A question to spot badly designed services

Hey lovely human ??

This week I want to share with you:

• A good heuristic can help us verify if the services or products we build are good enough.
• 2 answers to Service Design questions (one about recessions and one about workshop reports)
• an invitation to the next webinar I'm hosting

Greetings from Switzlerland,

Daniele ????

p.s. send some love and congratulations to the people who finished the 5-week service design course.

Would I do the same for a friend?

When I encounter badly designed business experiences, I must first show that they are absurd. They're absurd, not because they aren’t standard. In fact, most of the experiences I think feel inhumane are standard business practices.

The way I show their absurdity is by taking them back into the everyday life of people.

Just like the fact that many notifications you receive from the company are sent from an email address that says no reply. Imagine if you bring that back into the everyday life. Imagine if you send a birthday card to a friend and back on the letter, instead of having your address.

You write:

“Please do not answer back. I don't want to hear from you.”

That will not just feel awkward. But extremely rude!

After this translation into everyday life, people suddenly say:

“Oh yeah, this is wrong!”

After analysing many tiny Service Design principles, I've noticed this is a recurring problem.

So this makes me realise that a lot of the work of the service designer is to bring back what we do in the business world into the normal world and ask ourselves:

If we created this experience for friends, colleagues, or people we like, would we design the experience in the same way?

If the answer is no, then we need to change that experience.

And if the answer is yes. Awesome! You already have designed an experience that humans will love.

New Service Design Questions

I'm slowly building a library of answers to the most common questions about Service Design. Here are the new ones:

1. How can you be quicker and more efficient when you have to create a report about a workshop?
2. Can a service designer survive a recession?

Next Webinar: Storytelling x Service Design

This Wednesday, I’m hosting a webinar on Storytelling and Service Design for the Swiss Service Design Network with my mate Romain Pittet. It’s a free one-hour webinar that is open to everyone. I’d love to see you there!

Save your seat for free

This is a copy of the Service Design Newsletter I sent on July 8th 2023. You can join the Service Design newsletter here to get future updates directly in your inbox.