Good Services summary

So far, here’s the brief: a well-designed service is just that. Designed, not accidental. And it’s defined by the user, not the provider. To help you hit that brief, the rest of this Blink is going to walk you through some of the core principles of good service design.

Sound good? Then let’s start.

To work effectively, a service must have a clear purpose from the outset. This means even a user with no expertise understands exactly what your service will achieve for them.

Take the UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, or the DVLA, which requires drivers to report medical conditions that impact their ability to drive, like vision impairment or epilepsy. Until recently, about 40 percent of respondents reported conditions that had no impact on their driving whatsoever – things like ingrown toenails and broken bones. They were being safe rather than sorry.

When we design services, we must remember that a good service helps users achieve their goals seamlessly. Consider the eye-opening case documented in Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article “Million Dollar Murray.” It followed a homeless man whose interactions with various systems, like prison stays, hospital visits, homeless shelters, and emergency rooms, cost the government a million dollars over ten years. This starkly illustrates how addressing just one aspect of a person’s needs through disconnected services can be both costly and ineffective. Imagine how differently that million might have been spent on a more cohesive solution.

Your service might represent only a small component in a broader process. But when defining what your users want to achieve, you must think beyond the boundaries of your specific service and envision their complete journey. Your service needs to collaborate effectively with all other elements of the end-to-end experience.

Less is truly more. Your service should require users to go through as few steps as possible. The reality? Most services aren’t designed from scratch – they’re a mishmash of processes that evolve over time, the opposite of intentional design. But here’s the thing: having the right number of steps matters – a three-step service that should be ten steps is just as unusable as a ten-step service that should be three steps.

So how many steps should your service have?

Imagine this: You’re out for the night. You get an Uber home. You’re barely through the door when you realize you’ve left your phone in your driver’s car. You can notify Uber through the app. But the app is on your phone. And when you borrow a phone and log into the Uber app, your two-factor authentication is turned on. You can only access the app once you type in a code that’s just been texted to – you guessed it – your phone.

All services fail. But this dead-end failure – when a user hits a point beyond which it’s impossible to progress – can be avoided. Dead ends often happen when a user strays from what’s called “the happy path” – the path the ideal user progresses through on their journey. Specifically, the dead ends happen when we fail to predict the reasons a user might not meet their goal.