Don't be heroin for the people you serve

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Swiss Innovation Academy

Hi lovely human 👋

Lots, of stuff about Service Design this week, if I had to highlight just one it would be this:

Free Remote Service Design Coaching

Share your challenges with other Service Design practitioner and support other professionals Tuesday at 8PM (CET)

Save your spot

Here is the overview of all the rest of the new Service Design content I've worked on in the last few days:

4 Service Design Principles:

Addictive Design: Don't be heroin for the people you serve
Open source: Make Competitors to Steal from You
Expiration: Set Expiration Dates in Your Service
Friction: Replace Automations with Rituals

1 Service Design Q&A

Prompt: What's a good prompt for AI coding tools to get better UIs?

As a bonus you'll also find at the end links to 3 positive news from elsewhere to end on a high note.

Greetings from Basel, Switzerland,

Daniele 🧔🏻‍♂️

p.s. As always, you'll find more details below 👇
for when you have the time to read this newsletter.

Service Design Coaching opportunity

Share your challenges with other Service Design practitioner and support other professionals in a remote and free coaching session. This Tuesday at 20:00 Swiss Time.

What will happen during this event?

Kickoff: You'll be introduced to the structured intervision process that we'll use in the group coaching sessions.
Group coaching: You'll join a smaller group for a confidential coaching session using a structured intervision process.
Insights sharing: Participants who feel comfortable sharing with the wider community can share key insights and learnings that are inspired from the coaching session.

What's the structured coaching process?

We'll use a group coaching process inspired by the art of intervision.

Challenge selection (5 minutes)
Clarifying questions (10 minutes)
Discussion (15 minutes)
Synthesis (5 minutes)
Closing with two words (2 minutes)

Service Design Principles Series

I'm writing the fifth book in the series Service Design Principles, where I explore simple tips, tricks and provocations that can help us make services a little bit less shitty for the people who use them and the planet that hosts them.

An illustration of a woman next to a giant smartphone with many warnings and notifications

Don't be heroin for the people you serve

For years, service creators have been obsessed with keeping users engaged in their platforms. Think Facebook or YouTube—they want you to say as long as possible on their platforms (1). But when we focus on keeping people engaged for as long as possible, we're basically designing for addiction. As service creators we used nudges, gamification to ensure people not use our services but really love them deeply. Sometimes too deeply.

Now with distance, it's clear: entire generations feel addicted to digital services.

Instead of just checking if people are using our service or engaged, let's look at how meaningful or impactful their time is. Just because someone spends a lot of time on our platform doesn't mean they're getting joy out of it or a solving their personal challenges with it.

Action question

Which part of your service might have the highest risk of being like heroin for the people you serve? What metrics do you use might lead you to design for addiction without you even realizing it?

Footnotes

(1) Because the longer you stay, the more you see ads, and the more you see ads, the more money the companies make.

Daniele's notes

This is the first shitty draft of this principle
This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.
If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

Written with AI help
This principle draft is based on an audio note I took while walking that was transcribed and cleaned using Audiopen. I then reviewed and improved the text by hand.

Share feedback

Other principles I shared this week:

An illustration of two people holding a welcome sign

Replace Automations with Rituals

In short: Not automating everything leaves space for human interactions where you learn what people truly need.

Red the full principle

An illustration of a cat sleeping while a computer has an update sign in it.

Set Expiration Dates in Your Service

In short: Make sure some pieces of data or service pieces automatically are deleted when they not needed anymore.

Red the full principle

An illustration of a person stealing something from a smartphone

Make Competitors to Steal from You

In short: Share process and parts of your service so that other companies can copy them.

Red the full principle

Service Design Q&A

I'm slowly building a library of answers to the most common questions about Service Design. Here are the new ones:

An illustration of a person using an AI to code an app

What's a good prompt for AI coding tools to get better UIs?

In short:

Give it a reference as inspiration of a type of UI you like. For example Vision OS from Apple that has a lot of shadows and smooth animations. Ask
Ask it to use modals for the forms to add or edit elements
Ask it to put the navigation and buttons in a sidebar

Read the full Q&A

Positive news from elsewhere

I’m an optimist and as there is so much bad news out there at the moment, I want at my scale to rebalance things by sharing also some positive news for service owners and creators.

London’s low-emissions zone saving lives and money:
The introduction of the low-emissions led to dramatic falls in pollution. New research put the cost savings for the health service at upwards of £37m a year. (Positive News)
Switzerland first rail track solar power project:
“In the long term, our ambition is to produce energy between the rails and re-inject it into the traction current of the trains so that it is practically 100% self-propelled” (Swiss Info found via Good News)
"Climate seniors" lawyer as TIME 100 most influential: Cordelia Bähr is the only Swiss woman to make it onto the American magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of 2025. She helped the Climate Seniors to victory in court. (Swiss Info)

If you want more positive news make sure to checkout the website positive.news that offers more in depth articles.