A book review of Good Services, by Lou Downe

The past year has seen many people with more time on their hands to learn new skills, take up new hobbies and read more books. I would love to say this is how I have spent my time, but with school-aged children and a Netflix subscription, unfortunately I wasn’t one of these people. I did, however, find the time/inclination to purchase and then read (these being two distinct steps in the booking buying process – I am often guilty of managing the first step but not the second!) the book Good Services: How to design services that work by Lou Downe. And what a beautiful addition to my bookcase it is! The vibrant fluorescent book cover is an immediate draw for me.

What’s inside

But what about inside the front cover? The simple yet effective definition of a service stands out as one of the bold full-page statements that are scattered throughout the book – “A service is something that helps someone to do something.” Downe digs deeper into this definition as the book unfolds but, essentially if you are designing a service then your goal is to help your user attain their true goal.

The book sets out how to consciously design a service. As Downe illustrates using interesting case studies and anecdotes, many services come about through a bunch of products or systems being stitched together in an ad hoc, poorly considered way. The book explains that “The services we use every day…are more likely to be the product of technological constraints, political whim and personal taste than they are the conscious decision of an individual or organisation”. As service industries accounted for 80% of the total UK economic output (Source: Service industries: Key Economic Indicators), it is clear that anyone involved in this huge section of the economy should be reading this book (and others like it).

The book gives anyone working on a whole service or any small part of a service an understanding of what a good service looks like and a grounding in what they should be considering as they consciously design and build that service.

Theme 1

Downe sets out what makes a good service (often by providing stories of services demonstrating the lack of conscious design) and provides 15 principles that each reflect one aspect of how to create a good experience for not only users but also organisations and the world as a whole. This concept of ‘creating good’ for the user, organisation and society at large runs as a theme throughout the book and is a refreshing and worthy objective for anyone in service design.

Theme 2

A second valuable thread throughout the book, is the importance of inclusivity. Downe’s 11th Principle is “A good service is usable by everyone equally”. Downe recommends we focus on people’s strengths and weaknesses as opposed to people’s ‘conditions’ or ‘disabilities’. Sometimes these abilities may be related to a disability, but sometimes they may be related to a circumstance or environment that the person is in at that moment in time. Downe goes on to explain “…the needs of users often converge… someone who isn’t able to use the phone [to access your service] might find this difficult because they are autistic, deaf or at work whilst your call centre is open.”

A second example relates to a service that requires someone to physically be in a location to access that service. This can be a struggle for people with physical disabilities but also for people with social anxiety or those who don’t have access to or money to pay for a car or public transport. So, when we are finding it “hard to justify making our services inclusive… because we see this an enhancement for a small number of users, not a necessity for everyone… in reality, making your service inclusive doesn’t make it usable for diverse users but for everyone.”

Another stand-out point for me was the idea of weak links – Downe regularly refers to the fact that services are made up of many different parts. “If each of these links is strong, they mesh together as one seamless, coherent experience. Get it wrong though and your user is exposed to a gap that either means they can’t continue with your service, or don’t feel comfortable doing so.” And Downe points out that organisations are often guilty of concentrating their efforts on the part of the service that is seen as the “superstar” or most important part of the service.

However, “although there are points in a journey where failure has more of an effect than another – being able to complete a service from start to finish is far more important than having a great experience in one moment then not being able to complete the rest of the journey”. As consultants we regularly witness this bias towards one aspect of a service; where there is heavy investment in the step that is directly responsible for bringing in revenue, and far less investment in the rest of the steps that form the whole service. Downe goes on to suggest that we think about Minimum Viable Services as opposed to Minimum Viable Products to ensure a more holistic view of what we are launching.

The usability of the book…

As this is a book review, and we are UX consultants, I do also feel the need to review the usability of the book, not just the content! My feeling is that at some level the design of the physical book itself has succumbed to form over function and for a book so well-written about the importance of the user’s experience with a service, I think this is a mistake that could have been avoided. I personally love the colour palette, paper quality and size of the book (for reading in bed!) but the bold font for the body text, the narrow margins, the different font sizes and a lack of line spacing between paragraphs made a beautifully written book harder to read than it needed to be. So, perhaps purchase the Kindle edition of this book to read and the paper version to display on your bookshelf!

Summary

In summary, I highly recommend this book for anyone working in or interested in service design. The anecdotes and examples of recognisable products and services peppered throughout the book create a storytelling feel while deepening the reader’s understanding of the principles. The book has a lot more to offer than the limited points I have talked about here, so buy a copy and let us know what stood out for you!