The Service Design Curse

Hey there 👋

In this week’s newsletter, I want to explore this idea with you:

Learning Service Design is a curse.

The changelog

As usual, you’ll find the changelog of all the Service Design content I’ve worked on in the last weeks. I’ve:

• created new drafts for the 100 next Service Design Principles that will be in my next book.
• made notes about 3 new Service Design Q&A and updated 3.
• wrote 1 new behind-the-scenes blog post.

Greetings from Switzerland,
Daniele 🧔🏻‍♂️

The curse of Service Design

I’m 18 years old, and I’m a fresh student in an Art School, learning a lot about graphic design. I’m so excited that I share a lot of what I learn with my girlfriend. After a few months of dating me, she tells me:

Before I knew you, I never noticed all the ugly stuff that’s around us.

She explains that because now she understands how things are made, she notices more of the good design around her but also more of the pretty shitty design around her.

Now let’s move a few years later. I’m now married to that lovely girlfriend, and I’m publishing the second book in the Service Design Principles series. I notice one comment in a book review that I find intriguing: Maaria Tiensevu says:

It’s something that might make your life hell if, before reading it you haven’t been observing services with this mindset. You’ll start noticing the small decisions made around you, and you might find yourself sending more detailed feedback after starting to embody the mindset.

There is again this idea of blessing and curse. Now let’s jump even a few later after that moment. We’re in 2022, and I’ve asked many of you to review my next book in that series. In one of the comments about a story of how well the tax offices does their work, JJ Turner says:

Cheers to the Swiss! I’ve never heard anyone say they were excited to see how the US Internal Revenue Service improved the process. 🤪

JJ sees it right. Learning about Service Design and how services are built makes us so curious that even receiving a tax document is something that becomes exciting. It’s an opportunity to see and learn how a big and complex service is made. So it’s a blessing! It’s a blessing because learning about service design:

1. makes us look at the world with a new look
2. turns boring moments into something we can learn from

But yes, there is also the other side, as Maaria and my girlfriend, now wife, noticed: You notice all the sloppy work around you. You notice all the small things service creators could have done differently to make your life easier.

So be aware as you continue your journey in the fascinating world of service design. It’s gonna make your life hell. A hell full of continuous curiosity.

Changelog

Below you’ll find all the Service Design content I’ve worked on in the last weeks.

Service Design Questions

I’m slowly building a library of answers to the most common questions about Service Design. Here are the new ones:

New questions

1. How do Service Design Principles evolve over time?
2. What are metrics you can track in your service design principle library?
3. How to name your Service Design Principles?

Updated questions

1. Service Design in big organizations?
2. Where do Service Designers work?
3. Do people recommend a service design career?

Service Design Principles

“A Service Design Principle is an idea, a tip, an advice or a principle to improve the human experience.” These are the latest principles I’ve been working on.

New principles

1. Show me how it compares

Updated principles

These Service Design Principles have a new draft. Once you open the link, scroll to the bottom to see the latest version. These 100 principles will all be part of my upcoming book Service Design Principles 201–300.

Innovation mindset

• Don’t measure just because you can
• Keep looking for weird things that happen in your service
• Make me want more of it
• Think of the first moment as the first date
• Turn things upside down to go through the crisis
• Change one little thing every day
• Help first those who you can impact the most

Understand customers

• Test your idea against the ones from your competitors
• Listen to what people don’t say. Observe what people don’t do
• Don’t prototype. Test what already exists.
• Ask for who this is?

Accessibility

• Make it at the eye level of kids. (hint, it’s gonna be great for wheelchairs too)
• Offer the same service but alternative experiences that include everyone.
• Show me how steep it will be
• Make everything workable with one hand or one less sense

Technology

• Detect if I’m fed up
• Pre-select the input for me
• Help me keep track of my notifications
• Let me remove things your AI shouldn’t use for recommendations
• Tell me how to enter the code

Policy

• Use beauty instead of prohibition signs
• Let me know you updated the rules
• Don’t enforce the rule completely

Communication

• Let me know what to say in an emergency
• Don’t be creative when it’s urgent
• Help the newbies without slowing the pros
• Put the information in the paper I already have
• Send taxes and big bills early before I buy christmas gifts
• Help me realize what I already mastered before showing me where I have challenges
• Tell me why I have to use this form
• Show me first the deadline
• Be careful of the history of words
• Add a little secret note to your coupon codes
• Help me brag about that positive thing I’m doing

Errors

• Give me a place to put what I messed up with
• Verify that’s me before doing anything else
• Help me finish this later
• Say you messed up before I discover it
• Imagine the shortcuts people will take
• Don’t tell me you could fine me for something I did nearly perfectly

Family

• Let me do this for another person too
• Put some glass in front of things my kid shouldn’t touch
• Remember that I’ll share my account
• Offer a little help during big life changes
• Make it less shitty to change my kids diapers
• Prepare me for the challenge
• Hide my kid if you take care of him
• Give me a pizza buzzer when I wait with my kid
• Show me if I can bring my kid
• Acknowledge my kid to make me feel relaxed

Waiting

• Reflect are you rushing things too much?(slow service)
• Let me know why others come before me
• If it takes five minutes, do it now.
• Offer many tiny distractions
• Use patterns and dots to make the wait fun

Workplace

• Match my salary to the newcomers
• Don’t overwhelm me when I come back from holidays
• Ask who really has the power
• Celebrate the end of my trial period
• Do the obvious thing in an extreme way
• Get everybody in the room so there is no scapegoat
• Tell me who I should congratulate
• Add a one hour buffer between meetings.
• Separate getting shit done moments from bonding moments
• Tell where the fuck I should this message
• Let me take holidays
• Respect the holidays of others
• Create a purge day
• Disagree but commit
• Don’t launch new things on Fridays.
• Ask who else could help
• Make me teach so that I learn
• Help colleagues understand you are in the zone.

Change

• Let me do the bad behaviour in a safe way
• Get 3.5% to protest to change this

Goals and planning

• Make me see my progress creatively
• Make me write something for my future self
• Measure the impact for me

Choice

• Put a gun on your brain to decide
• Let me keep what I’m comfortable with
• Not doing anything is always an option
• Decide as if you were a fucking millionaire

Reassure and prepare

• Ask me my consent before you do something and say how it will feel
• Prepare me for the worst gradually

Human touch

• Even if it’s not a discussion you can respect my intelligence
• Every service, even the most simple and boring one, can add a wow factor to it.
• Leave me with a physical reminder and summary of the service.
• Open the cage where you put customers in
• Let me add a personal note in any survey
• Ask the customer’s companion if he has questions
• If you ask me to fill a survey, let me see the results
• Add context to the address
• Wait for me to handle my shit
• Give me the week day when you give me a date
• Ask me if I want to continue with you
• Use different love languages with your staff and customers
• Don’t break the value of the good stuff with repeating it
• Use easy to remember number sequences
• Wish me something lovely in an unexpected place.
• Do one tiny lovely thing per day

Behind the scenes articles

I love to explain how I’m building educational content. I’m trying to be as transparent as possible so that it might motivate others to create such content too. These are the latest blog posts I’ve written:

1. Reflections after a 3 day book editing sprint