www.ijdesign.org

International Journal of Design Vol.5 No.2 2011

S. Clatworthy

Use Context 5: Touch-point Addition or Removal

This challenges today’s situation by removing important touch-

points. Based upon the touch-point mapping, the main touch-

point at each stage of the service journey is removed, and idea

generation is used to ﬁnd a better replacement. If it cannot be

replaced, then the team has gained a deeper understanding of the

touch-point’s importance and role. An alternative to this is to pick

a random card at each step of the service-journey and discuss

how it could be used to improve the service. We have added

some speciﬁc touch-points for this, such as "service integrated

into a product" or "smart phone". This can be a useful task in

many ways, particularly to help challenge today’s situation, which

might have deep historical roots and need updating.

Use Context 6: Forced Association to Create New

Services

In this task, participants are asked to select random cards (two

or more) picked from the pack and then to use them to design

a service based only on the cards. Forced association is an idea

generation technique to force you away from logical thinking.

Doing this with the touch-point cards forces the team to break

with pre-conceived understanding. It’s a fun and challenging

way to look at touch-points and often unearths useful reﬂections

regarding a service.

Evaluation of the Touch-point Cards

The evaluation of the touch-point cards employed multiple

methods. This included semi-structured interviews with selected

workshop participants, discussion sessions with workshop

participations,

questionnaire

developed

for

workshop

participants, and participative and non participative observation.

The questionnaires were ﬁlled out by workshop participants at

the conclusion of touch-point workshops in which the cards were

used.

Evaluation of the toolkit took place during 2010, the ﬁnal

year of the project. The toolkit has been utilised during ﬁve

workshops, each of a minimum three-hour duration. Participant

numbers in the workshops have varied from six people to 24

people. The evaluation data all relates to the ﬁnal version of the

touch-point cards.

The interview guide was informed by observation of several

workshops combined with the insights gained from the literature

review of touch-points in service innovation. The questionnaire

was a standard questionnaire developed for the evaluation of the

AT-ONE workshops by the project team. It consisted of open

questions requesting information about positive and negative

aspects of

the workshop itself, and multiple choice questions

related to the innovation potential of the workshop at a project

level. These questions were developed from literature regarding

innovation metrics in companies (Perrin, 2002; Brusoni, Prencipe,

& Salter, 1998; Andrew, Haanæs, Michael, Sirkin, Taylor, 2008).

Furthermore, the questionnaire and interview guide drew on

discussions within the projects cross-disciplinary validation team.

Participants at the workshops were primarily project

participants in commercial service innovation projects at the

fuzzy front end of a project in the telecom ﬁeld or within public

health services. Since these workshops have been at the fuzzy

front end of large innovation projects, the evaluation process has

not been able to follow the ideas and concepts from the workshops

through to market. However, a separate validation activity has

evaluated the effect that the AT-ONE workshops have had upon

participating organisations. This work is close to completion and

will be described in future articles.

The following section describes the evaluation of the cards

in relation to their intended function. Additionally, a ﬁnding is

described that relates to their tangibility and how the cards

afford cognitive and social support through cognitive-gestural

movement.

Assistance with Team Building in Cross

Functional Teams

Molin-Juustila (2006) discusses the ﬁve critical elements that

together create team cohesiveness during the fuzzy front end:

personality barriers, different cultural thought worlds, language

barriers, organisational responsibilities and physical barriers.

Similar elements are identiﬁed by Persson (2005) and Pei (2009).

Of these, the cards (used as part of collaborative workshops)

have had positive effects on four of these ﬁve elements. The ﬁfth,

physical barriers due to geographical location, is not addressed by

co-located workshops.

It is difﬁcult to distinguish between the role of the cards

themselves and the role of collaborative workshops in these

positive team building results. The cards assist with the reduction

of cultural thought worlds by giving a common context for

collaboration within a customer-centric service innovation

framework provided by the AT-ONE process. In terms of language

barriers, the toolkit establishes common terminology through

clearly deﬁned tasks. Additionally, the use of images on the cards,

together with clear texts makes understanding of card content

unambiguous. Organisational responsibilities are a speciﬁc focus

for one of the tools, such that organisational roles for touch-point

development are speciﬁcally identiﬁed.

Comments from participants support the relevance of the

cards for team building.

They were reported to be “very useful as

a common point of reference” and that the participants “quickly

developed a common understanding” and that “the use of visual

tools simpliﬁed the process and created a common understanding

in the group.”

Analysis and Mapping

The cards were found to be effective when it comes to their

ability to assist the analysis and mapping of existing situations.

They were seen to assist the holistic understanding of a service

by allowing a visual overview of all touch-points along the

whole customer journey. They also allow the team to focus

upon individual touch-points. This seems to be aided by the

combination of clear images and texts which allows them to be