Bad Services
OUT NOW!
15 billion hours are wasted on ‘life admin’ every year
That’s roughly an hour per day, or just over a month per year spent paying bills, requesting refunds, making complaints, resetting lost passwords and a plethora of activities involved in ‘life admin’.
Why, despite advances in technology, does fulfilling our basic needs dominate so much of our time? The answer is simple: services that don’t work.
From the author of the bestselling book Good Services, Bad Services, untangles why, despite our best efforts, organisations struggle to deliver services that work and what we can do to change it.
Order your copy
Bad Services is out now in the UK and Europe. Buy your copy from all good (and bad) bookshops. Please buy from local bookshops if you can.
Order from Hive, Waterstones, TGJones, Hachette, Amazon or directly from the publisher BIS.
Please buy from local bookshops if you can
Beyond the UK and Europe, the book will be available in English from October 2026
" I can say that Bad Services is the most important and honest book written about the real work of fixing broken services. Lou Downe gets to the heart of why services fail in the messy reality of organisations. I’ve recommended Good Services as essential reading since it was released, and Bad Services is the sequel I’ve been hoping for"
Mark Stickdorn
Author of This is Service Design Thinking & This is Service Design Doing
“You can learn a lot from design patterns. You can learn even more from anti-patterns. With this great practical guide from Low Downe, you can set yourself up for successful service design by avoiding well-documented pitfalls. This is a must-read for anyone who thinks about the bigger picture when it comes to design.”
Jeremy Kieth
Co-founder of Clearleft
“Bad Services is the story and cheat sheet you need to understand why good services sound simple, but delivering them well is hard. It's compelling, practical, realistic, ambitious and a thoroughly good read”
Kate Tarling
Author of the Service Organisation
Dates and locations
London - UX London, 4th June
Glasgow - Glasgow School of Art, 8th June
Birmingham - Birmingham Design Week, 11th June
London - Book Launch, June 30th
Bristol - Service Design Bristol, July 1st
Manchester - Autotrader x School of Good Services, July 15th
Exeter - TBC
More dates will be announced soon. If you would like to help make a tour date possible, we are currently looking into Europe and rest of world travel from September onwards
Service design is 10% design, 90% creating the conditions for design to happen
Something strange happens to services as they grow and get older. What starts as a deep connection with our users and what they need gets lost as we scale. Over time we become detached from the reality of how our services are experienced by the people who use them.
We do this for lots of reasons. Sometimes the scale of our service means we rarely see our users, sometimes we think it doesn’t matter that the service doesn’t work because our users don’t have a choice of using it.
Sometimes our service becomes so bad that we start to dislike our users for their constant complaints and ‘failure’ to use our service.
Whatever the reason, the result is the same; a detachment from the reality of how our services are experienced. As a result, we don't see the impact our decisions have on our users, and we don’t see the impact of our users’ problems on our organisation.
The vital feedback loop that we rely on to see problems, know what impact they’re having and know what we should do to solve them has been severed. The result? Services that get worse rather than better over time.
Good Services taught us that there are some things that all users need from all services. Bad Services shows that there are also some things that all organisations need to be able to do in order to deliver services that work.
Bad Services untangles why, despite our best efforts, organisations struggle to deliver services that work, and will help you to learn straightforward ways to change this, with or without buy-in.
Whether you're a designer or a change-maker, this book will help you understand the universal problems we all face when delivering good services.
Lou is a service palaeontologist, botanist, and forager, digging up the bones of services past to understand how today’s services have evolved.
Like the David Attenborough of Service Design, Lou remains optimistic and gives us practical tools to make change, in whatever terrain we find ourselves.”
Carrie Bishop
Director of Data & AI, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Former CDO of the City of San Francisco
“Everything is shit. The thing is, everything didn’t used to be shit. Today’s disagreement is whether we should bother trying to make things work at all, when you could ditch the designers and replace them with AI slop machines!
Somehow, in the middle of all this, Lou Downe has managed to write a hopeful book. Because there are still designers out there trying to do the right thing. My hope is that this book creates even more of them.:
Mike Monteiro, Author of Ruined by Design
“Bad Services tells you why your organisation keeps failing to build good services, and hands you a way to diagnose it. The five causes of Bad Services Lou describes in this book are the conversations I have with clients every week, finally named and made fixable. “
Gerry Scullion
Author of 'This is Human Centred Design’