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

Last month, we ran a session called Getting into Service Design.

It sold out within a day, with a waitlist of over 100 people and 200+ submissions of questions for the session. There was a demand!

How do you make the case for service design when there might be a million other competing priorities or term decisions needed to invest in improving something? The answer is often making a financial case for the work we’re doing. Meeting budget constraint with business case.

We’re coming to the US/Australia/New Zealand/Canada!

Well, we’re plotting… and some other countries…

We have been receiving an increase in requests for training online and in person in different time zones. Particularly in the countries mentioned above.

Since the dawn of the internet, amazon and cheap print, libraries have become a part of our civic infrastructure that we don't always quite know what to do with. No longer the primary source of books to the majority, they have become the overspill to services that we can't quite fit anywhere else.

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.