Service blueprints
Frontstage, backstage, and supporting processes on one canvas. The canonical artefact, and the one most likely to surface the gap nobody owns.
What we do · One of three lenses
Service design.
The whole experience, end to end. Most "product" failures aren't really product failures. The onboarding email arrives late, support has no view of what the user just signed up for, and renewals quietly leak. Service design is everything around the product that decides whether the rest of the relationship holds.
What it really is
A product is one moment in a longer relationship.
Service design is everything around that moment. The frontstage your users see, the backstage that makes it work, and the supporting processes (operations, finance, support, training) that keep the whole thing running.
The most common service design failure: a beautiful product nobody can sign up for because the onboarding email lives on a different team's roadmap. Or a product that handles 60 percent of the journey beautifully and breaks at the support handoff. For enterprise products that's a 60 percent product, no matter how good the screens look.
When this is where the risk sits
You probably need a service lens when…
- The user journey crosses multiple channels: web, mobile, call centre, email, branch, partner.
- You're launching a new product on top of an old support model and the friction lives in the gaps.
- Customer satisfaction is fine on the product but bad overall. The shape of the service is the issue, not the screens.
- Two teams are quietly building the same thing because nobody has drawn the journey end to end.
- An incident exposed a backstage failure that the frontstage was hiding.
- Onboarding works but second-month retention doesn't, and nobody owns the gap between them.
What we deliver
Artefacts that show the whole picture.
These artefacts force teams that usually work in different rooms to look at the same service at the same time. That's how the gaps get found.
Journey maps
The user side, end to end. Steps, channels, expectations, emotional arc, and the moments where the relationship is won or lost.
Touchpoint audits
Every point of contact across every channel. Who owns it, what it promises, and where it leaks.
Support flows
How problems escalate and resolve. The shape of the service when things don't go well, which is when service quality really gets measured.
Channel maps
Which channel is doing what work, and where they collide. Useful when web, app, call centre, and partners all think they own the same step.
Role & capability maps
Who needs to be in place for the new service to actually run. Roles, skills, tooling, and training, drawn so the org-chart shadow of a service redesign is visible up front.
Three lenses, one product
Service design widens the frame.
The three lenses we use, UX, business process, and service design, each look at a different layer of the same product. Service design is the layer that includes everything around the product, the channels, the support, the touchpoints between them.
Sibling lens
UX design
The product people actually use. Screens, flows, and the small details that make software feel clear or frustrating.
Sibling lensBusiness process design
How the work moves behind the product. The roles, steps, and handoffs the screens have to support.
You're hereService design
The whole experience, end to end.
Service design without UX is a strategy doc nobody can use. UX without a service view risks shipping a great screen into a journey that breaks two steps later. We use whichever lens the risk asks for, and most engagements end up needing all three.
Where it shows up in our process
Service work frames the project, then bookends it.
Our five-phase process is shared across all three lenses. Service design is heaviest in Plan and Gather, where we set the boundary of the engagement, and it returns in Test, where field issues outside the screens come back to bite.
Plan
What service are we actually designing?
We frame the boundary: which channels, which roles, which support paths are in scope. The wider the lens, the bigger the conversation about ownership.
Gather
Frontstage, backstage, supporting.
We talk to users on the frontstage, staff on the backstage, and the operations teams whose work the service depends on. Then we put it on one canvas.
Ideation
Multiple service shapes.
Different ways the same outcome could be delivered, traded off against cost, complexity, and how much of the org would have to change.
Build
Service shape feeds the product shape.
The chosen service blueprint sets the constraints the product has to honour. It tells UX what the product owns and what it hands off.
Test
Real journeys, end to end.
We test the full service, not just the product. That means following users across channels and watching the handoffs that usually live in nobody's test plan.
A failure in Test usually points to a backstage process or a missing channel, not a screen. We loop back to Gather and adjust the blueprint.
Got a service that's bigger than its product?
Tell us where the experience is breaking. We'll help you see the whole picture and decide what to design first.
Talk to us