​

​

---

6 ways to design services for REAL people

---

Charlie Fountaine Freelance Service Designer

Welcome to the newsletter! It's had a slight refresh. I'm Charlie 👋your newsletter spirit-guide. This no-nonsense newsletter is all about designing better products and services for real people.

Each month I send you a short email explaining how.

These are favourite 6 tips that I continually apply to my design work. In each project, I apply these ideas, to make services that are as easy-to-use as they can be.

1. Keep it familiar

People want to use things that they are familiar with, because familiar services feel like less effort to adopt. Existing products and services which are already popular (car washes, doctors surgery’s, email providers) have already worked out how people want to interact with their service. They’ve created reusable patterns.

Action to take: understand what services people already use that they love, and use those principles.

2. Start with the user's goal 🎯

Align your team on what success would look like for the user. Focus on the user’s goal. Like getting their driving licence, or getting their clothes clean.

Ruthlessly cut any features that don’t help users reach that goal.

This tip is inspired by Lou Downe in this blog post.​

What to watch out for: Don’t get distracted by the wrong goals. A good goal gets a user from A to B. Your goal is not to pass an assessment, build a shiny prototype, or please senior stakeholders or investors!

3. Make it measurable

Ensure the team is aligned on success criteria. It can feel counterintuitive to do this during the early research phase. But even if you don’t know what the service is yet, the outcomes for the user and indicators can be clear.

Action to take: collate baseline data around what’s currently happening, and identify what change you would like to see in that data.

4. Plan for failure

If hundreds of thousands of people are using a service, it’s not if it fails, it’s when it fails. I recently had my purse stolen, and I was able to quickly freeze my card and order a new one with Monzo. Excellent designers anticipate and design for failure scenarios.

Take a look at existing data of failure rates. This could be; returned items if it’s a retail service. Forms started and not completed. Number of complaints. Do a risk assessment, and write down with your wider team what can be done when those incidents occur. Ensure that there are support channels, allocate budget for support.

Watch out for: if there is no budget for support, the service should not be going live.

5. Plan for maintenance and running of the service

Services are run by people, usually paid staff. There are a few examples of excellent volunteer-run services; Good Gym (people run and do good deeds), charity shops.

Digital services still require maintenance, and people to intervene at points of failure. Successful designers think about:

• How the service will be staffed, and what budget is available for that.
• Who will look after feedback (failure rates, written feedback from users) and action issues that arise.

Watch out for: when an organisation doesn’t have the budget to run a service, but it does want to develop something, it’s a massive red flag.

6. Don’t assume that new is better

Exercise patience, particularly in large government services. Unravel complexities, identify incremental improvements, and resist the urge to start from scratch. Complex services have evolved over many years, and even when the user is having a poor user experience, they may well be still getting something done.

It takes patience and discipline to carefully peel back the layers of a complex service, and work out how to improve something existing. What tweaks can be made. The temptation to rip-it-up and start again might be the reason that disjointed services exist in the first place.

As Dieter Rams said; good design is as little as possible.

​

Don't miss the next one If you loved this email, mark it as important so it never ends up in your junk.