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Service design and systems thinking glossary
46 terms from R02, Service design and systems thinking — 22 defined in the guide itself and 24 more from the field around it. Every term the guide teaches links to the slide that teaches it.
R02 · Why build
Service design and systems thinking
What does the whole experience look like, beyond our screen?
Every term below is defined in the words of service design and systems thinking, guide R02 of craft guides for educational technologists, and opens the guide at the slide where it is taught. 24 of the 46 are the field’s vocabulary rather than the guide’s own: words a reader will meet around this subject, defined here because the guide assumes them. 3 terms are also defined by another guide in the series; where the two differ, both wordings are given. The whole craft glossary holds all of them together.
| Term | Definition | Referred to in | Read further |
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| A | |||
| Administrative burden | The learning, compliance and psychological costs a system imposes on the people it deals with (Herd & Moynihan, 2018). |
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| Alignment diagram | A picture, such as a journey map, service blueprint, experience map or ecosystem model, that helps an organisation see the user's experience alongside its own work (Kalbach, 2020). |
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| Assisted digital | Support given to people who cannot use an online service unaided, by phone, in person or through someone acting for them, so that they still get the same result. |
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| B | |||
| Backstage | Work that supports a service but that the user does not see. |
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| Balancing loop | A feedback loop that works against change and pulls a system back towards a goal or limit, as a thermostat does. |
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| C | |||
| Causal loop diagram | A diagram of the variables in a system joined by arrows marked to show whether each one pushes the next up or down, used to find its feedback loops. |
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| Channel | A medium through which a user deals with a service, such as a website, an app, a phone line, a letter or a school office counter. |
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| D | |||
| Desktop walkthrough | A service prototype in which a team acts out a journey on a tabletop with small figures and a simple map, to find gaps before anything is built. |
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| E | |||
| Ecosystem map | A picture of every person, organisation, system and rule around a user's task. |
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| End-to-end service | A service considered from the moment a user first has a need to the moment it is fully met, across every channel and organisation involved, not only the part one team owns. |
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| F | |||
| Failure demand | Demand on a service caused by a failure to do something, or to do it right, for the user (Seddon, 2003). |
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| Feedback loop | A route by which the effects of an action return to influence the next action. |
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| Frontstage | Work and touchpoints the user sees directly. |
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| J | |||
| Journey map | A picture of what one person does, thinks and feels while completing a task. R06 A picture of the process a person goes through to reach a goal (Gibbons, 2018). |
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| L | |||
| Leverage point | A place in a system where a small change can produce a large effect (Meadows, 1999). |
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| Line of interaction | The line on a service blueprint that separates what the user does from what frontstage staff or systems do. Every crossing of it is a touchpoint. |
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| Line of internal interaction | The line on a service blueprint that separates backstage staff, who deal with the user's case, from the support processes and systems they rely on. |
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| Line of visibility | The line on a blueprint that separates what the user sees from what they don't. | ||
| M | |||
| Mental model | A person's internal picture of how something works, which shapes what they notice and what they do, whether or not it is accurate. |
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| Moment of truth | A point of contact at which a user forms a lasting judgement of the whole service, such as a first login or a results day. |
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| P | |||
| Physical evidence | The tangible things a user meets at each step of a service, such as a letter, a screen, a form or a room. It forms the top row of a service blueprint. |
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| Policy resistance | The tendency for interventions to be defeated by the system's response to them (Sterman, 2006). |
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| Pushed-down work | Effort a change moves onto people further down the line, usually in schools. | ||
| R | |||
| Reinforcing loop | A feedback loop in which a change feeds back to produce more change in the same direction, giving growth or collapse that speeds up. |
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| Rich picture | A free-hand drawing of a problem situation showing its people, relationships, conflicts and concerns, made to share understanding before any formal model is drawn. |
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| S | |||
| Service | Everything that has to happen for a user to get what they came for, across people, rules and systems. |
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| Service blueprint | A diagram that lines up user actions with the frontstage, backstage and supporting work behind them. |
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| Service design | The work of making the whole service visible, its people, rules, handovers and other systems as well as screens, and of treating rules, forms and deadlines as design material. |
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| Service safari | A research exercise in which team members use a service themselves, as its customers would, and record what they meet along the way. |
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| Service-dominant logic | The view that all economic exchange is an exchange of service, that goods are only a means of delivering it, and that value is created jointly with the user in use. |
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| Servicescape | The physical setting in which a service is delivered, including its layout, signs and atmosphere, considered for its effect on users and staff. |
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| Shifting the burden | A pattern in which easy fixes relieve symptoms and weaken the fundamental solution (Senge, 1990). |
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| Sludge | Friction in a process, such as needless forms, waiting or repeated proof, that makes it harder for people to get something they want or are entitled to. |
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| Sociotechnical system | A system in which people, their working arrangements and their technology depend on one another, so that changing the technology alone changes the work in ways nobody planned. |
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| Soft systems methodology | An approach to messy organisational problems in which the people involved build and compare models of the purposeful activity each of them sees, to agree changes all can accept. |
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| Stakeholder map | A diagram of the people and organisations involved in or affected by a service, arranged to show their relationships to one another and to the user. |
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| Stock and flow | A stock is a quantity that builds up or drains over time, such as unmarked scripts; flows are the rates that fill and empty it. Stocks change only through their flows. |
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| Street-level bureaucrat | A frontline public worker whose discretion shapes what policy becomes in practice (Lipsky, 2010). |
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| Swimlane diagram | A process diagram divided into parallel lanes, one for each person, team or system, so that every step shows who does it and every handover shows as a crossing. |
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| System archetype | A recurring structure of feedback loops that produces the same problem behaviour in many settings, such as fixes that fail or limits to growth. |
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| Systems thinking | A way of explaining why changing one part of a service so often produces effects somewhere else, and why a well-meant change can make the problem it targets worse. |
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| T | |||
| Touchpoint | Any moment where a user meets the service: a screen, a form, a message or a person. |
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| Tragedy of the commons | The pattern in which people each acting sensibly for themselves overuse a shared resource, such as teachers' time, until it is degraded for everyone. |
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| U | |||
| Unanticipated consequences | Effects of a purposive action that nobody planned, as when people inside a system adapt to a change and their adaptations cancel it out (Merton, 1936). | ||
| V | |||
| Value demand | Demand that a service exists to meet, as distinct from the failure demand it creates by getting something wrong (Seddon, 2003). |
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| W | |||
| Wicked problem | A problem with no single owner, no agreed definition and no clear stopping point (Rittel & Webber, 1973). R03 A problem whose formulation is itself the problem, with no single owner or stopping point (Rittel & Webber, 1973). |
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