Abstract

Services are getting increasingly complex and extensive. Rapid growth in digitization, increased focus on customer satisfaction, continuous demand for innovation, and diverse views coming from multidisciplinary stakeholders are making service design a challenging endeavor. With its focus on human-centric and holistic approaches, service design is largely adopted by organizations for designing desirable and useful service concepts. A major final step in the service design process is service prototyping which helps to communicate the proposed service concepts. Each prototype has a specific intention with which it is created. The way service prototype is effectively and efficiently communicating the intents and meeting the stakeholder’s expectations is a crucial phase in the service design life cycle. The process of service prototyping becomes even more challenging considering the required time, effort, and resources. Generally, these multi-user activities within a service span across multiple encounters which adds to the complexity of prototyping. To address these concerns, various characteristics of a service prototype were identified, while exploring their relevance based on the service intent, context, and audience to develop the service prototyping framework. In this paper, we reflect on the challenges faced in two aspects of communication in service prototyping—challenges related to communication within the organization during the creation of the service prototype and challenges faced in communicating the prototype to stakeholders. We followed the methodology of “plan (research activities)–act (as planned)–observe (during activities)–reflect (on the observations)–refine and repeat” during several corporate projects we undertook in the past to arrive at service prototyping framework.