Hi, I am Jan ↑
On the photo right is my boxer dog Garry →

Garry accompanies me very often and with this muralized motto perfectly characterises us when literally staying outside the box. I find it necessary for fresh ideas and fun times together.

I am Service Designer in my profession with deep knowledge of Customer Experience, Customer Service & Callcenters, Customer Retention. Actually, I am a Service Design university student too, to keep in the loop of this changing field of expertise across industries.

Find out more also in my professional portfolio with curated use cases and projects: www.staycurious.space

My studies, my path
to the excellence

Information Services Design at Masaryk University (MUNI) is a very new and unique distance program allowing full education and work at the same time. You may find it interesting that MUNI just celebrate 105th anniversary and is ranked between 500 top universities globally. 

I started my studies in fall 2023. I am happy to broaden my horizons, leaded by great professors and to know fellow students with interesting experiences and desire to learn and cooperate. I feel those are great basics for further development and by the way this is my very first university studies, I enjoy it :) 

Entrance Exams (Spring 2023)

I was thinking about studying a longer time before but no suitable study programs matching my needs within Customer Experience expertise were available. Also I needed to encourage by my manager at work by his example - he used perfectly service design work and I made him a workshops support and learned it by doing. I send finally my motivation letter and my list of experiences to the university. I was chosen to online assessment for the second round and I realise what interesting personalities are there with me. Most of them are my actual fellow students :) Our class is made by 28 of students.

First semester reflection (Fall 2023)

Study program is very well prepared from the beginning - students have all information accessible online in native university information system - documents are sorted by study courses and contains scripts, sources from books, learning videos and online recordings from the bi-weekly Fridays online synchronous sessions focusing on various topics. We also use Teams to communicate together and to get all actual information from our lecturers. It is super useful and helps navigate us through the study duties.

School year is organised into two semesters containing online lessons and possibility to join personally a Hackathon project. Semester is finished by exams, tests and colloquiums (working and reflecting prepared work in groups). All of those activities are focused on both practical and academia work. I feel very grateful for the possibility for the interactions within a class as interviewing and team workshops and consultancies with the lecturers.

We learn about Service Design from basics e.g. what parameters has Good Services to use different methods practically during design challenge and hackathon. There is also couple of unusual programs as Virtual Reality -theory and practice (university provide us by VR headsets for one year!), Introduction to psychology for designers and Sensitivity to the important issues of today. For all of the eight compulsory programs during a first semester I value interconnection and positive approach by everyone from our class.

On the beginning of the semester we prepared by ourselves and we can continuously update our goals during our studies. It is one of the activity which truly powered me to keep learning, to keep going, show me the direction and milestones. This is crucial for the distance learning, btw. great idea. One of the output regarding my goals is to keep better time management. It helped me to connect with my fellow students on Linkend and inspire by their student portfolios or study outputs for the colloquium. I liked socializing during our online meetings and during Hackathon as well. I understand better now their expertize and approach and it is very enriching and valuable for me and it encourages me to move forward. My goal is to understand what we do and practice and I can say after the first semester that the work was done successfuly :)

Second semester reflection (Spring 2024)

Cooperation over competition - that is how I feel a swing during second semester on Service Design studies. Advantageous level of learning began just after first semester exams ended. Focus was mainly on research methods and practical use, we newly get familiar with Inclusive design which is really new and this expertise has just few of professionals here in the Czech and Slovak Republic. Data for Design Service was my favourite class. I was surprised what I still do not know or use in the field of data analysis and visualisation. Open data sources, advanced work with MS Excel, Data scrapping, Datawrapper application for professional visualisation, this all was mindblowing experience. Thanks to extra time and feedbacks to our work from Gabriela Godišková, studying how to work with data was exceptional. I also appreciate English course and final presentation in person of my favourite Customer Experience topic :) 

Extra classes for Virtual Reality opened my first semester first experience to higher level of knowledge. I also went voluntarly to the VR presentation of the Charles University project of team game with task on International Space Station used for HR department purposes of one of international company.

I really enjoyed extra class for attending conference - I choosed Zlin Design Week and spend there 5 unforgetable days full of inspiration, presentation and discussion with students of Zlin University and my two classmates who joined the event with me.

Third semester reflection (Autumn 2024)

Going into the detail, more research work with interaction design principles, customer journeys mapping as well as creating immersive spaces in VR it is 3rd semester of Service Design studies. Additionaly we got a great learning insights for digital accessibility and inclusion. I grab for the opportunity tutoring of one online session for Customer Journey mapping, share my work experience, prepare presentation with theory as well. This semester started mentoring program with possibility to meet with mentees, share and lead them in the field of expertise - I will definitely start following semester.

Anyway during the 3rd semester I have learned at least two dozens new software solutions from AI, Customer Journey Mapping, Designing protoypes and add dozen of international LinkedIn channels specialized for Service Design and connect with great experts in this field. I am grateful for that interactions and I am looking forward for more.

Fourth semester reflection (Spring 2025)

Team cooperation within study projects was a focus during the fourth semester. I was happy to meet stable group of classmates for the main compulsory courses and we did a lot of work together. Especially for Project management where ve excelled with a large project - defining Children theater international festival for city of Brno. It could easily serve as a model for a real theater event for the whole summer holidays!
Other task we succesfully finished was Theory and experiments in information behavior and behavioral design. It was real usecase project to achieve better conversions and results for webpages of small family business. We did it by A/B testing and learned how to serve Facebook campaigns and change visitors into real customers of the online course. 

Top moments during the fourth semester was for me the chance to provide two sessions for my classmates and introduce them into Customer Experience and its metrics. Both theoreticaly and practicaly. This had a great impact and I provided later two individual sessions which helps to my classmates work with CX with higher efficiency and positive impact to end users.