Instead of doing the classical, first, we're going to do the research, then we're going to do some ideation, then we're going to do some prototyping.

I start right from the start with prototyping. How could the end result of this project look like? Without much research or ideation.

What I try to do here is to ensure that people are already synchronized on the vision they have for where they would like to land. And obviously through research, ideation and prototyping, we will then change that vision, you improve it.

But by having this prototype very early on, it allows me to have very tough conversations much faster, and especially tough conversations again with key decision makers, who will then be able to tell me, but this is absolutely not where we would like this project to go.

And therefore it helps also to clarify the scope of the project.

At the moment I'm part of a team that is working on creating a framework for internal communication within a big organization.

One of the very first prototypes we made alongside all of the research we do in parallel was to clarify how could such an internal communication framework or concept look like?

Is it a 50 pages document? Is it rather a tool? Is it something that should be summarized within a A4 page? How much detail does it need and what are the big elements that should be in it?

And what's nice when you have this kind of stuff is that you can go to a decision maker and say, we think that at the end, we're going to have something like that. For now, it's all fake content, but we feel it's going to go into that direction. And you can then also test it with users and say, Hey, at the end of this project, we're going to have an internal communication framework that looks like that.

Is this helpful to you? Does it help you communicate better internally?

So the idea here is to absolutely not wait to prototype, but start with it from the start of the project.

And in parallel, do the usual research work.

Tool number three. Using competitors as prototypes.

This is one thing that I've used more and more in the last two years. Instead of building many prototypes, I sometimes build just one prototype and then use an existing service and put it as an another prototype to test.

In practice, this could look like this.

If we have a new service idea, we could build the landing page that describes this new service. And then we could go online and find other competing services and that have a landing page that describes them.

Then during a testing session with participants, we would show the new idea and competing services that already exist.

People don't know which one exists and which one doesn't exist. They assume that all of these offerings exist.

Then we can get very valuable feedback without having prototyped that much.

Prototyping tool number four: Meet John storyboards.

This is something that I have covered a few times already, so I'm going to keep it short.

I love to use storytelling frameworks to create a little bit of storyboards or video stories that explain or show how a user goes through a service.

These days I use two storytelling frameworks a lot.

The first one is the Meet John Storytelling Framework, which is one that I created based on all the startup video explainers that I saw.

And the second one is the Five Lightbulbs Framework from Billy Broass.

I use these storytelling frameworks to help me structure a story and then turn that into a video. And these videos get then shown to potential users to gather feedback. What's nice with having a video format is that it's also pretty lovely to present internally to decision makers and stakeholders.

Prototyping tool number five. Notion.

If you know me, you know that I use Notion a lot. Therefore, you might assume that yes, I use a lot Notion when it comes to prototyping how digital parts of a service could look like.

In fact, With Notion, you can prototype both things for the front stage and for the backstage.

You can prototype how a website or knowledge base of a service could look like.

But you could also prototype how a tool that helps people to work together in the backstage could look like.

So these are just five of the tools that I use a lot in my service design practice for prototyping.

There are much more, but for now, I'd like to switch gears and look at what are prototyping methods for service design that I'm excited about and don't use that much yet, but that I want to use more.

And for now, I'm going to share five of those.

First one. Theater as a prototype.

My mate Emmanuel Fragnière inspired me a lot with this.

He is using theatre to test out new service ideas.

These aren't just basic role play sessions. In fact, these are sessions where you really script out a tiny scene of how a service could look like. And for the actors, you then use the people who are really making the service.

And then you play the scene, and see what works and what doesn't work.

I'm especially excited to test this idea of theater for prototyping services for longer term services that happen over days and weeks.

Imagine a scene where you see how the start of a service looks like, and then we go kind of fast forward, and then you see a second scene, which then happens weeks after, and you could then showcase the whole length of the service within just a few minutes.

You could even give the sensation that time flies by by having the actors like move like crazy like that to show that days are passing. And I'm sure this will be quite funny to look at.

Tool number two that I'm excited about is SAP Scenes.

SAP Scenes is a library of tiny paper scenes that you can put together, like Lego blocks, to create the story of a service. Until now, I've used a lot Legos to create these scenes with people. The nice thing about this SAP Scenes Toolkit is that it comes already with things that are designed and that you just can use like that. Where when you do it with Lego, you have to build a lot of things. If you have the idea of having an information counter, you have to create it and SAP Scenes, you kind of already have it pre designed for you.

Tool number three: tools that allow you to quickly transform a sitemap into wireframe.

Here one of those tools which is quite interesting is Relume. Within Relume you create your site map and for each page, you then put out what are the different sections.

And for each section you can add a little description.

Once you're ready, you just hit a button and it will generate a wireframe for each of the pages.

I feel this could be a pretty fun way to prototype a website with many stakeholders within a workshop.

In fact, imagine in a workshop setting, you spent the time to create the sitemap, you then send participants to go on a break and once they come back from the break, you already have wireframes built out that they can improve and criticize.

Pretty neat.

Tool number four: Red Teaming.

The companies that put out these AI models like ChatGPT or Claude do a lot of work to ensure that things don't go to shit.

They spend a lot of time to think on: How could people misuse their tool,

and how that tool could harm people and society.

Such a structured way to think about how things could go bad is something that I'd like to use more in my own service design work.

Tool number five: Proper Financial Modeling.

One mistake that I've done a few times and that I'm now trying to stop is to prototype new service ideas that are really lovely, both for the people and the companies, but that aren't economically viable. That's why I'm very interested now in working with financial modelers and business modelers that can help me put down the numbers, Bring down the business models with numbers before we even start to think about a new service idea.

Because in many organizations, if the service isn't economically viable, there is no need to think if it would be an idea that people would love.

So these are 10 advanced prototyping methods that you can use in Service Design.

And obviously there are way more, but at the same time, there is only that little that we use again and again and again.

That's why it was important to me to start this video by sharing the five ones that I'm using a lot already today.