In Good Services, how to design services that work, Lou Downe effectively shifts the common focus of Service Design away from coming up with new things and innovation, towards making services function well (or at all) for users with real needs.
At first glance, Lou Dorne gives us – a very welcome – checklist with hygiene requirements that need to be fulfilled in order for a service to be a “good” service. But as the principles are presented one after the other, with excellent examples from the real world to clarify, it becomes something more. A way of shifting the conversation towards how we can make services more efficient at, for a lack of better words, serving humans.
Promoting the user perspective
Dorne consistently takes the users’ side against poorly designed services that do not put people’s needs first. In the process of explaining what and why this lack of user-centricity hurts both users and service providers. Throughout most of the book, the language, and tone not only caters to designers but is well suited for anyone that would like to understand how services interact with users and what can be done to improve these interactions.
Good Services, less explicitly, gives insight into one of the most value-creating and hopefully profitable activities that can be undertaken today as an entrepreneur. Find a corner of the vast fabric of services that people use that is under-digitalized and create seamless services that help people through the process without feeling that they are stuck in a Kafka-esque nightmare. A good service. Creating a successful startup around failed service points might be more challenging than I feel it would be when reading Good Services, but that is also not what the author is trying to achieve. Instead, Good Services conveys the common-sense solutions to service issues that make you think, “well of course a service should be inclusive, logical, and easy to find” without being trivializing or on the nose. It will surely be a guide often referenced by designers and companies trying to keep their services good.
A practical guide
Good Services is written with a very clear structure that furthers the books’ ability to function as a guide to diagnosing a service “goodness”. Each chapter goes over one design aspect and presents this as a statement. Then a short, three-sentence explanation of the statement before going into detail, deep-diving into the concepts with examples and all. Each concept is then summarized in a few bullet points. All in all the author has made a well-functioning guide to doing just what is advertised on the cover. Designing services that work.
That being said, if organizations can learn to use the principles of designing good services effectively, this would lead to a quality revolution in the service system, in which we as users and citizens try to get things done. If this book can serve as a conversation starter for this, no one is happier than me.
One issue I find with the book is that the author sometimes organizes the advice given as if they are the same order of importance and magnitude, while they can in fact be very different depending on what principle we are reading. Consider principle 1: Be easy to find, a hands-on text about how to make a service identifiable and findable for people. Then compare that to principle 12: Encourage the right behaviors from users and service providers. Which almost becomes a philosophical text about designers and service organizations’ responsibilities for the world we live in. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as both topics surely are worthwhile to discuss. However, for me, it makes it a bit difficult at times to organize the learnings from the book, demanding a lot more from the reader to make the principles applicable in real-world situations.
Final thoughts
All in all, this is a great book. I am already using it as reference material in my work and it is adding value for me as a Service Designer. Potentially Good Services could help organizations identify what can be done to make their services better.
What do you think? Have you read the book or are you thinking about it? I would love to hear your thoughts, so write a comment and let us discuss.
If you would like to buy Good Services, and I recommend that you do, you might consider using the affiliate link below. I get commissions for purchases made through links in this post.
Good Services: How to Design Services that Work
It is of course also available in many other bookstores off- and online.
If you have the time and would like to read more, check out my post, Design as a catalyst for innovation.