Designing Good Services is a 1 day course that demystifies what makes a good service, helping you to identify problems with your service and develop the skills to build services that work

Who it’s for

This masterclass is for anyone who wants to learn how to design (or redesign) services that work for users - covering everything from how to make sure your users can find your service, to how to ensure your service is accessible and inclusive.

This masterclass is suitable for people who are delivering a service, who are new to service design or doing it as part of another role, as well as those experienced service designers looking to take a fresh look at their practice

What you’ll learn

• What makes a good service for users and why, using the 15 principles of good service design
• How to make sure your service is findable,  usable and meets your user’s needs
• How to make sure your service is accessible and inclusive
• How to identify problems with your service and plan strategic improvements to it

Course modules

1. Understanding services

• Understanding what users need and how they behave when using services

• Defining services and the importance of taking a service-focussed approach
• Learning the tools and techniques you need to identify good and bad services
• Understanding the language of services and how to talk about them confidently

2. Making your service findable

• How to make sure your users can find your service and understand it when they get there without having to resort to support before their journey has begun. Covering service naming, setting expectations and storytelling \

3. Making your service usable 

• How to make sure your users can use your service once they’ve found and understood it by designing for their expectations, having the right number of steps to your service and remaining consistent throughout

4. Making your service work behind the scenes

• How to make sure that the structure of your organisation is set up to deliver good services, then how to make sure you’re incentivising your whole organisation to continue to support them through metrics and monitoring

5. Making your service accessible and inclusive

• How to make sure that everyone who needs to use your service can use it, your service is free from dead ends, and no one is excluded from using it

6. Supporting your users when things go wrong

• How to make sure that your service can respond to changes in your user’s life, support your users when they’re in crisis, and recover if things go wrong

How it works

All classes are delivered live and online in small classes that are a mix of taught tuition, individual exercises, and group discussion.

Participants work on a service or case study of their choice so all course takeaways are able to be put into action immediately

Your trainers

Lou Downe is author of the bestselling book about how to design services that work - Good Services.

They founded the discipline of service design in the UK government, where they were national Design Director for 5 years - establishing the Government’s Service Standard and Design System and building a community of over 3,000 designers, user researchers and content designers - one of (if not the) largest design teams in the world.

Lou was nominated as one of the top 50 creative leaders in the UK in 2016 and one of the world's 100 most influential leaders in digital government in 2018 and is a passionate believer in the role of design to create a world which benefits everyone.

Private courses

This masterclass can be delivered privately for your organisation. Drop us a line here to discuss.