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Foreword Marc Stickdorn

Think about all of the different services that you experienced today. Did you check your bank balance on the way to work? Get on a bus? Buy this book from your local bookshop?

Think about the different parts of the services you experienced – the different channels you’ve used, and the different parts of an organisation you came in to contact with, without even knowing it.

Now, think about who was responsible for creating the different parts of those services: the managers, software developers, marketers, sales representatives, customer support officers, lawyers, engineers, architects, accountants and, of course, designers.

Think about how many of those people are working on changes that might have an effect on the service you’ve just used – the infrastructure building projects, changes to internal software, accounting processes or legal terms and conditions.

All of these projects affect the experience that customers, users, employees and citizens have of our services; but how many of these things were designed intentionally, or with a knowledge of how they might affect a user’s experience? And how many of these were designed with a knowledge of what a good service looked like?

The reality is: very few.

Users don’t care who designed the services they use. They only care if services meet their needs, or at least match their expectations. In short: if they’re good.

For many years, we’ve been discussing what service design is and how it works.

Service design has been taught in design schools and practised since the mid-1990s, at places such as Köln International School of Design (KISD) and the first dedicated service design agencies, such as LiveWork and Engine.

When I was teaching at one of these early service design courses in 2008 (at the MCI business school in Innsbruck, Austria) there were still no textbooks out there on this topic.

Together with Jakob Schneider, we decided to simply write it ourselves. ‘This Is Service Design Thinking’ was published in 2011 and brought together 23 co-authors from the service design community.

It was intended simply as a textbook to be used by students during courses, but the fact that it later became an international bestseller is testament to the massive growth of service design all over the world.

When I look back at the 10 years since Jakob and I published our book, we’ve not just seen a huge growth in service design, but also a huge change in the way that it has developed.

More and more education programmes, agencies and in-house teams have adopted service design, and a wave of acquisitions of service design agencies has finally proved how much business now values the activity of consciously designing services.

In less than two decades, we’ve gone from discussions about how to raise awareness of the fact that services need to be actively designed, to how we scale that activity beyond the boundaries of service designers.

In this new phase of service design, a discussion on what we’re aiming for when we design services is long overdue.

‘We talk about “what good looks like” in service design… but has anyone actually ever defined it?’ Lou tweeted this question on 20 March 2018. This led to numerous discussions, talks and a blog post that was widely shared in and beyond the service design community. Now, less than two years later, you can read what makes good services in this book.

Service design is a team sport – and a definition of good services with common principles gives you and everyone else working on your service a common focus and goal. Here, however, we see competing mindsets: while some push towards adding new ‘wow’ factors to a service, perhaps to drive marketing and sales, others strive to fix the basics first.

I estimate that 95% of service design projects are about fixing the basics. The principles outlined in this book have the potential to act as a North Star, leading people to create good services and thereby a much better experience for users, customers, employees and citizens. But by establishing a baseline for ‘good’ services, we can also be much more efficient in the way that we work, and spend more of our time on the things that are unique to our services, rather than the things that aren’t.

This is not the first time we’ve tried to define what we mean by a ‘good’ service that works for users. In 1977 and 1980, Richard Oliver published the widely known ‘Expectation Confirmation Theory’. Summarised simply, it states that customer satisfaction is the result of a comparison of our expectations with our experience. If they match, we’re satisfied; if experience prevails over expectations we’re delighted; but if expectations outweigh experience, we’re dissatisfied. In 1984, Professor Noriaki Kano published the ‘Kano Model’, a theory for product development and customer satisfaction. It describes three main factors: basic factors (‘Must-be Quality’) that, similar to hygiene factors, do not contribute to satisfaction but cause dissatisfaction if missing; performance factors (‘One-dimensional Quality’) that can contribute to dissatisfaction when they’re missing, but also to satisfaction when they are implemented well; and excitement factors (‘Attractive Quality’) that only contribute to satisfaction, but don’t cause dissatisfaction when they’re missing.

Did you read the above paragraph? Or did you skip it when you read ‘academic literature’ and saw sources and academic concepts mentioned in the paragraph?

Often, academic research provides useful answers, but, unfortunately, it is not accessible enough in practice. My hope is that this book serves as a bridge between practical hands-on guidance on how to build a good service, and grounded principles that we can use to guide our industry.

I have no doubt that this book will become a must-read for the service design community, but this book is also for everyone working with services – consciously or unconsciously.

Talking about what makes good services is vital within the service design community, and will help us to further mature our practice, but these principles can help to leverage service design way beyond the service design community.

This book shouldn’t be seen as the ‘end’ of defining what makes good services, but rather as a starting point for a more educated discussion on this topic.

As Professor Richard Buchanan said in 2001: ‘One of the great strengths of design is that we have not settled on a single definition. Fields in which definition is now a settled matter tend to be lethargic, dying, or dead fields, where inquiry no longer provides challenges to what is accepted as truth.’ Thus, this book shouldn’t be seen as the ‘end’ of defining what makes good services, but rather as a starting point for a more educated discussion on this topic. It is a milestone defining how we see what makes good services now. This will change and evolve but, once we have a point of reference, we can build on this milestone and use it as a springboard to design better services and, over time, improve the principles and definitions of a good service.