This Is Service Design Methods

Chapter 1. Research Methods

Methods to move beyond assumptions

1. Methods of data collection

2. Desk research Preparatory research

3. Secondary research

4. Self-ethnographic approaches Autoethnography

5. Online ethnography

6. Participant approaches Participant observation

7. Contextual interviews

8. In-depth interviews

9. Focus groups

10. Extra Interview guidelines

11. Non-participant approaches Non-participant observation

12. Mobile ethnography

13. Cultural probes

14. Extra Co-creative workshops

15. Co-creative workshops Co-creating personas

16. Co-creating journey maps

17. Co-creating system maps

18. Methods of data visualization, synthesis, and analysis Building a research wall

19. Creating personas

20. Mapping journeys

21. Mapping systems

22. Developing key insights

23. Generating jobs-to-be-done insights

24. Writing user stories

25. Compiling research reports

This section provides a wide selection of potential research methods to collect data and to visualize, synthesize, and analyze the collected data. This is just a brief overview; many more methods exist, and often the same method has several inconsistent names. We can only give a very brief introduction for each method, but if you want to dig deeper, there is plenty of literature (and for some methods, even whole books) with detailed descriptions and examples.

Methods of data collection

There are a huge variety of research methods you can use to collect meaningful data in service design. We sometimes use quantitative methods like surveys (offline and online), any form of automated statistics (e.g., conversion ...