Better user-developer communication in service development by collaborative physical modelling

Making the service use experience visible and facilitating the communication between the users and the provider organisation are persistent challenges. We present a proof of concept for utilising a physical modelling approach called collaborative physical modelling (CPM) to reveal the different stakeholder interpretations of a service and to extract these interpretations in a format that can be easily shared and compared, thus facilitating user-developer communication. To demonstrate the use of this method, CPM is used in three differing cases. Our proof of concept brings relief to managers who understand the need for involving users in the service development but who are constantly bound by limited resources. We encourage managers to take advantage of this low-cost, time-efficient and easy-to-adopt physical modelling approach before jumping into more complicated and resource-intensive methods.