I have a preference for keeping service design principles short. Why?

Because it's natural to me: I'm not good at writing long sentences, and I like things that go straight to the interesting part without "blah blah".

Keep it natural

But what is natural to me, maybe, isn't natural to you.

I believe that whenever you write a Service Design Principle, you should write it in the way that feels the most:

• natural to you

• easy to you

• rewarding to you

Tips to make long formats easier to read

So if you end up writing long Service Design Principles, I would recommend a few tiny things to make it easier for those who aren't you to read that text:

• Add a summary: at the top, you write a one-sentence or one-paragraph summary. So you get the best of both worlds.

• Add subtitles: this helps you break a long text into smaller parts.

• Put in bold key parts: this helps the reader quickly see the most important parts of a paragraph

Ask AI for help if needed

And the chance you have is that these days, you can just ask ChatGPT or Notion.ai with all these formatting tips. You can ask those AI:

• to add a summary

• to add titles for each paragraph

• and even put in bold the most interesting sentences

Inspired by a community question

Thanks to Ramya Mahendran, who inspired this text by sharing a bit of her own writing journey.