The 15 Principles of Bad Services
In 2020 we released Good Services. 6 years on and we’re following up with Bad Services.
Whilst the new book isn’t explicitly about describing bad services per se and more about the organisational or system conditions that lead to bad services, we wanted to produce material around the book that helped people identify a bad service.
We’ve seen the Good Service principles used in multiple ways. People have used them as a guide in the design of a service. Many have used our Good Service Scale to evaluate services against them to find what to fix. Sometimes, they have just been a good discussion point. Other teams have created research frameworks to find out if their service is good (or bad).
But we recognised, sometimes, it’s easier to talk about or spot what’s not good. When I’m teaching Service Design in person, one of the first things I get people to do, is to describe a really bad service experience the'y’ve had, and tell me what was bad about it. Through this they learn to identify
So 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.
The 15 principles of bad service design
A bad service:
1 Is hard to find
2 Does not enable users to complete
the outcome they set out to
3 Does not explain its purpose
4 Does not set expectations a user has of it
5 Works in a way that is extremely unfamiliar
6 Requires prior knowledge to use
7 Is defined by organisational structures
8 Requires the maximum possible
steps to complete
9 Is inconsistent throughout
10 Has multiple dead ends
11 Is usable by a select few, unevenly
12 Encourages the wrong behaviours
from users and staff
13 Never responds to change
14 Never explains why a decision
has been made
15 Makes it hard to get human assistance
We’ve parodied what we know from real life bad experiences with services into a set of satirical training videos for the Bad Services Corporation, a spoof company we launched to celebrate the release of Bad Services. We wanted to have some fun, but also shine a light on the bad in a way people would recognise it.
We’ve created a training video for each principle, delivered in a comedy style by the spoof CEO of the Bad Services Corporation. We’ll be releasing these across the rest of the year. And just in case we didn’t mention, of course they are satire, but we think still useful as a conversation point.
Our first three principles are already live:
1 Is hard to find
2 Does not enable users to complete the outcome they set out to
3 Does not explain its purpose
If you want to buy a poster of the Bad Service Design principles, they are now live on our shop in A2 and A3.