Book: Service Design Principles 1–100

100 ideas to improve the user and customer experience in simple and practical ways.

What’s this book about?

The hypothesis of this handbook is that you don’t need to understand the full extent of Service Design to improve the user and customer experience. You don’t need to understand all the theory to create great services.

That’s why each principle in this handbook is summarized in a simple rule of thumb. These simple rules of thumb should be enough for smart readers. You might find, under each principle, a little story, an example, or a study. This additional content can help you turn this principle into action.

Buy the book

Get the Ebook and PDF version directly from Daniele.

Sorry, at the moment no more print version is available. I’m searching a new “print on demand” partner that treats his employees well enough for me to not feel guilty to work with them. So, I’m sorry that you can’t get a print version, but I’m happy I can look myself in the mirror and not be ashamed to participate in poor workers treatments.

Or watch it as an online course 🚀

For those who don’t like reading I’ve created a special version of this book in an online course format! The course is composed of 100 videos, exercices, quizzes and even a personal video coaching session 🎁.

So if you are a bit lazy, but want to get even further than this book, then check out the online course 🙂

Foreword

At the beginning of the 20th century, we were 1.6 billion humans on Earth. In 2000, we reached 6.1 billion. Today, we’re heading towards 8. We’ve built vast cities that interconnect megacities, gigantic airports, railway systems, global supply chains, the internet, the mobile economy, the social media platforms, and the blockchains. We’ve entered what Parag Khanna calls the connectographic era. Every day, these 8 billion people try to get things done by asking someone for it or by utilizing something that has been provided by someone else. This usually happens with the help of what is called a service.

Yet, for most of us, the very notion of service relates to frustrated customers, unpleasant experiences, and users rage-quitting or angrily confronting service providers.

In several cases, customers feel that services have their own realities. A bubble of rules and regulations, of processes and guidelines. How many times have we encountered the sorry excuse of “the system doesn’t allow me to do that”. Services are often orchestrated with bureaucratic mindsets that have poor to no meaning for the customers. Even worse, they are designed with a completely ideal imaginary customer in mind. Moreover, services too often reveal the caricature of organizational dysfunctions and management failures. What makes sense in the boardroom, on a PowerPoint, is often irrelevant and counterproductive for the end user on the frontline.

This global and busy complex world is often a mess. Work is hard and our bureaucratic legacy institutions are struggling to cope with massive changes amidst the chaos. The signages, urban mobility visual wayfinding systems, advertising, guidelines, logos, posters, notifications, alerts, and messages everywhere are all designed to help us, to guide us and to warn us. They all try to help us use services better. From right in the morning, as we turn off the alarm app, to the moment we put our mobile phones away to sleep, we are overwhelmed with information. It doesn’t stop. Not just the ads and the emails, but everything, all the time — the rich and constant flow of information flowing through our senses. If autistic people process everything they perceive around them as information, most of us don’t. We have built certain habits and mechanisms. Our brains have adapted to the situations around us. We have skills to surf this global tsunami of sensory information — nicely automated and active in the background of our brains, acting as our own private mental autopilot. Silently in the backstage, it filters and edits what matters and what doesn’t.

Today, designers have become experts at distinguishing the differences between what people say they do and what they actually do. As we’re often not aware of the decisions and trade-offs that our minds operate for us, interacting with services can quickly take a turn for the worse.

In this global context, helping your users, your customers get what they want requires a certain level of skills in hacking these autopilot routines or sometimes leveraging them.

This requires not only the ability to use well-known human patterns of behaviors but also knowing when to break them. This is the purpose of this book. A general body of knowledge aimed at doing just that.

For anybody working in the service industry, this will guide you through the simple adjustments and tweaks you can make that will ease both your services and your users’ experiences.

Daniele will help your services reach beyond the objective and transactional reality of business and trade. As an expert service designer, with this book, he proposes to anchor your services on a solid and deep underlying structure of psychologically meaningful axioms. However — and that is all the genius of the author — he does it in the most accessible and ready-to-use way.

Pascal Wicht, Founder,
Strategic Designer at Whispers & Giants

A spread when reading the ebook on an iPad

100 Service Design Principles that this book covers:

What Are the Basics of Service Design?

• Principle 001: The First Draft of Anything Is Shit.
• Principle 002: Selling Is Not the End, It’s the Start.
• Principle 003: Make It Easy for Customers to Come Back.
• Principle 004: Always Think About What Happens Before and After Your Service.
• Principle 005: Every Customer Mistake Is Your Mistake.
• Principle 006: It’s Your Fucking Job to Know What I Should Buy.

How Can You Make People Less Frustrated?

Error management

• Principle 007: Don’t Solve Every Problem You Are Asked to Solve.
• Principle 008: Do the Penis Test and Think About What Could Go Wrong.
• Principle 009: Let Users Undo Their Mistakes.
• Principle 010: Explain Why This Error Just Happened.
• Principle 011: Suggest Something After the Error.
• Principle 012: Stop Giving Coupons When You Failed.

Waiting

• Principle 013: Just Tell Me How Much Time I Have to Wait.
• Principle 014: Let Me Imagine the Waiting Time.
• Principle 015: The Length of the Line Is as Important as the Waiting Time.
• Principle 016: After an 8-Minute Wait, People Will Abandon.
• Principle 017: Tell Me as Soon as Possible That You Can’t Do Anything for Me.
• Principle 018: Phone Chargers Help People Wait in Peace.
• Principle 019: It’s Torture to Forbid People from Using Their Smartphone.
• Principle 020: Stupid Aquariums Make People Forget Time.

Pricing

• Principle 021: The Problem Is Not the Interface, It’s the Pricing.
• Principle 022: Show Me Your Damn Pricing.
• Principle 023: The Price Changes the Quality Without Any Other Change.

