Beyond the screen: journeys, blueprints and the service behind the interface

A prototype can pass every test the studio runs and the service still fail. A patient confirms an appointment on a screen that behaves exactly as specified. The confirmation then reaches a phone nobody answers at lunchtime. Nothing in the interface is broken. What is broken sits behind it: a queue, a rota, a system its designers do not own.

Journey maps and service blueprints are the studio's attempt to design that system. This unit argues that their real contribution is to relocate the object of design. They make the parts a patient never sees visible enough to be redesigned. They also turn an interface problem into an organisational one. The literature promoting these methods is written largely by their inventors. It reports few measured outcomes, and it does not agree what a journey is. This is the eighth of ten units; it takes the service and hands unit nine the structure to find a way through it.

Why the screen is the wrong object

The oldest argument for looking past the interface comes from service marketing. Zeithaml, Parasuraman and Berry (1985) set out a conceptual model of service quality. In that model failure arises in the gaps between what customers expect, what management perceives and what is delivered. The distance between those positions is where a service breaks, not the quality of any single transaction.

Hassenzahl and Tractinsky (2006) separate a product's pragmatic qualities from its hedonic ones, arguing that experience is subjective and situated in a context the designer does not control. Forlizzi and Battarbee (2004) sharpen the unit of analysis, distinguishing experience, an experience and co-experience, the last made with other people, so a session where one participant sits alone with a prototype samples the wrong thing. Lemon and Verhoef (2016) supply the temporal version: experience is formed over time, across touchpoints the firm only partly owns, so the object worth designing is a sequence crossing several owners, not a screen.

A blueprint exposes the work the customer never sees

Shostack (1982) argued that services can be designed systematically rather than left to intuition. She introduced the service blueprint as a way of mapping a service process and its points of customer contact on one surface.

Bitner, Ostrom and Morgan (2008) restated and popularised the technique. They argue that services are fluid and produced in real time. Prototyping methods borrowed from products transfer poorly to them. A blueprint at the right level of detail exposes where a service fails, including the parts the customer never sees. Their worked example is a hotel stay marked with the visible contact work, the hidden work and the systems both depend on. It is an illustration, not a test.

Patricio, Fisk, Falcao e Cunha and Constantine (2011) extended the technique beyond a single firm. Their multilevel service design links the customer's value constellation to the service experience, and then to its blueprint.

A journey map is only as good as the customer data under it

A journey map follows one customer through time and marks where the experience rises and drops. Rosenbaum, Otalora and Ramirez (2017) argue that most maps in circulation are critically flawed, because they assume that every customer meets the same touchpoints and that each matters equally. Their case is one of the world's largest indoor shopping malls, given the pseudonym Highland Park Mall. The management team listed sixty touchpoints at which a customer meets the organisation, then surveyed a hundred customers, whose answers did not weight those touchpoints equally and did not put all of them on one path, so a map drawn from the management's list alone would have weighted equally a step many customers never take. The map has to be tied to customer research, not to that assumption.

The review evidence says the same at the level of the literature. Folstad and Kvale (2018) systematically reviewed research on customer journeys. They found the concept used inconsistently, with a rich and at times incoherent terminology, and disagreement about what counts as a journey and what its elements are. They called for clearer constructs. A method whose central object is undefined across its own literature cannot yet tell a student whether a map is right.

There is a second warrant for the same instrument. Crosier and Handford (2012) report the first known use of journey mapping by a national charity as an advocacy tool. It was part of a campaign for improved access to goods and services for disabled people. Here the map earns its place by putting one customer's path in front of people who would otherwise design around their own assumptions. A blueprint marking a step an older customer cannot complete treats access as part of the service.

Modelling turns an observed experience into something designable

Teixeira, Patricio, Nunes, Nobrega, Fisk and Constantine (2012) developed customer experience modelling. It moves from the customer's experience to formal design representations for a service delivered across several channels. The modelling step, they argue, makes an experience designable.

Zomerdijk and Voss (2010) studied experience-centric services. They identified the practices that support the customer's experience. Two of those practices are the orchestration of cues that signal what stage a customer is in, and the management of the journey as a whole. Together they name what a blueprint is for: not a record but a plan for cuing and sequencing.

