Ever noticed that it's the services that are the worst that find it the hardest to change? This isn’t a coincidence. It’s not just that the problems with the service are difficult to overcome, bad services actively create bad relationships with users that makes it much harder for our organisation to buy into change. 

Services are defined by the materials we use to build them: those materials govern how our services work. Take, for example, the various services we’ve used to wake up on time over the last three hundred years

Good services don’t happen overnight. Neither do bad ones. The things we do (or don’t do) today affect the long-term health of our services. That’s why, sometimes, stopping bad decisions is as important as making good ones. 

Not knowing who our users are or what they need is now so common in some organisations that we almost don't notice anymore.

We always say at the School, ‘your user defines what your service is’ for a very good reason. A service is something that helps someone to do something. It's that ‘someone’ who defines what that ‘something’ is. 

A 2022 paper by the UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy in Dublin (Martin, Delaney and Doyle, 2022) found that we spend an estimated 15 billion hours in the UK each year ‘administering our personal lives’. That’s roughly an hour per day paying bills, requesting refunds, locating our pensions, making a complaint, losing our customer ID and a plethora of activities involved in ‘life admin’.

Without a clear sense of why our services exist, it's easy for our services to 'go through the motions' while never achieving what we set out to do

Purpose is a vital ingredient of service design, but It's also the one ingredient we perpetually forget. Take a sneak peek at chapter 1 of Bad Services, Purpose

For the release of Bad Services, we took the 15 Principles of Good Services and inverted them to create The 15 Principles of Bad Services. 

Today we launched Bad Services, the long awaited sequel to Good Services.

Bad services is about why organisations struggle to produce services that work.

Bad Services will be shipping tomorrow but here’s a sneak peak of the long awaited (for me at least!) sequel to Good Services. 

For 6 years I’ve been talking to designers, change makers and organisational leaders about why they find it hard to deliver better services

Every year we spend 15 billion hours in the UK ‘administering our personal lives.

The sequel to the bestselling book Good Services, Bad Services untangles why organisations struggle to deliver services that work and what we can do about it

I hear a variation of this on an almost weekly basis.

There are many issues our organisation might have with ‘user needs’ ( from making assumptions about what they are, to becoming so disconnected from our users that we don't even know who they are).

Service design leadership can be the responsibility of one person, or many, but it takes a whole organisation to improve a service over time, and crucially, make sure it stays that way. 

To be able to have a good services in our organisation, we need service literacy

Most bad services don't happen deliberately.

In our most pessimistic hour, it might feel like all of the mismatched processes, obtuse rules or confusing processes we have to wade through have been created to test us, but very rarely this is the case.

Leadership of service design can come in many different forms. It can be either something that is explicitly in your job title and is known and asked for by the organisation, or it can be a role you've taken on yourself in the absence of any formal support to do it.

I spend a lot of time silently assessing organisations by looking at their bathrooms.

That might sound like a strange thing to say but bathrooms are wonderful places to spot the indicators of good and bad service design and hints of a wider culture

We’re living in a post-truth society.  An age of fake news, increased online scams and anti-right tech founders spouting hate speech or bowing to alt-right state leaders. 

Trust matters right now when it comes to services and the organisations running them

Back in late 2024, Pat McFadden (the Minister for Intergovernmental Relations of the United Kingdom) outlined ambitions for the reform of the state in the UK by using a test and learn approach. 

This marks a global shift more broadly I’ve been hearing from organisations. How can we take a different approach to delivering better and make our services more efficient to deliver? But do this in a more iterative way where it’s not a large scale transformation project. 

Closing a service

Recently I learned that my favourite bookmark service was closing, pocket.

It is/was so handy to save things to read later, with a browser plug-in and an easy to save feature embedded on my phone. I will miss it.

On closing their service, it feels like they thought about the process.

It was easy to understand what was going on and they produce simple guidance, they made a service to export my data and download it as a CSV that came directly to my email, and they gave me plenty of time to do this. (It’s still open until October)

When you are designing a service, how do you develop your first concepts and come up with ideas for improving existing services?

You might work this out in your head, do some sketching, look at other services, go for a walk. Here are some prompts we’ve developed to help you generate new and interesting ideas for services