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Introduction to Service Design, 3 Sessions - 6/24, 7/8, 7/15

Event Details:

Wednesday, June 24, 2026
9:00am - 12:00pm PDT

This event is open to:

Faculty/Staff
Staff - Academic
Staff - Managers
Staff

Register via STARS.

Course overview: At Stanford, we all provide many services to our community of students, faculty, and staff. Service Design is a human-centered design approach to creating good service experiences.        In this training, you will learn the core concepts and methods of Service Design through an interactive, hands-on course.

Format: - The course is offered over Zoom, and consists of three, 3-hour sessions (9 hours of teaching time total), spread over three weeks. - Individuals or teams can participate, and will be choosing a real-life service from their work to use throughout the course.

Topics covered: Session 1 - An introduction to Service Design (Lecture) - Know your users (Build empathy by creating Personas) - User interviews (Participants plan for user interviews)

Homework between session 1 and 2: Interview your users

Session 2 - Journey Mapping (participants create journey maps from interviews) - Service Blueprinting (participants map the backstage processes, systems, and people involved in delivering the service)

Session 3 - Harvesting Opportunities (participants identify opportunity areas for service improvement) - Ideation (Participants brainstorm using "How might we" statements, and evaluate ideas using a 2x2 framework to prioritize) - Action Planning (students create action plans to move forward with their ideas for improvement)

Who it's for: This class can benefit people in many roles, including but not at all limited to: - Service managers/owners, product managers/owners - Staff delivering front-line service to their constituents - Staff who are part of service delivery (developers, managers, individual contributors)

Prerequisites: None

Questions: Please submit any questions about the class here.

Format: Three (3) 3-hour sessions - June 24, July 8, July 15

Course fee: $300

This class is facilitated by the Stanford Improvement, Analytics, and Innovation Services team. You can learn more about them here: https://improvement.stanford.edu/

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