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This is a book about good services – what they are and how to design them.

It will tell you what a good service looks like, and what a bad one looks like too. It will give you advice on how to design, build and run services that work for your users, but before we can get to that, we must first define what we mean by a ‘service’.

Services are everywhere. From how we book our holidays, to how we save money and get access to healthcare. Ask someone on the street what a service is, however, or what it means to design one, and they will probably struggle to tell you.

For something so ubiquitous and fundamental to how we live our lives, it might seem strange that services are so rarely thought about, and so often misunderstood. Yet services exist in the background by their very nature. They are the things that connect other things, the spaces between things – such as choosing a new car and having it delivered or booking an appointment at your GP and being successfully treated. We barely notice them until we encounter something that stands out as good or bad.

For the organisations that provide them, services are often barely more visible than they are for users. They require multiple people, and sometimes multiple organisations to provide all of the steps that a user needs to complete to achieve their goal. Sometimes there are so many pieces to this puzzle, or they stretch across such a long period of time, that we struggle to see them as a whole.

And yet it’s services that are the interface to so much of our experience of the world. From having children, getting married, moving house and, ultimately, death, services facilitate some of the most important moments in our lives.

To understand what it means to design a good service, we must understand the definition of ‘service’.

There are much longer books than this one that have explained what services are in minute detail and, although a lot of those definitions are accurate, most are long, complicated and almost impossible to remember, let alone apply to the real world. What’s even more troubling about these definitions is that they often claim that services are ‘intangible’, making them sound almost as if they are too complex or nebulous to be designed.

But services aren’t complicated, and they don’t deserve the complicated explanations they’ve been given in the past.