IDL's Chris Kurjan was invited to help reshape the service environment of an American maternity hospital. The main observation that Kurjan's team made in their "empathetic journey" through a families' experience of a maternity hospital was the unsatisfactory nature of leaving the hospital.

"First the mother and father could be leaving without any formal process ending this important part of their lives, but it could equally be they were about to leave when suddenly they are pulled back and given all kinds of important, vital information at the last minute, on top of which they could be waiting to see this person and that," says Kurjan.

The impact of this experience was to undermine the family's overall experience of maternity care. A lot of damage can be done in a short space of time. The UK design company Engine reports that over 80 per cent of people report bad experiences when encountering organisations.

The logic of service innovation is, if an organisation gets it right, hard for competitors to copy. In the case of maternity services customer dissatisfaction can have long-term effects on parent's quality of life, but also on their ability to assimilate information that's important for their child in the vital first few weeks.

Kurjan spent two weeks gathering this kind of user experience information prior to organising to take staff through the journey themselves to build empathy with the family's experience. They also has a series of sessions with 30 key people, generating ideas on how things might be done differently. From these ideas they began to prototype solutions. But prototypes in services are difficult to build.

"So perhaps the way to do it is through role-play," she says. "Or it's possible, for example, to set up a kiosk or create a mock-up brochure." Both would improve the maternity unit's way of handling families about to leave. Kurjan and the hospital staff came up with a number of paper-based prototypes (see picture).

In fact in this case the best prototype turned out to be a communications kiosk that could be used to provide information for families during their last day in the hospital.

The haphazard and ad hoc communication of vital information, depending on the availability of midwives and consultants, became more formalised and had a set location and process. The kiosk works because IDL's Kurjan helped the staff to understand the patient's journey and the disorientating effect of leaving such an important and significant event without ceremony and yet leaving also with information presenting in confusing ways.

It's vital, she says, to "understand the most significant experience for the user". And to do that service companies need to do the customer journey.

Does it not though involve what appears a to be a luxury cost: several days of consultancy time and staff time when health services are under-resources? "It's less time consuming than putting the wrong service up there," says Kurjan.