This is an archive of the Service Design Newsletter I sent on October 22nd 2022. You can join the Service Design newsletter here to get future updates directly in your inbox.

Hey there 👋

In this week's email, I try to explore this question:

What if making people happy and serving them better didn't take as much effort as you think?

Greetings from Switzerland
Daniele 🧔🏻‍♂️

p.s. It's been a busy week in terms of Service Design Content. 60+ early reviewers are now reviewing my next book. Thanks to all of you! I've updated 33 Service Design Principles, answered 2 new Service Design Questions, improved the video of the last webinar, and I even wrote two behind-the-scenes blog posts. You'll find all the links below if you are curious 👇

It doesn't have to be so hard.

You want to make your customers happy. You want to serve them better. But it feels as if this is an impossible task. It feels too complex as you are overwhelmed by the complex and systemic view of what happens. There are so many different opinions. Your boss wants A, and other decision-makers want you to focus on B. Where should I start?

Most of us have tried to find the big problems and invest a lot of energy in them. But in the end, we lost traction and motivation, and the solutions were too complex to put in place. So nothing goes forward.

So we switched gears. We looked and read about how others do it. But after hours of reading, they only describe vague things like “Be empathic”. These aren’t practical. They don’t answer the question: “What the fuck do I do tomorrow with this problem I’m facing?”

We’ve looked for models and tools, but they often take ages to master or create more questions than answers.

What do we do? Do we stop here in our quest to serve people better because it’s too hard? Do we invest even more time, energy and effort? That’s what many suggest.

I’d love to provocate you with another approach:

I accept that most of the time, we shouldn't focus on changing the world but on making it just a little bit better.

What if we focused our attention on the things that are nearly effortless to put in place? What if we could put in place ideas or tips that you can put in place in your service tomorrow? And this without a big budget, huge staff or a shitload of time.

Will these things change the world? No. But they will bring a good enough impact that people switch from “I hate these guys” to “Awww, they’re lovely!”.

In fact, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern. Most of the Service Design Principles I collect focus on “good enough impact with an effortless attitude”.

These principles are small things. They have just enough impact on making the people we serve to recognise that “we really care about them”. But they don’t break the bank, don’t neextranal staff and can be implemented tomorrow.

So instead of saying: 

"We don’t have enough research, money, time, or leadership goodwill to make change happen" 

What if we asked ourselves

"What simple things can we do to bring a good enough change?"

Pick an idea and try it out. And if you have no idea yet, steal one of these 200 ideas.

If it works, that’s awesome. You’re making the people you serve happier with little effort. If it doesn’t work, no worries. You didn’t spend ages and a shit load of money to learn this doesn’t work in your specific context. You can now try something else again with pretty much little effort.

Once you do this, something nearly magical happens. Positive change and actions motivate you to get more of it. The people around you will want more of it. And you now have the energy to continue as you didn’t burn out in analysis paralysis.

My question to you

What are all the things that you've tried lately to improve your customer experience but that, in the end, frustrated you or weren't worth it? I'm curious 🧔🏻‍♂️

New and updated Service Design content

Below you'll find links to all the new and updated Service Design content I've worked on during the last few days.

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.

Updated principles

These Service Design Principles have a new draft. Once you open the link, scroll to the bottom to see the latest version.

1. Don’t be creative when it’s urgent

2. Test your idea against the ones from your competitors

3. Make me see my progress creatively

4. The second draft of this Service Design Principle

5. Even if it’s not a discussion you can respect my intelligence

6. Don’t measure just because you can

7. Make me love this awful experience

8. Don’t prototype. Test what already exists

9. Notice what people don't say and don't do

10. Don't add an extra interaction

11. Prepare me for the worst gradually

12. Help the newbies without slowing the pros

13. Every service, even the most simple and boring one, can add a wow factor to it

14. Make it at the eye level of kids

15. Leave me with a physical reminder and summary of the service

16. Create alternatives for those who can’t experience the original

17. Keep looking for weird things that happen in your service

18. Verify that’s me before doing anything else

19. Ask me my consent before you do something and say how it will feel

20. Acknowledge my kid to make me feel relaxed

21. Match my salary to the newcomers

22. Don’t overwhelm me when I come back from holidays

23. Ask who else could help

24. Ask me if I want to continue with you

25. Don’t lock me in

26. Be careful of the history of words

27. Remember that my kid wants to play with everything

28. Use patterns and dots to make the wait fun

29. Build on my bad habits

30. Add a little secret note to your links

31. Ask me for who this is?

32. Show me for who this is made

33. Tell me why I have to use this form

Service Design Questions

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

New questions

1. What are the advantages of writing your Service Design Principles in the open and how to do it?

2. How do I manage the references of my Service Design Principles?

Service Design Webinars

1. Updated: I’ve made an edit of the webinar 004 video and was able to reduce its length by 41%. You’ll also find the full transcript if you prefer reading to watching a video.

Behind-the-scenes 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 onboard early reviewers for my books

2. How I manage references and sources in the books I write

3. How I write in the open with a timeline of changes