What Makes a Good Service?
These days, services are plentiful. We use services to vote, purchase products, order food, do our taxes, watch movies, listen to music, and the list goes on and on.
So, what exactly is a service?
In Lou Downe’s book, Good Services: How to Design Services that Work, a service is defined as: “something that helps someone do something” (Downe, 19).
So, what makes a service good? What makes you recommend it to a friend or look forward to using it again?
Before becoming a UX writer, I never paid much attention to the services I used. Spotify, Gmail, Zoom — as far as I was concerned, they were all designed by magical elves in a cloud somewhere.
However, like a lot of app users, there were moments of unexpected delight, where I found myself grateful for an app’s thoughtful design. After downloading Uber and ordering my first Uber ride, I was surprised to see how many minutes away my driver was. This gave me pause. “Wow, this is great. What a neat feature,” I’d say quietly to myself.
Years later, I learned that there are specific reasons why an app seems effortlessly easy to navigate; or why interacting with certain buttons can be a pleasant and almost addictive experience. The literature on product design, emotional design and user experience is vast and ever growing. However, for the purpose of this article, let’s stick to what makes a service satisfying to use.
A simple way to determine if a user’s reaction to a service is positive vs. negative is to think in terms of 2 variables: user expectation vs user experience.
If a user’s experience using the service satisfies their initial expectation of what the service does, their experience is neutral, if not positive. Similarly, if a user’s experience does not meet their initial expectation of the service, their experience is negative. However, if a user’s experience exceeds their initial expectation, this leads to a positive reaction.
So how do we create services that leave users feeling satisfied?
Downe’s book outlines 15 principles of good service design. It’s a great book for those getting into service design as well as senior practitioners looking to expand their understanding. Below, I dive into 7 principles outlined by Downe.
Set expectations with your user
Naturally, this seems like a good place to start given that unmet user expectations guarantees frustration. A good service clearly communicates to users what they should expect when using the service. They answer questions users have on their mind:
- How long will it take?
- Am I eligible to use this service?
- How much does it cost? How often will I be charged?
- What information do I need beforehand to use this service?
Identify what expectations users may have and try your best to meet as many of them as you can. If you cannot, make sure you clearly explain to users why and offer alternative solutions instead. By setting expectations with your users early on, you protect them from a bad experience.
Design your service in a way that is familiar
A good service requires no thought on the part of the user. It should feel effortless and almost intuitive. Users should be able to apply their prior knowledge using similar services to use your service. Forcing people to learn new names, button interactions, etc., makes completing a task longer. Unnecessarily complicated tasks = upset user. However, blindly replicating what your competitors do is harmful too. Watch out for established customs that do not ultimately benefit your user. Avoid using customs that are outdated, inefficient or exploitative to your users.
Reduce the possible steps to complete a task
A good service recognizes it’s not the most important thing in the world. It respects its users time and makes it easy for them to complete a goal so they can focus on other things in their life. Completing a service is rarely ever the end goal. Rather, a service is a link between a user’s need and their goal. You order food on Uber Eats to satisfy your hunger. Eliminating your hunger is your unmet goal and Uber Eats helps you get there. Hence, it is critical that your service only asks the very minimum of your users to help them achieve their goal as efficiently as possible.
Examples of this are:
- Only asking the most important questions on an onboarding flow
- Merging multiple questions into one step
- Allowing users to focus on the most time-intensive steps and skip optional steps
Remove any dead ends
Good services empower users, not make them feel helpless. Every action taken should lead to an outcome that helps users. If an outcome is unfavourable, give the user an explanation and a way to continue or resolve their issue. Make sure there are always alternative pathways for users who stray off the desired path of your service.
Respond to change quickly
A good service adapts to new information and emerging user needs. Doing so mitigates user frustration and prevents the service from becoming outdated.
Examples of this are:
- Updating user information across the service when a user changes their address
- Clearly updating your service based on business policy changes
- Identifying a bug and offering users an alternative path
Allow users to speak to a human
Don’t make your users feel helpless, stuck, or hopeless. Sometimes all you want is to chat with a human…and that’s ok. Give users an easy way to chat with human support if they need to. When you’re frustrated, the last thing you want is to jump through multiple unnecessary hoops to resolve your issue. Burying a customer support phone number under 15 links, is an example of obstruction. This, like many other dark patterns, exploits users. Avoid this at all costs.
Design for everyone
A good service can be used by everyone regardless of their abilities or circumstances. Does your service treat every user equally? Does it accommodate users who might otherwise struggle to use it? “Inclusion is a necessity, not an enhancement” (Downe, 167). Do user research to find any barriers within your service that some users may encounter, then solve for it.
We discussed what makes up a good service, but what makes a service ethically good? What kinds of behavior does a good service promote? In its users? In its employees? In the world at large? Downe believes that a service is ethically good when its:
- Good for its users
- Good for the business
- Good for the environment
A good service does not exploit users (i.e. use their data without them knowing). It does not incentivize staff to deliver bad service to users (i.e. shorten customer support calls). Lastly, it does not harm society or the environment in which it lives.
Now more than ever, it is crucial that we continue building services that empower all users, solve ongoing human problems, and do so in the most efficient and empathic way possible.
Sources:
1. Downe, Lou. Good Services. BIS Publishers B.V., 2020.
