A Service Design Principle on how to change a terrible experience into a lovely one.
This principle is inspired by a community contribution from Swareena Joshi

You are a kid. The optician tells the bad news to your parents: you’ll need to wear an eye patch for two hours per day for three months to help your vision.

As a kid, this is bad, bad news! You look like a pirate with an eye patch, but not in a good way. Your friends make fun of you. It feels weird to have that thing on your face! And it’s for three months! That’s a lot of days!

What if, as a kid, you would say after three months of wearing that damn eye patch: “I want to wear it longer!”. You would tell me this isn’t possible. But it is!

That’s what Swareena Joshi (1) observed with a friend whose child wears an eye patch.

Each day the kid receives a new eye patch. But that’s not just a standard boring eye patch. No, this one has character (2), and it changes everything.

One day it’s his favourite Disney character who’s on it. The next day it’s one from a Pixar movie! So every day, the kid is excited! He might say: “Mom, what character patch do I get today?!”

The good stuff doesn’t stop there. At the end of each day, the kid can take out the eye patch and stick it on a little calendar poster (3). In this way, the child can see that he is making progress!

The poster with the eye patches sticked on it.

This little story proves that it’s definitely possible to turn a terrible experience, like wearing an eye patch as a kid, into something you get excited about!

So this might be possible for many other horrible experiences.

As service creators, we can ask ourselves:

What can we do to make people want more of the experiences that suck for now?

For example, if meetings are a part of your work experience that mostly sucks, which is the case in many places, you can ask yourself: How can I create meetings where everybody says at the end: “Oh no! It’s already finished! Can we schedule another one?!”

You can make people want more healthy experiences even if they suck at first.

Footnotes

(1) Thanks to Swareena, who shared the original story and picture of the eye patch calendar that inspired this Service Design principle.

(2) These eyepatches are designed by a company called Ortopad. The company also creates educational and motivational material both for kids and parents.

(3) The calendar is provided by Trusetal who seems to be a reseller of Ortopad material.

Alternative titles

I'm not yet convinced of the title of this principle, so I'm "thinking out loud" by writing in order to find better alternatives:

• Make me want more of it: the title I'm starting with

• Ask yourself how you can make me love this terrible experience: very descriptive, too long but gives the right idea.

• Make me ask more of this shitty experience: better as it shows from the start that this principle is about bad experiences

• Make me want more of this shitty experience: maybe the verb "want" is better?

What title do you prefer? Do you have other ideas?

Little side notes

• This principle is based on a story shared by Swareena Joshi from which we extracted together several different principles. Thanks Swareena for sharing such an inspiring story!

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

• Once adapted, even more, this principle will 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.