Wetter-Edman, Sangiorgi, Edvardsson, Holmlid, Gronroos and Mattelmaki (2014) connect that practice to service-dominant logic. In that logic value is not delivered by a provider, but co-created with the customer. That is where the thesis meets its strongest qualification.

Contested question: can a blueprint locate a failure that the customer creates?

One position holds that a blueprint is a design instrument that can locate a service failure and specify its repair. Its champions are the method's own authors. Shostack (1982) treats the service as systematically designable. Bitner, Ostrom and Morgan (2008) claim a blueprint exposes failure points, including the invisible ones. Patricio and colleagues (2011) and Teixeira and colleagues (2012) extend the representation to a multilevel, modelled account. Zeithaml, Parasuraman and Berry (1985) support this side.

The other position holds that the customer produces the value, so a blueprint can at most set conditions for something it cannot determine. Wetter-Edman and colleagues (2014) connect design for service to service-dominant logic, where value is co-created in the customer's own context. On this reading, a mark of failure marks where the customer's situation diverged from the designer's model. The correction then belongs to the organisation.

A third disagreement cuts across both. Rosenbaum, Otalora and Ramirez (2017) find unrealistic maps in wide use, and Folstad and Kvale (2018) find the journey concept inconsistently defined. The field therefore cannot yet tell a good map from a well-drawn one. The nearest thing to a measured result is Trischler, Pervan, Kelly and Scott (2018). They found that codesign teams' concepts scored higher on novelty and user benefit, but lower on feasibility, though it measures concepts rather than the service.

What would settle the question is a study the literature does not contain. It would build the map or blueprint from documented observations. It would state in advance what observation would show it wrong, and compare service outcomes between a team designing with the representation and a control given the same observations without it. Until then, the studio should hold the blueprint as a claim about a system, kept only while somebody can say what would falsify it.

The blueprint's case is a lineage of worked cases and one conceptual model, and its authors are largely the method's inventors, while the co-creation side is a theoretical argument from service logic that asserts a limit rather than measuring one. The firmest findings here are critical: Rosenbaum, Otalora and Ramirez compare management's touchpoint list with a hundred customers, and Folstad and Kvale show the concept is undefined across its own literature. The strongest objection is that the unit cannot show a blueprint improving a service, since no study compares a service designed with a map against one designed without. While the dispute is open, a designer keeps the map tied to observed touchpoints, marks each hidden step with its evidence, and states what would show it wrong.

Where the argument is heading

The first is scale, where Patricio and colleagues (2011) extend the blueprint to a multilevel account running from a customer's value constellation to operational detail. The second is measurement, where Folstad and Kvale (2018) call for clearer constructs and comparable measures, which are the precondition for testing whether a map changed anything. The third is participation, where Trischler and colleagues (2018) show that involving customers changes the ideas produced, and that the design of the involvement matters. The fourth is instrumentation, where Teixeira and colleagues (2012) place a modelling step between observation and design, so a team can represent an experience before it builds one.

The gap that remains is the one Lemon and Verhoef (2016) describe from the marketing side. Experience accrues across touchpoints over time. No method here has shown that designing against a representation of that sequence produces a better service. Until one does, the studio should teach the blueprint as an argument about a system. It should ask of the blueprint what it asks of every other design claim: traceable to an observation, and open to being wrong.

