I am so proud of the new Service Design course that I launched recently and wanted to share a little more information about it.
We use them all the time. To pay our bills, to access medical support, to receive education.
How these services are created, are often created with the best intentions, but quite often miss the mark.
In this new course you won't learn about creating delightful experiences. This might seem like a strange thing to say, but in reality, many of the services that we use, have been very poorly designed. Our goal as change-makers is very often not to 'wow' people with fireworks here and there, it's to slip behind the curtain to make them functional.
In this course, I cover off a typical service design process, and weave journey mapping as a method around the theory. I've found that by doing this, is much more exciting that sitting through hours and hours of lectures and listening to people talk about Design.
At its core, Journey Mapping is most effective when shared with other people. We learn from each other congruently. We learn about how people see the world in a visual way. I believe that by introducing this element of visualisation really helps connect the dots between the theory and the doing.
During the pandemic, when I was running courses at scale, we saw a pattern emerge where people didn't want to be sitting in front of a screen all day, every day. It was exhausting. At that stage, myself and many of my peers moved to Blended Learning, where we merged pre-recorded material with live elements and this worked excellently. But what the customer gained in that new experience, the trainer and practitioner lost in many other ways.
Many of these items can be trivialised, but I am a huge believer that the environment and setting plays a huge role in how we learn. I always incorporate funny moments in my sessions, to try and relax the mind, and create a sense of acceptance around vulnerability. I do this often through sacrificing myself for the sake of a laugh, or by bringing musical elements or SFX into the sessions.
This course does a few things well.
I compress the learning experience into a very dense 4-hours period.
Why? Well, I believe we are all time poor, and people are happy to take in much more information in a shorter period of time.
The downside of this, is people don't absorb as much. But I counteract this by offering the video recording back to people who buy the middle tier of 'Session Playback'. This is why I always encourage people to get the middle tier as a minimum.
Too often I hear "I can create a Journey Map". Sure, most people can create a journey map.
But can they create a journey map that aligns perspectives and is inclusive? Much like having access to Microsoft Word does not make you a New York Times Best Selling author, the same can be said about creating Journey Maps.
Journey Mapping is one of the most powerful tools in any innovators toolkit.
When correctly presented and created, it provides a visual representation of the experiences faced by people navigating an organisational ecosystem.
In this course, we will cover all aspects of how you can use the method of 'mapping' to cover areas such as customer journey mapping, user journey mapping, employee journey mapping.
If you are toying with the idea of taking this course, then now is the time to act! I won't be running it again until September 2023 - but the video course option is already ready to go if you prefer that and need to learn straight away.