Good Services. Lou Downe

cannot have a sequoia. It’s not the right kind of tree for your neighbourhood. Ok, well, I guess that’s on me. I knew I was being a jerk when I selected it. But it’s also on you, for having it on the list. Regardless, I probably knew I shouldn’t have asked for a sequoia. I went back to the list. I picked something else, I think it was an oak tree, because that sounded like a non-jerk choice. A week later: no, you cannot have an oak. I tried again. Cypress? (Possibly because I was listening to Cypress Hill.) Again, no. Wrong tree. Why couldn’t the city just tell me what kind of tree I could have? This went on for a while, until one day I came home to find the city had cemented over the whole thing, and some kid had written LORD SALAMANDER in the wet cement.

       I never got a tree.

       In this particular case, as much as I enjoyed my ugly tree, it wasn’t a catastrophic loss. It was annoying. But the same city that runs that online service also runs services for starting small businesses, getting married, jury duty, the municipal courts and law enforcement. And I guarantee you those are designed just as well. And that’s just the city stuff.

       Every day, all over the world, people go online to accomplish things. They’re signing up for stuff. They’re checking their finances. They’re getting tickets to something. They’re making medical appointments and, if they’re in the US, they’re checking to see whether their insurance company covers a procedure they need. They’re checking on their citizenship application status. They’re applying to schools and trying to see if they qualify for a loan so they can afford it.

       For the most part, no one wants to be doing these things. They’re not exciting. They’re tolls for existence. We want to get through them as quickly as possible so we can get back to the stuff we actually want to do. Sadly, using these services too often turns into a frustrating experience. Made all the more frustrating because you didn’t want to be doing it anyway.

       Here’s where we come in. If you’re reading this book, it’s probably because you have something to do with designing services of one sort or another. And I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume that you’re the type of person who cares about doing this right, because, duh, you’re reading a book about it. And you’re looking for help in doing the right thing. Well, I have good news for you. This book is going to help. I’ve read it! It’s well-written. It’s helpful. And it’s brilliant. And it’s written to help you help others do what they need.

       Lou Downe has been designing good services for quite a while. And they’re good at it! I can’t tell you how many times I got stuck trying to solve something and thought: ‘Well, let’s go see how GOV.UK solved it.’ I have no doubt that Lou is a good designer, because I’ve stolen their work more than once. But as much as Lou cares about design, I think they care about people even more. And that’s the secret. You’ve got to care more about the people on the other end of the screen than about what’s on the screen. You’ve got to help them get on with their day. So they can do the stuff that really matters to them.

       Some people say that good design is invisible. That when it’s done right you shouldn’t notice it. I say they’re looking in the wrong place. Turn around. Good design is very visible. It’s visible on the face of every person who’s ever used a well-designed service. The slightly raised eyebrow that says, ‘huh, I expected that to be a lot harder’, followed by a recognition that they just reclaimed some time to read a book, or play with their kid, or walk their dog – whatever it is they actually want to do. That’s good design. It’s pretty visible. You just need to know where to look.

       We don’t design for screens. We don’t design for organisations. We don’t design for shareholders. We design for people.

       I have no doubt that if Lou Downe had overseen the design of that local government website, I’d have a tree right now.

       Foreword Marc Stickdorn

       Think about all of the different services that you experienced today. Did you check your bank balance on the way to work? Get on a bus? Buy this book from your local bookshop?

       Think about the different parts of the services you experienced – the different channels you’ve used, and the different parts of an organisation you came in to contact with, without even knowing it.

       Now, think about who was responsible for creating the different parts of those services: the managers, software developers, marketers, sales representatives, customer support officers, lawyers, engineers, architects, accountants and, of course, designers.

       Think about how many of those people are working on changes that might have an effect on the service you’ve just used – the infrastructure building projects, changes to internal software, accounting processes or legal terms and conditions.

       All of these projects affect the experience that customers, users, employees and citizens have of our services; but how many of these things were designed intentionally, or with a knowledge of how they might affect a user’s experience? And how many of these were designed with a knowledge of what a good service looked like?

       The reality is: very few.

       Users don’t care who designed the services they use. They only care if services meet their needs, or at least match their expectations. In short: if they’re good.

       For many years, we’ve been discussing what service design is and how it works.

       Service design has been taught in design schools and practised since the mid-1990s, at places such as Köln International School of Design (KISD) and the first dedicated service design agencies, such as LiveWork and Engine.

       When I was teaching at one of these early service design courses in 2008 (at the MCI business school in Innsbruck, Austria) there were still no textbooks out there on this topic.

       Together with Jakob Schneider, we decided to simply write it ourselves. ‘This Is Service Design Thinking’ was published in 2011 and brought together 23 co-authors from the service design community.

       It was intended simply as a textbook to be used by students during courses, but the fact that it later became an international bestseller is testament to the massive growth of service design all over the world.

       When I look back at the 10 years since Jakob and I published our book, we’ve not just seen a huge growth in service design, but also a huge change in the way that it has developed.

       More and more education programmes, agencies and in-house teams have adopted service design, and a wave of acquisitions of service design agencies has finally proved how much business now values the activity of consciously designing services.

       In less than two decades, we’ve gone from discussions about how to raise awareness of the fact that services need to be actively designed, to how we scale that activity beyond the boundaries of service designers.

       In this new phase of service design, a discussion on what we’re aiming for when we design services is long overdue.

       ‘We talk about “what good looks like” in service design… but has anyone actually ever defined it?’ Lou tweeted this question on 20 March 2018. This led to numerous discussions, talks and a blog post that was widely shared in and beyond the service design community. Now, less than two years later, you can read what makes good services in this book.

       Service design is a team sport – and a definition of good services with common principles gives you and everyone else working on your service a common focus and goal. Here, however, we see competing