This is a copy of the Service Design Newsletter I sent on March 26th 2023. You can join the Service Design newsletter here to get future updates directly in your inbox.

Hey lovely human,

This week I have for you:

• 4 new Service Design Principles 💡

• 5 answers to Service Design Questions 🙋‍♂️

• A question about a possible audiobook

• A tip if you hate the notifications from the Swiss Innovation Academy community 

• And two blog posts about how I use Podia for those interested in the backstage

Pfffiou! That's a lot of stuff that happened in one week 😅

Greetings from Switzerland,
Daniele 🧔🏻‍♂️
p.s. ready to read now? Awesome, scroll down a little and you'll find all of it 👇 Otherwise, just bookmark this for later ✅

What I'm redesigning in my 5-week Service Design course

In the last few years, I’ve taught Service Design skills to over 10'000 people through different courses, templates and books. Some things went pretty well, and some went to shit.

So for my new 5-week Service Design course, I’m re-designing some core elements that sucked in my previous courses to make Service Design learning suck less:

• Start and end. 90% of the people who sign up for online classes don't complete them. That’s why for this course, I’m switching to a cohort model with a start and an end that motivates people to finish the course.

• Personal relation: Each time I have personal coaching or chat with a learner, I see a massive difference in that person's progress. So for this updated course, I want to check in more often and personally with each learner. Not in an automated way, but in a real personal way. For this to be possible, this course will limit the number of people who can join to keep the experience human instead of automated.

• Beyond the course: one course can help you only go so far. That’s why, during the coaching session, I’ll check in with the learners to see what additional resources they need to reach their personal goals. I have a huge library of content I created over the years and even more bookmarks. Over the years, I’ve created dozens of customised learning plans for people from all around the world based on their goals and challenges. I want to create this for each person who follows that course.

I’m curious: Which of these changes are you the most excited about?

p.s. obviously, I plan to keep the things that worked well, like the getting shit done approach, simple language with a twist of humour and funny stories.

New Service Design Content

💡 New Service Design Principles

“A Service Design Principle is an idea, a tip, an advice or a principle  to improve the human experience.” These are the latest principles I've been working on.

1. Notice the small things every day for the yearly review

2. Everyone should do customer support

3. Tell me what's the one thing I absolutely have to remember

4. Give time to people to transfer the discussion in their own tools

🙋‍♂️ New Service Design Questions

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

1. How do you take notes during user interviews?

2. What are some audiobooks on Service Design?

3. How can I improve my portfolio?

4. What's the history of Service Design in Switzerland?

5. Where can I find sample interviews to train my note taking skills?

📽️ Latest Service Design Webinar: History x Switzerland x Service Design

The recording of the webinar about the history of Service Design in Switzerland, the slides, transcript, and a list of additional resources mentioned during the webinar are now available 🤓

Thanks to all of you who joined and shared additional historical moments and insights. A special thank you goes to Emmanuel Fragnière and Vanessa Monstein, who not only shared good stuff but who will also be speakers at future events of the Swiss Service Design Network

🎧 A future Service Design audiobook?

Angel Takooree shared an interesting provocation: there aren't much Service Design audiobooks out there. So I'm exploring how to make my books available in audiobook format.

I'm not a native English speaker, so I have an accent when speaking English. What do you prefer in an audiobook: to have the author's voice, even if it's not in perfect English, or have a professional voice-over artist? So far 72% of people who voted on Linkedin say I should do it with my own voice. There are still 3 days left to vote in this little poll if you are on Linkedin. It would be awesome if you can help me with your vote.


If you vote, I'd love your thoughts on why you prefer one over the other.

Notification bug for the community

Thanks to community member Ravid who made me aware of a bug with the notifications of the community part of the Swiss Innovation Academy that made it impossible to cut notifications from certain topics.

Now you should be able to choose in the community for which topics you want to get notifications or not by clicking the "+ Follow " button here.

Thanks again to Ravid for the feedback and help in spotting this bug.

Backstage articles

I love to explain how I'm building educational content. I'm trying to be as transparent as possible so that it might motivate others to create such content too. These are the latest blog posts I've written:

1. How I "hack" podia to create my blog and help center

2. How I prepare my weekly newsletter with Notion and Podia