How to use the Good Services scale 

Use the scale for user research, in workshops or on your own to assess and/or continuously monitor the quality of your service

Before you start, it's a good idea to have a clear picture of how your user's experience the service. You can do this through user research, or if that's not possible, by gathering what their experience would be through your service in a user journey map 

For each principle:

  1. Give your service a score from 0 - 4 on how well it delivers this principle to users (with 0 being the worst and 4 being the best)

  2. Describe what your service is failing to do right now to meet that principle

  3. Describe what 'good' would look like for your service 

  4. Describe what's currently stopping your service from achieving this 

  5. Finally document what you need to do to make sure your service can achieve this. Try to make your actions tangible so that you can regularly review if you've achieved these 

Using the tool to do a self assessment 

If you're using the tool to do a self-assessment, either on your own or as part of a group it's helpful to start by listing all of the things your user has to do from start to finish so that you can spot where your service is or isn’t meeting the principles

Take care to include everything that a user needs do, from the moment they set out to achieve their goal to the moment they complete it. Try to gather as much detail of their experience as possible including examples of the things a user needs to do in order to use your service

Use the tool to interrogate the journey you have created, asking yourself if you've achieved each of the 15 principles throughout their journey

Using the tool to do user research 

The tool can be used to test your service with users in several ways.

 For example: 

  • Use the ‘you’ve achieved good when’ statements in the tool as a benchmark to test your service against 

  • Use the principles as a discussion guide to plan areas you want to investigate with your users 

Using the tool to monitor the quality of your service 

This is a great way to understand how your service is improving over time. Do this on a monthly or quarterly basis so that you can track your progress