Continuing the theme of service design from my last post, I wanted to write a review of a very approachable, clear and insightful book that I have found particularly useful when communicating with non-designers - 'Good Services'.
Rewind to spring 2018, and designer Lou Downe tweets: ‘We talk about “what good looks like” in service design...but has anyone actually ever defined it?’ Cue fevered discussion on social media, a couple of blog posts and two years later we have ‘Good Services’: a book with a singular purpose - to clearly define the characteristics that successful services tend to have in common.
The book begins with a definition of services, which simply put, 'help someone to do something'. To qualify as 'good', the service must be good for the user (they do what they need it to do, in a way that works for them) good for the organisation providing them (profitable and easy to run) and good for society as a whole (a positive or at least non-destructive impact on our world). The third is perhaps the most commonly neglected or forgotten, but just as crucial as the others, as without sustainability, the service is ‘unlikely to be able to deliver long-term value' to the organisation or its users.
The rest of the book is then devoted to how we can design services that ‘join these three areas so that they work together’. This takes the form of 15 succinctly described principles which are as follows:
Be easy to find
Clearly explain the purpose of your service
Set the expectations the user has of your service
Enable each user to complete the outcome they set out to do
Work in a way that is familiar
Require no prior knowledge to use
Be agnostic of organisational structures
Require the minimum possible steps to complete
Be consistent throughout
Have no dead ends
Be usable by everyone, equally
Encourage the right behaviours from users and service providers
Respond to change quickly
Clearly explain why a decision has been made
Make it easy to get human assistance
Reflecting the spirit of principle 6, the author does a great job of describing each point in an accessible and easily understood way. But the book is also an entertaining read, with a wide range of interesting examples of services both good and bad provided. Analogies made with other industries are particularly illuminating, including how the play of a football team highlights the importance of consistency and having no ‘weak links’ (principle 9).
Some of the principles are ones that most designers are probably broadly familiar with, such as the need to clearly explain the purpose of a service (principle 2) and setting expectations in the right way (principle 5). However, there is a good deal of depth and nuance to each of the chapters, making a careful read of the book very worthwhile. For example, principle 8 is that a service should have as few steps as possible, but Downe goes far deeper than this: she discusses the crucial importance of the ‘spaces’ in between steps, as well as their ‘tempo’, in ensuring the user has the time to think about and make decisions when required. On reading this, I realised this is an aspect of services I have perhaps not considered enough in the past. I expect, most, even very experienced, designers could find some benefit from refreshing themselves via the crystal-clear framing of design principles in the book.
As a final point, the visual styling of the book has a bright boldness that reflects and reinforces the singular intent of the text, whilst also providing a sense of unity that helps it meet principle 9 - 'be consistent throughout'.
Handily too, the author makes a good deal of detail on each of the 15 principles available on her website: https://good.services/15-principles-of-good-service-design
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