Quiet:  The Power of Introverts (everyone likes a book about power, right?). Thumbs up. Good read.

Or you’re told that you’re “in your head too much,” a phrase that’s often deployed against the quiet and cerebral. Of course, there’s another word for such people: thinkers.

it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly.

Service Design: From Insight to Implementation

Tough read, but in the end very insightful and valuable in thinking about expanding the concept of a journey map. I felt the most interesting examples at the end of the book were about public service design. There is definitely a phase where the design of services overlaps with public policy and politics in general. Think of dark patterns in user experience and the design of services that purposefully extract money from a population. Health care is of course the ultimate service (that is best experiences when it’s not used, e.g. you’re healthy).

A useful way of thinking about people’s roles in services is to think of every exit “off stage” as an entrance somewhere else. This is particularly true in situations in which the staff involved in delivering the service are service users and service providers at the same time.

Do people understand the service—what the new service is or does? Do people see the value of the service in their life? Do people understand how to use it? Which touchpoints are central to providing the service? Are the visual elements of the service working? Does the language and terminology work? Which ideas do the experience prototype testers have for improvement?

typical service blueprint template, with the phases of the customer journey along the top (here it’s Aware, Join, Use, Develop, Leave) and the various touchpoint channels in rows underneath, including the backstage activities at the bottom. A couple of touchpoints have been filled in as examples.

Some examples of Service Design Blueprints.

Currently reading: Radical Candor