Desktop walkthroughs

What it is

Acting out ideas for service interactions at a lego level! Desktop walkthroughs are very simple exercises in imagining a service experience using small, hand sized toys. A typical desktop walkthrough involves a customer, a member of staff, an environment and some paper touch points. You literally walk through the service moment, taking pictures and ideally with another person, imagining what the various actors are doing, saying and feeling. It can be useful to run the walk through using various different personas, and under different imagined situations.

What about the kids?

What you get

A better understanding of the choreography of the service elements, and insight into any inpractical or illogical ideas and moments. If you’ve been using different types of customers and contexts, you’ll also emerge from the desktop walkthrough session with additional insight into specific needs, and hopefully a little more empathy to you plastic friends. You also get lots of cute photos of the service moments you can use in storyboards or other activities later.

When to use it

Use desktop walkthroughs to check your thinking when designing complex service choreography, or when different people will have very different experiences of the same environment, as well as to inject a bit of fun and 3D focus to otherwise quite flat (i.e paper or screen based) design thinking.