Bad Services
OUT IN MAY
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.
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.
