Desktop walkthrough is a well-known service design technique: a miniature environment is developed to simulate the experience on a small scale, for example with toy figurines, cardboard or Lego bricks. The purpose is to have a mock-up simulation of the user experience for co-designing and testing a service and different scenarios.
The relevant output is not the model of the map but the experience of simulating the service experience step by step. The desktop walkthrough helps to make tangible the experiential process of a service. Desktop walkthroughs allow service concepts to be iterated at a much faster pace. New ideas can be instantly identified, tried, and tested. The service concepts get refined quickly.
This method is suitable to be used with citizens and other stakeholders, to have feedback or co-design the service experience. It can be applied to any field and it seems particularly useful to design and test innovative service concepts, for instance when a city is planning a new service for car sharing or circular economy such as re-using or recycling. The path to climate neutrality will require behavioral changes: as it is difficult to predict people's behavior for novel services, the Desktop Walkthrough method supports designing user-centered services.
Name of Method
Brief description
Type/Level of Method
Challenges
Predict people's behavior when interacting with a new service
Problem, Purpose and Needs
This method allows to simulate the experience of customers or users. It’s usually used to explore service experiences and allows a team to get a shared understanding of the step-by-step customer journey and any potential critical moments.
Relevance to Climate Neutrality
Challenges
Thematic Areas
Impact Goals
Issue Complexity
Issue Polarisation
Enabling Condition
Essential Considerations for Commissioning Authorities
This method requires at least basic knowledge of group facilitation since it is possible to add new personas during the activity. It requires that the person facilitation has the ability to feel and see the need and act on the right time intervening in the group.
Engagement Journey
Governance Models and Approaches
Enabling Conditions
Democratic Purpose
Spectrum of participation
Communication Channels
Actors and Stakeholder Relationships
Conducting a desktop walkthrough does not require developing relationships with stakeholders, but the method can be used to think and design new services and improve the relationship between actors and stakeholders.
Participant Numbers
Actors and Stakeholders
Participant Recruitment
Interaction between participants
Format
Social Innovation Development Stage
Scope
Time commitment
Anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours depending on what kind of material you will use (if it is LEGO, sticky notes, etc.) and how many groups you will facilitate.
For the activity itself: 1 to 2 hours
Resources and Investments
Typical duration
Resources and Investments
In-house
Step by Step
Preparation
1.Review scope and clarify prototyping questions: Start by reflection on what your group want to achieve with this activity:
What is your scope?
What do you want to learn from this prototyping activity?
Do you want to test the whole experience or just a part? What are the aspects and details you want to test for later?
Who you want or need to involve in this walkthrough? Is it just for within the project team, or are you planning to involve potential users or other stakeholders?
2.Prepare workspace and materials:
Pick up the desktop walkthrough materials and a flipchart paper. Set up the paper on a table. Make sure that the table is not too big so everybody can stand around it and contribute at the same time.
3.Brainstorm an initial journey draft:
Select a customer or persona and do a brief brainstorm in the group: looking at your new service concept, what are possible steps in the customer journey?
Sort your sticky notes in chronological order. Do just enough to get a first draft of what the journey could look like.
4.Create maps and stages:
Based on the initial journey, what locations are important? Start by creating a big overview map that contains all the relevant locations of the service experience. Then, decide if and where you need to zoom in on certain locations for some part of the service. If necessary, create a detailed stage plan for each of these locations.
5.Create roles, set, and props:
Which roles need to be cast?
What needs to be built?
Pick a figurine for each of the roles/key stakeholders in your service and quickly build the essential set and props, using paper, cardboard, plasticine, or LEGO bricks to set the stage.
6.Set up roles: Find your actors
Who is going to play which role? Also, it can be helpful to assign someone to keep track of the bugs, insights, and ideas queue during the walkthrough.
Research
1.The first walkthrough:
Who or what must move at each step in the journey?
Does everything fit together?
Put all the actors and props onto their starting positions and, loosely following the events from your journey draft, play through the service from beginning to end. Move your figures around on the map/stages. Act out all necessary dialogue and do all the interactions with other actors, devices, and so on.
2.Keep a list of bugs, insights, and ideas:
After each run-through, take a few moments to reflect with your group: what worked? what didn’t work? what you would like to change or try next?
Document the results on a flipchart with insights, bugs, new ideas and questions.
3.Decide on the next variation and iterate:
Check off the idea that has just been simulated and, in your team, quickly decide (show of hands, simple majority) which of the still open changes and ideas you want to try next. Then go again. If you think that last walkthrough was a real cracker, create a quick, less than 60-second video pitch of the walkthrough to capture it for later. Stop iterating either when the set time for your workshop is up or when the group have hit a roadblock that requires them to switch to other core activities next – for example, doing some more research or more intensive ideation.
4.Document:
Document and finalize your work. Use customer journey maps, photo storyboards, or videos to document the latest version(s) of the service experience from your walkthroughs.
Briefly reflect on your documentation flipchart and identify the critical steps in this journey, other key elements, as well as problem areas or questions that need to be addressed in the next steps in the design process.
5.Present (optional):
Using a storytelling approach, present your last iteration and key learnings to other stakeholders and gather feedback. It is often useful to also capture the presentation and the final feedback rounds on video and add them to your documentation
Evaluation
This method doesn’t have a specific form of evaluation, since it is qualitative and subjective. However, a good idea is to schedule a meeting after a period to see which changes were put into practice.
Connecting Methods
Flexibility and Adaptability
This model works with small groups only (from 3 to 6 people) it is important that everyone in the group have a voice and explain the changes they are making in the prototype one by one, so you can track (and document, if that is the case) all the ideas, suggestions and discussions. Also, since the whole model is based on the idea of having physical material and pieces to play, ideally it is done in a venue, not online.
Existing Guidelines and Best Practice
Observers: if you have more participants than 6 in each group, one idea is to add a participant that will only observe the activity. The idea here is that this person will be watching out for bias of active players. The observer can also have an independent view of the process and give feedback to the team at the end of the activity.
Flow: this activity can easily trigger deeper discussions that are not necessarily connected to the theme or topic. Always encourage the group to simulate in the model what they are talking about instead of doing randomly different versions of the service they are working on.
Teleporting: watch out for pieces and sticky notes moving from one place to the other. Since it is a journey always keep asking the question: how did this ended up there?
Bugs: if you realize that the group is stuck on a bug, ask them to take a step back, do a quick brainstorming session to think about solutions and then go back to the activity.
Judge or director: if you realize that the group is having too much trouble in making decisions or is trying to do a lot of things at once, nominate a judge or director. The idea here is not that this person will decide everything together, but will help the group organize thoughts, make sure that everyone has their turn to talk and document the changes that are already agreed on.
References and Further Resources
Low Threshold Service Design: Desktop Walkthrough by Johan Blomkvist, Annita Fjuk, Vasilisa Sayapina (https://ep.liu.se/ecp/125/013/ecp16125013.pdf )