A Service Design Principle to make admin work less painful.

Imagine this. You are looking for a new job. You go through several job offers online and fall on one that looks really interesting. You open the application form and start filling it. Suddenly you notice you miss a key document to finish the application. You think: “Shit! I’ll have to redo all of it from scratch later!”.

That sucks! It sucks because you already spent a lot of time on this application, and now that time is basically lost. It sucks because there is a good chance that you won’t even remember to finish it later.

As community member Lynnsey Schneider says: “Imagine if you are completing a paper form, you put it down to run an errand or attend a meeting, and when you came back, it’s blank!? That’s the experience we create when we don’t support completing tasks over multiple sessions.”

Fortunately, some form creation tools know that frustration and have a great fix! For example, Jotform lets people finish filling out a form later. Even better, when you click to say that you want to finish the form later, Jotform will send you an email so that you’re sure not to forget to complete it in the future. Smart!

This idea is not limited to forms! In fact, Email services like Outlook, Apple Mail or Spark offer a snooze feature to remind you about an email later. Your iPhone can even remind you about a phone call when you refuse to answer it. Futureme is a small online tool that lets you send yourself a note in the future. Even your stupid alarm clock has a snooze feature!

All these snooze features are smart because now is not always the best time to do something. For example, to finish a task, you might need unique stuff, like contract numbers, a copy of your passport or some other document you don’t have while you are on the bus looking at this form on your phone.

Instead of relying upon that people have a good memory or a functional task management system in place (1) you offer people a simple way to be reminded about this in the future.

We might believe that our service is the most important thing people have to go through right now. But let’s be humble. It’s usually not true. So instead, we should help people do what’s critical for them first and check in with them later about our service.

So let me ask you this.

What parts of your service or product could use a “remind me later” feature? What is the best way to send this reminder in the future? Which part of your service could also use a “let me finish this” later feature?

Footnotes

• (1) A survey found that even in the countries where people are the most dependent on to-do lists, a good quarter of people don’t have one

• Thanks to community member Nemos Kostoulas who inspired this Service Design Principle by sharing some feedback on another principle called Help me keep track of my notifications. A big thank you also to community member Lynnsey Schneider for reminding me about the “finish later” feature of some form builders by sharing a comment on one of my Linkedin Posts.

Daniele's personal notes

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

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

• As always feel free to share comments, feedback or personal stories to improve this principle.