Bad Services

Bad services waste time, cost money and can even ruin lives. Why, despite advances in technology, are most services getting worse rather than better?

From the author of the bestselling book Good Services, Bad Services untangles why, despite our best efforts, organisations struggle to deliver services that work.

This book will help you see the universal challenges we all face when delivering good services. You’ll learn how to identify the root cause of these issues and build simple, straightforward ways to solve them, with or without buy-in. Whether you’re a designer or a change-maker, this book offers clear and straightforward steps to overcome the barriers to good service delivery.

Good Services brought us the 15 principles of Good Service Design that have been universally recognised as an international standard for the service design industry. Bad Services brings you the 5 Causes of Bad Services – a vital diagnostic tool that will help you identify and solve the problems we all experience when attempting to deliver services that work.

There are many books out there that will help you design a service once, but Bad Services goes beyond this to help us understand how we create the conditions for good services to thrive in the future.

AUTHOR

Lou Downe is author of Good Services, the bestselling book on how to design services that work and the founding director of the School of Good Services, an organisation that has helped thousands of people and organisations around the world to build the skills they need to design and scale great services.

They are the former Director of Design for the UK Government where they founded the discipline of service design, growing a 2000 strong team of designers into one of the largest, and most influential design teams in the UK – winning a Designs of the Year award and a D&AD lifetime achievement award.

QUOTE

Designing GOOD services is hard. In this book, the forces that push us off course into the swamp of mediocre (and worse: BAD) services are laid out in a way that is all too recognizable to anyone in the creative field. They are treated thoroughly but also lightly – after all, they are all too human, and should be approached with compassion and a small wry smile. That makes this a wholesome book (good to know it is not just you, you are not alone). And as it maps new paths forward to deal with these issues it is also a hopeful book that helps sustain your enthusiasm and creative drive.

— Prof Kees Dorst, Princeton University