A Service Design principle to make policy changes less frustrating for users.

Parking your car is a thing of habit. Once you know that you can park for free parking in a specific place in the city, you always go back there.

Now imagine the city changes the policy. You are in a hurry, so you park your car quickly. You come back, and... shit! You have a fine.

You didn't notice the change of colour on the stripes on the street floor that shows that it's now a paid area! Or you didn't see that the time limit has changed from 40 minutes to 20 minutes.

Cities like Yverdon-Les-Bains in Switzerland have a nice hack to avoid these frustrations. When they change the policy somewhere, they put out a big sign that says: “New parking rules” with a big danger icon.

A sign spotted in Yverdon-Les-Bains, Switzerland.

This sign makes sure that people know the rules have changed. People can then take a minute to see if the new rules are a deal-breaker for them or if they can adapt easily.

If a new policy or change of rules can break a habit, notify people visibly. Show that the policy has changed to avoid mistakes or frustrations.

Little side notes

• This is the second draft of this Service Design Principle.

• I was able to reduce the lengths of this principle by about 12% compared to the first version.

• Once adapted, even more, this principle will be part of the book "Service Design Principles 201-300"

• As always comments and feedback to improve this principle are welcome

• If you have a personal story that goes in that direction it would also help if you share it 

Community feedback

The first version of this article was adapted in a more comprehensible English by the lovely Joanna Bienz. As Joanna is also an expert on Customer Experience and UX she shares additional comments to go further:

Joanna's comment

In addition to signifying a change in rules, it would save a lot of time and headache for the person to have to look up what the changes are by simply adding a little more detail outlining exactly what has changed.

If it's a matter of being able to re-use the signs for different purposes, this could easily be solved by sticking on a clear sleeve in which interchangeable print-outs can be inserted as needed.