to fix the basics first.
I estimate that 95% of service design projects are about fixing the basics. The principles outlined in this book have the potential to act as a North Star, leading people to create good services and thereby a much better experience for users, customers, employees and citizens. But by establishing a baseline for ‘good’ services, we can also be much more efficient in the way that we work, and spend more of our time on the things that are unique to our services, rather than the things that aren’t.
This is not the first time we’ve tried to define what we mean by a ‘good’ service that works for users. In 1977 and 1980, Richard Oliver published the widely known ‘Expectation Confirmation Theory’. Summarised simply, it states that customer satisfaction is the result of a comparison of our expectations with our experience. If they match, we’re satisfied; if experience prevails over expectations we’re delighted; but if expectations outweigh experience, we’re dissatisfied. In 1984, Professor Noriaki Kano published the ‘Kano Model’, a theory for product development and customer satisfaction. It describes three main factors: basic factors (‘Must-be Quality’) that, similar to hygiene factors, do not contribute to satisfaction but cause dissatisfaction if missing; performance factors (‘One-dimensional Quality’) that can contribute to dissatisfaction when they’re missing, but also to satisfaction when they are implemented well; and excitement factors (‘Attractive Quality’) that only contribute to satisfaction, but don’t cause dissatisfaction when they’re missing.
Did you read the above paragraph? Or did you skip it when you read ‘academic literature’ and saw sources and academic concepts mentioned in the paragraph?
Often, academic research provides useful answers, but, unfortunately, it is not accessible enough in practice. My hope is that this book serves as a bridge between practical hands-on guidance on how to build a good service, and grounded principles that we can use to guide our industry.
I have no doubt that this book will become a must-read for the service design community, but this book is also for everyone working with services – consciously or unconsciously.
Talking about what makes good services is vital within the service design community, and will help us to further mature our practice, but these principles can help to leverage service design way beyond the service design community.
This book shouldn’t be seen as the ‘end’ of defining what makes good services, but rather as a starting point for a more educated discussion on this topic.
As Professor Richard Buchanan said in 2001: ‘One of the great strengths of design is that we have not settled on a single definition. Fields in which definition is now a settled matter tend to be lethargic, dying, or dead fields, where inquiry no longer provides challenges to what is accepted as truth.’ Thus, this book shouldn’t be seen as the ‘end’ of defining what makes good services, but rather as a starting point for a more educated discussion on this topic. It is a milestone defining how we see what makes good services now. This will change and evolve but, once we have a point of reference, we can build on this milestone and use it as a springboard to design better services and, over time, improve the principles and definitions of a good service.
What is a service?
This is a book about good services – what they are and how to design them.
It will tell you what a good service looks like, and what a bad one looks like too. It will give you advice on how to design, build and run services that work for your users, but before we can get to that, we must first define what we mean by a ‘service’.
Services are everywhere. From how we book our holidays, to how we save money and get access to healthcare. Ask someone on the street what a service is, however, or what it means to design one, and they will probably struggle to tell you.
For something so ubiquitous and fundamental to how we live our lives, it might seem strange that services are so rarely thought about, and so often misunderstood. Yet services exist in the background by their very nature. They are the things that connect other things, the spaces between things – such as choosing a new car and having it delivered or booking an appointment at your GP and being successfully treated. We barely notice them until we encounter something that stands out as good or bad.
For the organisations that provide them, services are often barely more visible than they are for users. They require multiple people, and sometimes multiple organisations to provide all of the steps that a user needs to complete to achieve their goal. Sometimes there are so many pieces to this puzzle, or they stretch across such a long period of time, that we struggle to see them as a whole.
And yet it’s services that are the interface to so much of our experience of the world. From having children, getting married, moving house and, ultimately, death, services facilitate some of the most important moments in our lives.
To understand what it means to design a good service, we must understand the definition of ‘service’.
There are much longer books than this one that have explained what services are in minute detail and, although a lot of those definitions are accurate, most are long, complicated and almost impossible to remember, let alone apply to the real world. What’s even more troubling about these definitions is that they often claim that services are ‘intangible’, making them sound almost as if they are too complex or nebulous to be designed.
But services aren’t complicated, and they don’t deserve the complicated explanations they’ve been given in the past.
A service is something that helps someone to do something
A service, simply put, is simply something that helps someone to do something. That ‘something’ can be short and straightforward, like buying a chocolate bar, or it can be long and in multiple parts, like moving house. What unites all services is that they help us to achieve a goal, however big or small it might be. The parts of a service might be provided by a number of different organisations but, to a user, a service is one continuous set of actions towards that end goal, regardless of who is providing it.
Services are often hugely affected by the channel in which they’re designed to be provided, and you can chart their evolution over time by the rise and fall of the technologies we use to access them. It’s therefore important to know a little bit about the history and evolution of services in order to understand how to design a good one for the world we live in now.
A (very) brief history of services
If services are things that help people to do things, then services have existed for as long as people have helped each other to do things.
Homeowners on byways have helped people to sleep safely on long journeys way before we had ‘hotels’, and certain religious organisations ‘looked after’ people’s money before anyone coined the term ‘banking’.
Services can be thought of in conjunction with ‘products’ – with the service being the things that exist around this product. For example, the service isn’t the hotel itself or the money in a bank, it’s the process of booking a hotel room, of opening a bank account or making a complaint.
How we access these things is affected by the technology we use at the time. Opening a bank account in the 1900s by written correspondence was very different than it is now, when the same function can be done