Why products and services need to consider each other in meeting user needs

You might have heard that we’re running a new course called Designing Sustainable Services. We’re getting together with friends Ness Wright and Lucy Stewart to run a course that equips designers with the tools and questions to take action on climate change

We’re just back from a European trip talking at Service Design Network Global Conference and Servicios Digitales de Aragón’s Design and Citizenship conference.

We’ve opened a School of Good Services Bursary which gives 5 people an opportunity to attend courses for free at the school and have 1:1 coaching with our directors on a twice yearly basis.

Plugs on the west coast line have finally be installed. What can we learn about user needs from this?

5 steps to raise your organisation’s service design capability, and a free tool to help you plan how to do it

Our first frontier, ‘The Robots are Coming’ looks at the rise of AI in service delivery and what that means for the future how we design and deliver services.

A common question I’ve been asked throughout my career is ‘what makes a good service designer?’ There’s no one perfect ‘mould’ a service designer should be or fit, but when I’ve interviewed for the role, I’ve looked for several recurring skills and experiences.

To design something you have to - at a bare minimum - believe that it exists. And this is the problem we have with service design.

Services are invisible by they’re nature. They help our users to achieve an end goal, but they are more than the sum of their component parts. Services are also made of the connections between the products, systems and information we interact with

The things our users need from our services aren’t unique, and the problems we have in delivering those services aren't either

Here at the School of Good Services, we get a lot of questions along the lines of “I’ve been doing X, am I a service designer?”

Here are five things that you don’t need to be a service designer, and two that you do

When designing a service, there are many questions we need to answer - who are our users? What do they need from us? What could we do to help them achieve their goal?

But there is one question we’re often afraid to ask. It’s by far the most common question that comes up in Good Services courses, and that’s ‘what is my service?’ 

After nearly 2 years of delivering training to over 5,000 people and hundreds of organisations in how to design services that work, Good Services is officially becoming a school, and with it, we’re changing our name to The School of Good Services.

In the winter of 2019, Paris was much like any other large northern European city; messy, imperfect, and cold.

But like every other city, there was a more deliberate force behind some of the mess if you looked closely.

I made a scale to measure the quality of services using the 15 principles of Good Service design. Here’s why.

At long last, you can now buy posters and stickers with some of the best quotes from Good Services check out the shop here

Just over a year ago I wrote a blog post about what we mean by a ‘good service’ and how strange it is that we don’t have a better understanding of this.

The book is now finished (all 190 pages of it!) is available for preorder now