Impersonal services

• Principle 024: Just Remember Me.
• Principle 025: Ask Unnecessary Emotional Information.
• Principle 026: Making It Personal Is Different for Every Culture.
• Principle 027: Don’t Force Me to Call You.
• Principle 028: Don’t Create Groups of More Than 150 People.

Technology

• Principle 029: Tools Are Not the Problem but the Symptom.
• Principle 030: Making It Digital Won’t Make It Smarter.
• Principle 031: Scheduled Automation Is Stupid.
• Principle 032: A Bot Won’t Help Shape Your Culture.
• Principle 033: I Prefer Bots over Fake Humans.
• Principle 034: Let Me Speak with a Human.
• Principle 035: Why Can’t I Answer This Email?
• Principle 036: It’s Now Time to Websites That React to the Context.

Workplace

• Principle 037: To Improve Your Service, Start by Paying Your Employees Well.
• Principle 038: Make Your Employees Happy, They Will Be Better Service Providers.
• Principle 039: Work Can Wait.
• Principle 040: Your Open Space Is like Hell.
• Principle 041: Mistakes Are Worthy Only If You Share Them.
• Principle 042: Employees Should Check Their Emails Less Often.
• Principle 043: Put Some Stupid Plants to Make Your Workplace Better.
• Principle 044: You Need to Repeat a Behavior for 66 Days to Create a New Habit.

Naming

• Principle 045: Give Everything a Name.
• Principle 046: Stop Inventing Silly Names for Standard Stuff.
• Principle 047: Don’t Assume That I Know How to Spell Your Company Name.

Other Frustrations

• Principle 048: Your Opening Hours Don’t Make Any Sense.
• Principle 049: I Don’t Want to Schedule an Appointment When There Is Someone at the Counter!
• Principle 050: Choose the Proper Sound to Alert Your Users.
• Principle 051: Always Look for the People Who Accompany Your Users.
• Principle 052: Help Me Remember My Room or Parking Number.
• Principle 053: Send Customers to Your Competitors.
• Principle 054: Allow What Your Competitors Don’t.
• Principle 055: Frustrate Rude Customers.

How to Find out If You Make People Feel like Shit?

• Principle 056: Eat Your Own Shit.
• Principle 057: Use the “Honestly, Would You Do That?” Test.
• Principle 058: Be Ready to Get Slapped by Your Customers If You Ask Them Feedback.
• Principle 059: Great Ideas from Yesterday Might Suck Today.
• Principle 060: Test Your Service with Extreme Users Who Will Break Everything.
• Principle 061: Don’t Ask. Observe Behaviors.
• Principle 062: Don’t Ask for Feedback, Hunt for Feedback.
• Principle 063: Do Not Send Surveys to a Small Team.

How to Do Service Design Without a Budget for It?

Big Problems Don’t Need Big Solutions.

• Principle 064: Adding More Resources Won’t Always Solve the Problem.
• Principle 065: Forget Complex Technology, Just Use Some Stupid Paper.
• Principle 066: Save 2 Million with a Simple Checklist.
• Principle 067: Pets Can Help with Depression and Health.
• Principle 068: Reduce Cleaning Costs by Putting a Fly Sticker in the Urinal.
• Principle 069: Beauty Reduces Pain.
• Principle 070: A Good Sticker Can Reduce Thefts by 62%.
• Principle 071: Candies Make People Smarter.

Be Lazy and Don’t Reinvent the Wheel.

• Principle 072: Keep It Simple Stupid.
• Principle 073: When You Add This, Remove That.
• Principle 074: It’s Okay If Your Website Looks like Every Other Website.
• Principle 075: Don’t Build Custom Software for Your Business.
• Principle 076: Let Employees Use Their Own Apps
• Principle 077: Print in Black and White.

Don’t Solve the Problem, Fix the Perception.

• Principle 078: People Don’t Know That You Are Doing a Great Job.
• Principle 079: You Will Be Seen as a Better Service If You Do Only One Thing.
• Principle 080: Good Design Helps You Sell Things for Twice the Usual Price.
• Principle 081: One Wow Effect Is Enough.
• Principle 082: Do Small Updates and Sell Revolutions.
• Principle 083: A Swimsuit Can Make Your Event Different.

How to Use Psychology to Improve Your Service?

How to Build Trust?

• Principle 084: You Are a Liar, so Let Me Ask Other Customers.
• Principle 085: You Need 10 Reviews to Build Trust.
• Principle 086: Sharing Your Bias Builds Trust.
• Principle 087: Use the IKEA Effect to Make Your Users Proud.

How to Help People Change Behavior?

• Principle 088: Offer Less Choices to Improve Customer Experience.
• Principle 089: 90% of Your Website Content Is Useless.
• Principle 090: Focus on Smaller Short-Term Goals to Change Behaviors.
• Principle 091: To Get People to Act, Show the Losses Instead of the Wins.
• Principle 092: Reduce Missed Appointments with a Simple Stupid Sentence.
• Principle 093: Ask People to Name When and Where They Will Perform a New Habit.
• Principle 094: Don’t Motivate People with Money.
• Principle 095: 95% of People Stick to the Default Option.

How to Use Rhythm to Create Better Services?

• Principle 096: Under Promise, over Deliver.
• Principle 097: Start with the Boring Stuff Then Excite Me Little by Little.
• Principle 098: Always End a Service with a High Peak.
• Principle 099: Uncertainty Makes Users Safer.
• Principle 100: Friction Can Help People to Be Less Stupid.

ℹ️ Hey, by the way, if you are interested in Service Design, you might be interested in the Service Design Jobs website that lists more than 1200 service design job opportunities from more than 40 countries.