Kindle Notes & Highlights
This is a book about good services – what they are and how to design them.
good service looks like,
A service, simply put, is simply something that helps someone to do something.
What unites all services is that they help us to achieve a goal, however big or small it might be.
What’s interesting is ecosystemic services are just side products of being like bees pollinating
Above all other changes in technology and culture as we know it, there are three things that have influenced our understanding of services more than anything else: the invention of the postal service, the telephone and the internet.
Now that more people were involved with providing services, those services needed to be standardised in a way that they could be provided consistently.
Advertising was no longer able to sell us something that we couldn’t prove worked, or wasn’t useful in the same way that it once did, and we now exist in a world where we compete on the quality of our services, not the strength of our messages.
These services were designed for a world where a person was always on hand to help you to do something – be that filling in a form, choosing a product or returning something. But this is not how services work on the internet.
The major challenge this creates is that your user will start by looking for what they think they need, not what you’ve decided they need.
But changing our services to be ‘of the internet’ rather than ‘on the internet’ has happened at a slower rate than the internet itself has changed.
The simple fact that our services weren’t designed for the channel they’re delivered in is one of the most common causes of service failure.
In that way, each service is broken down into steps, and each step into a series of tasks. Each one of these steps or tasks will probably be called ‘a service’ by the person running it. What defines the edge of a service is very dependent on your context, so if all you do all day everyday is provide surveys, it’s easy to think of the service as providing surveys.
Service edges
While it’s important for each step and task to be well-designed, it doesn’t mean that these things are services. The only person who gets to decide what the service is, is the person who has the goal they need to achieve – and that’s your user. It’s your job to orchestrate all of the pieces of this service in as seamless a journey as possible, even if you don’t provide the whole service yourself.
The separate steps within the service of selling your house and buying a new one give you visibility and control over important decision points – like deciding which house to buy, how much money you want to spend or how many bedrooms you might need for any children.
Katy Highland was one such victim of accidental service sabotage. A teacher from New Rochelle, New York, Katy took out a loan when she went to college to pay for her teaching degree.
We have a collective blindness for services. They are the gaps between things, and so not only do we fail to see them, but we fail to recognise when they aren’t working. They are often provided by multiple organisations, or parts of an organisation, so their cost and the negative effect they have on the world is more difficult to track than the cost of failing technology.
