Hey Daniele! If I do all this, it might take me a shit load of time! Don't be scared; the final bonus principle is here to save you from this danger:

If you have more than ten blocks per stage, you are overdoing it

For each of the four big moments, I recommend that you don't have more than ten blocks (outside of the summary of the stage and the emotional level). If you have more than ten, your service blueprint might be so detailed that other people will never go through it as it will feel too much work.

Many studies tend to show that we can't keep more than 4-5 elements in our memory. So ten blocks is already a lot. 

The idea here is that by forcing yourself to a certain number of blocks per stage, you have to decide what information is strategic and essential for others, and which one is not. Sometimes being lazy makes us smarter too 😉

Make it large, not tall

Yeah, but ten blocks is really not enough! This can happen for complex services. If this is the case, I recommend that instead of adding more blocks in the same stage, you split that stage into two ones. This makes it possible to have for each stage, not too much information.

I recommend that if you want to add a lot of information, which you should do carefully, you build a template that isn't tall but rather large. 

Use progressive summarization

From my coaching sessions with service design students, I have learned one thing: there are some people for whom it's tough to summarize information, and they need to add every little tiny detail.

If you are like this, don't fight it but embrace it with progressive summarization. Here what you should do in such a situation:

  1. Build your service blueprint with all the details that you want
  2. Duplicate your blueprint and rename it to something like: "progressive summarization 1."
  3. If, for example, you have in total 100 blocks in your blueprint, your goal is now to summarize these 200 blocks in 190 blocks.
  4. Once you have done this, duplicate the blueprint again and do another run of summarization.
  5. Repeat this until you arrive at a blueprint that feels way too summarized.

Know you have multiple levels of details for the same service blueprint. You can now decide which are the two versions of the service blueprint that you will keep. What is the version with a lot of details that you'll keep for yourself to feel that you have all the data? And which one is the version of the blueprint that you'll save and share with others because it's a good enough summary of what you want to show?

This progressive summarization tip is really for people who have a hard time losing details. If you are not like that, you can make your service blueprint simple from the start.