The sources this unit rests on

• Bitner, M. J., Ostrom, A. L. and Morgan, F. N. (2008). Service blueprinting: a practical technique for service innovation. California Management Review. doi:10.2307/41166446 They argue that services are fluid and experiential, that product prototyping transfers poorly, and that a blueprint at the right level of detail exposes failure points including the parts the customer never sees. It is the unit's central method.
• Crosier, A. and Handford, A. (2012). Customer journey mapping as an advocacy tool for disabled people: a case study. Social Marketing Quarterly. doi:10.1177/1524500411435483 They report the first known use of customer journey mapping by a national charity as an advocacy tool, part of a campaign for improved access to goods and services for disabled people. It gives the map a warrant of argument, not measurement.
• Folstad, A. and Kvale, K. (2018). Customer journeys: a systematic literature review. Journal of Service Theory and Practice. doi:10.1108/JSTP-11-2014-0261 Their systematic review finds the customer journey used inconsistently, with a rich and at times incoherent terminology and disagreement about what counts as a journey and what its elements are, and calls for clearer constructs. It makes the unit's journey-map claim arguable.
• Forlizzi, J. and Battarbee, K. (2004). Understanding experience in interactive systems. Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS). doi:10.1145/1013115.1013152 They distinguish experience, an experience and co-experience, and argue that design must account for social context. It supplies the account of experience that moves the unit past the screen.
• Hassenzahl, M. and Tractinsky, N. (2006). User experience: a research agenda. Behaviour and Information Technology. doi:10.1080/01449290500330331 They separate pragmatic from hedonic qualities and argue that experience is subjective and situated. It frames experience as more than usability, which is the premise the unit needs.
• Lemon, K. N. and Verhoef, P. C. (2016). Understanding customer experience throughout the customer journey. Journal of Marketing. doi:10.1509/jm.15.0420 They argue that experience is formed over time through many touchpoints and so cannot be judged at a single interaction. It gives the unit its account of experience over time.
• Patricio, L., Fisk, R. P., Falcao e Cunha, J. and Constantine, L. (2011). Multilevel service design: from customer value constellation to service experience blueprinting. Journal of Service Research. doi:10.1177/1094670511401901 They develop multilevel service design, linking the value constellation to the experience and its blueprint, arguing that service design must work at more than one level of description. It shows the technique scaling beyond one firm.
• Rosenbaum, M. S., Otalora, M. L. and Ramirez, G. C. (2017). How to create a realistic customer journey map. Business Horizons. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2016.09.010 They contend that most journey maps are critically flawed, because they assume that every customer meets the same touchpoints and that each touchpoint matters equally, and they tie the map to customer research instead. It keeps the map tied to evidence rather than assumption.
• Shostack, G. L. (1982). How to design a service. European Journal of Marketing. doi:10.1108/EUM0000000004799 She argues that services can be designed systematically and introduces the service blueprint as a map of process and contact points. It is the origin of the blueprint and makes the service, not the product, the object of design.
• Teixeira, J., Patricio, L., Nunes, N. J., Nobrega, L., Fisk, R. P. and Constantine, L. (2012). Customer experience modelling: from customer experience to service design. Journal of Service Management. doi:10.1108/09564231211248453 They develop customer experience modelling, moving from the customer's experience to formal design representations for a multi-channel service; the modelling step makes it designable. It closes the loop from observation to design.
• Trischler, J., Pervan, S. J., Kelly, S. J. and Scott, D. R. (2018). The value of codesign: the effect of customer involvement in service design teams. Journal of Service Research. doi:10.1177/1094670517714060 They found that codesign concepts scored higher on novelty and user benefit but lower on feasibility than those of an in-house team and a user-only team, and that cohesive teams produced them. It is the nearest thing here to a measured result.
• Wetter-Edman, K., Sangiorgi, D., Edvardsson, B., Holmlid, S., Gronroos, C. and Mattelmaki, T. (2014). Design for value co-creation: exploring synergies between design for service and service logic. Service Science. doi:10.1287/serv.2014.0068 They argue for synergies between design for service and service-dominant logic, in which value is co-created. It makes the thesis contestable, since co-created value is not something a blueprint can fix.
• Zeithaml, V. A., Parasuraman, A. and Berry, L. L. (1985). A conceptual model of service quality and its implications for future research. Journal of Marketing. doi:10.1177/002224298504900403 They set out the gaps model of service quality, locating failure in the distance between what customers expect, what management perceives and what is delivered. It makes the organisational cause of breakdown explicit.
• Zomerdijk, L. G. and Voss, C. A. (2010). Service design for experience-centric services. Journal of Service Research. doi:10.1177/1094670509351960 They studied experience-centric service design and identified the practices that support the customer's experience, including the orchestration of cues and the management of the journey. It names what a blueprint is for: cuing and sequencing.