Good Services: a bloody good read (Part 3)
By: Jo Carter
Tags: Human Centered Design, Government, Design Thinking, Service Design

Good Services by Lou Downe tells you how to design good services that work.

I’m sharing my book notes so that you can enjoy the highlights for now, and hopefully be inspired to go on and buy it.

I’m not on commission. I just think that if you work in a job where you’re responsible for the delivery of services to other humans — you should read this book. It will help you to make your services better.

I am not alone!

The book contains 15 principles, which if followed, will help you to design services that work. Many of the examples in the book are from Lou’s experience of working in UK government organisations.

My notes are personal to me. I’ve noted the things that resonate, or that I want to remember and in places, added my own examples. I recommend you read the book to understand things in more depth and to read Lou’s stories of good and bad service design.

I’ve separated my notes into a three parts.

Part one: pre-service stuff

Part two: during service delivery

Part three: post-service stuff (this one)

15 Principles of Good Service Design

(Principles 1–12 are in parts one and two)

13 — A good service should respond to change quickly

Respond quickly and adaptively to a change in a user’s circumstance and make this change consistently throughout the service.

The most common problem with these less predictable changes is that we don’t expect them to happen at all.

Thriva offers no way for users to change their gender

Thriva tests customers’ general health and well-being in the comfort of their home. By asking customers’ biological sex, they presumed their customers’ gender. They don’t offer any way for users to change their gender. This became a problem in 2018 when they sent marketing materials for fertility tests and hormone balances to trans men and women who had identified as female.

Think carefully about what pieces of information you use to anchor the identity of your user. Name, gender, age, location, address and phone number can all change.

What can we do differently?

Work on the assumption that nothing is fixed — make it easy for users to change things about themselves.

Make a list of all the changes that might happen to a user and work out which ones need to be designed for as functionality.

Give users the option of changing their details at the point when it becomes relevant to them (e.g., the NHS in the UK asks patients to confirm their phone number and address details when they make an appointment).

Always give users the ability to share only what they want to share.

14 — A good service clearly explains why a decision has been made

When a decision is made within a service, it should be obvious to a user why this decision has been made and clearly communicated at the point at which it’s made. A user should also be given a route to contest this if they need to.

In an effort to standardise decisions across multiple services, we create policies, processes and scripts to ensure our decisions about users are consistent regardless of who makes them (often codified as algorithms). Yet, what if these algorithms are biased? It’s only over time that we start to notice a pattern.

If decision making isn’t transparent, it means that bad decisions can continue unchecked and unchanged. The harm doesn’t come when an algorithm is given too much power, but when it isn’t explained. Decisions based on policy are often equally as unexplained.

Favourite quotes

We design our services in a way that demands 100% accuracy, and that just isn’t realistic. People and machines make mistakes. With lack of transparency in explaining decision making, it’s impossible for staff to change that decision, and users are left with no understanding of how they might take control of the situation and appeal.

What can we do differently?

Make sure decisions are:

Valid — eliminating bias, conflicts or dead ends

Transparent — to both users and staff

Communicated — at the time it’s made

Capable of appeal — because you won’t always get it right

15 — A good service makes it easy to get human assistance

What differentiates your service is not whether or not it fails, but how it deals with failure when it inevitably happens. Getting access to a real human being who is empowered to make a decision and clearly explain it to you, is a vital part of that recovery.

Research conducted by Government Digital Service in 2014 established that 80% of the cost of government was spent on services. And 60% of that cost was spent on calls and casework. Diving even deeper, those calls and case work were split as follows:

Status checking 43%

How to do something 52%

Complaints 5%

Complex cases 2%

The vast majority of these could be solved with clearer service design. Often, our solution to this is to make it harder to seek human assistance. Have you ever tried to find a phone number for Ebay, Amazon or a high street retailer? But, hiding your phone number just pisses people off.

The balance between human and machine-based interaction will vary depending on the service and factors including complexity, risk profile, value and whether it’s tied to the physical world, e.g., hotel, GP surgery.

If we’re leaving the machines to deal with the simple cases and the humans are reserved for the more complex cases, they will have to be more expert and empowered to make decisions than ever before.

What can we do differently?

Make sure humans are accessible when needed

Use humans / machines proportionately

Empower the humans to make decisions — this means removing org. Boundaries and ensuring that they are experts and multi-skilled.

Consistent with the rest of the service — human decisions must be consistent with other human decisions and those made in other channels.

I hope that you’ve enjoyed my summary of Lou’s book and that I’ve inspired you to go on and take a deeper dive into the book for real.