Touchpoints: The emotional and physical tangible moments of interacting with a service/experience eg. Touch-points can take many forms, from advertising to personal cards, web- mobile phone- and PC interfaces, bills, retail shops, call centres and customer representatives.
Experience Prototyping: An approach to prototyping that encourages us to think of interactions with product, space, service or system as integrated with the dynamic aspects of time and space, as they are actually experienced by people in their context, rather than one or more specific isolated artifacts. Traditional design prototyping tools like storyboards, scenarios, sketches, models, video, or on-screen simulations are able to communicate the elements that make up an experience and do this by inviting people to look-on rather than actually participate. Experience prototyping would involve activities such as role-playing, simulation sessions, (using appropriate props), and similar situations that are carefully-designed/or selected to highlight particular qualitative aspects of engagement with product, space, service or system.
Service Blueprints: Blueprints need to describe time in a service. This includes the sequence of events of a service experience, its durations and timings. A blueprint should graphically and narriatively describe this time element. A blueprint can be used by both business process managers, designers and software engineers during development, and can be used as a guide to service managers that operate services on a day-to-day basis.
Currently, the biggest challenges in blueprinting revolve around ways of depicting services in a holistic way, from elements of the branding and user experience on one hand to back-end technical and business processes on the other.
Ethnography: the scientific study of the customs of individuals or groups, as part of the discipline of anthropology. It attempts to put as much emphasis on intangibles, such as aesthetics and emotion, as on so called hard data.
Heuristics: the use of experience based techniques, such as “trial and error”, for problem solving, learning and discovery
Links to service design definitions and methodologies: some are just common sense
Guardian Service Design article: Jargon Buster
