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The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · 15d

What have bathrooms got to do with service design?

Author of Good Services Lou Downe, and our school director reflect on lessons in service design from bathrooms.

good.services/writing/lessons-about-service-design-from-bathrooms

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The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · 27d

What makes a bad service?

In preparation for our new book, Bad Services, we started thinking about the key patterns in bad services

Beyond the user experience, much of the reasons for bad services sit with how the org runs them

What do you think?

good.services/writing/rwfx...

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The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Sep 5

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

We wanted to find a way to help teams work together to develop ideas on making their services work for people

good.services/writing/deve...

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The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Sep 3

That’s why we wrote Good Services—15 principles for designing services that actually work for the people who need them.

Because if people can’t use your service, it’s not a service.

Delving back into the archives with this piece from Think with Google.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2PT...

Lessons from service design with author Lou Downe

Are you speaking a totally different language to your customers? Lou Downe, author of the best selling book Good Services and former Design Director of the UK Government, joins Neil to talk about…

www.youtube.com

The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Sep 3

Most services don’t fail because they’re missing tech.
They fail because people can’t use them.

A good service doesn’t make you work hard to find it. It doesn’t leave you guessing, or feeling stupid for asking.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2PT...

Lessons from service design with author Lou Downe

Are you speaking a totally different language to your customers? Lou Downe, author of the best selling book Good Services and former Design Director of the UK Government, joins Neil to talk about…

www.youtube.com

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The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Sep 1

Good Services need designed.

Our intro level course on Good Services takes place on the 17th September

If you were wondering if this course is for you, here's Lou, author of Good Services to talk you through the course

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuxV...

Designing Good Services Course Overview

Demystify what makes a good service, helping you to identify problems in the design of services and understand what can be done to improve them Designing Good Services is a live 1 day course that…

www.youtube.com

The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 29

Service literacy is a term we come back to often

We think it's important organisations see their services, then recognise what outcomes they are helping them to achieve, whether purpose, policy or financial.

It's an old post but something we come back to daily
good.services/writing/why-...

The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 28

- How to make the case for sustainable service design and influence decision makers

- How to build personal resilience in a forever changing climate

The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 28

- How to adapt your design tools and processes to make sustainable design decisions

- Ways to measure and monitor the impact of your service on the planet

- How to identify the risk of service continuity in the face of increasing climate risks and design resilience into services

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The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 28

Lucy Stewart takes you through;

- How the design and delivery of services contributes to the climate crisis

- Where the key opportunities are for interventions in the design of services to reduce their impact on the planet

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The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 28

Designing Sustainable Services is back!

Two half days, 11th and 12th November.

Learn how to reduce the impact of your work on the planet and design sustainable and climate resilient services

good.services/designingsus...

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The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 21

Why do Services fail?

When services work, we rarely notice the design. Good service design should lead to a frictionless joined up user experience, no matter what ‘front door’ you come at it from

Enjoy this talk from the archives, thanks to brilliant Camp Digital

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wve...

Sarah Drummond - Designing for Service Failure (Camp Digital 2019)

When services work, we rarely notice the design. Good service design should lead to a frictionless joined up user experience, no matter what ‘front door’ you come at it from, that helps someone do…

www.youtube.com

The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 20

If you're interested in learning more, our next introduction course to Good Services starts on the 17th September, tickets can be found on good.services/designing-go...

Designing Good Services — Good Services

Designing Good Services is a live 1 day course that demystifies what makes a good service, helping you to identify problems in the design of services and understand what can be done to improve them

good.services

The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 20

Use it solo, with your team, in a workshop, or as part of user research.

A practical tool to start conversations around how you can make the services you run better.

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The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 20

We'd recommend this is done hand in hand with user research, reflecting on any data you have that can help you answer these, and observing how your service is used. Even without this, it is a really useful starting point to connect people with seeing their services and discussing good services

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The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 20

It can help you to;

✅ Spot what’s working and what isn't
⚠️ Find where people are falling through the gaps
🎯 Focus your efforts where it matters most

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The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 20

Want to know if your service is actually delivering a good service?

The Good Services Scale helps teams reflect on how well their service works for real people—based on the 15 principles of good service design.

👉 good.services/the-good-services-scale

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The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 18

Full Stack Service Design is a model to help people break services down into the parts that make them and understand how all of these parts impact the user experience.
Services are made up of thousands of tiny, often accidental design decisions.

Read more on sarah-drummond.com/full-stack-s...

A white poster on purple background that says service, infrastructure, organisation, intent, culture as a stack

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The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 15

If you're interested in joining the course, you can read more here:
good.services/agile-servic...

And Kev's website is here:
www.mearso.co.uk

Agile Service Design — Good Services

Agile Service Design is a live 3 day course split over three weeks that focuses on the reality of designing services in changing organisational environments

good.services

The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 15

We're focused on going beyond tools and really delving into the critical ideas of what services are, how we design them, how to make this work inside organisations who don't see their services and the various roles of people who design services.

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The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 15

This is what Kev had to say;

"I couldn't speak more highly about the course. The material is over and above, with no fluff, and you did a great job of delivering, facilitating and educating"

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The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 15

The brilliant Kev Mears who joined our Agile Service Design Course this year, sent us these wonderful sketch notes from the course.

It's so great to see the course we run reflected back at us and see the takeaways.

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The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 11

Sometimes services don’t work the way we hope — not because people aren’t trying, but because the service itself is hard to see

In this talk, Lou Downe shows how making services visible and designing them end-to-end can save everyone time and frustration.

🎥 Watch the talk: youtu.be/QoN9tYpbB-k

FBTB 2024: Lou Downe - Bad services: Why services fail and what we can do to make them work

Founder & Director of The School of Good Services Lou Downe is the former Director of Design for the UK Government, where they founded the discipline of service design, growing a strong team of 2000…

youtu.be

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Reposted by The School of Good Services

Sarah Drummond @rufflemuffin.bsky.social · Aug 8

For me, at the heart of this test and learn approach was always a readiness to observe, learn, adapt the design, and repeat.

Wrote about design for @theschoolofgood.bsky.social on test and learn for organisations this week, felt good to revisit old work

good.services/writing/test...

How to ‘Test and Learn’ in service design — Good Services

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 ...

good.services

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The School of Good Services @theschoolofgood.bsky.social · Aug 6

How to ‘Test and Learn’ in service design

At the heart of test and learn approaches is a readiness to observe, learn, adapt the design, and repeat. We're written about how we take a test and learn approach to whole services

good.services/writing/test-and-learn

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