Services we love to hate — a design game

Two birds, flying back North for (a Canadian 😜) Spring.

Part of the responsibility of a designer in the public sector is to build capacity with other public servants. It’s not really teaching. It’s helping others adjust their lens a little bit. These are the people who build, maintain, and know their services by heart. We want to push them out of their comfort zone a little bit and see where it can take us.

I like to play a simple ice-breaker game with new people I work with.

Now, let’s talk about the services we love to hate

…and the services we hate to love.

Activity format

• Style: An ice-breaker game.
• Time: 1.5 hr + (depends on the number of participants engaged).
• People: 1 unbiased facilitator, as many participants as you want.
• Phase: After people research, before product/service ideation.
• Rules: There are no bad ideas — all brains are welcomed.

1. Introduction

In order to build services, let's talk about some services! Services are made of many pieces depending on how you look at them. They could be features, systems, people (or a lack of), or full transactions— you name it!

Today we are going to come together to talk about services that we interact with our lives, and log what makes them good or bad.

However, we are not going to talk about just any services.

We are going to talk about the services that can either dominate the conversation at the dinner table or the services that are all of a sudden a part of your daily routine.

There are three things to try to remember when ideating:

1. Services can be huge. Think of one specific feature that helps or doesn’t help you complete your goal.
2. The words Love and Hate were chosen intentionally to evoke emotion. Which services are frustrating, painful, invisible, and so easy to use that your wallet suffers (Ahem, UberEats).
3. Try to ideate beyond digital services.

2. Ideating features of services that we love to hate

Facilitators will emphasize the tips to keep in mind and provide an example of a service that they strongly dislike. These are the services that make you alter your day to use, the ones where you have 12 tabs open in order to figure out how to use it, the ones where you get no confirmation after and you just sit there wondering if you did the thing properly.

Give participants 5 minutes to write down 1–2 feature or product experiences (depending on the time, and the number of total participants). Once everyone is done, have them share the service and why it is frustrating.

Past examples:

Signing your kid up for camp

• It is first come first serve, so everyone logs on at once and the website freezes.
• The database times out, so it isn’t flexible for everyone’s day.

Solving a problem through a telephone company’s call center

• The telephone tree is not descriptive enough so I never know if I am talking to the right person.

Delivery service with too many unhelpful channels

• You can only pay online or on the phone and both channels don’t work when paying a fee.
• Their “Help assistant” is automated and can’t answer any question that isn’t saved in their database.
• The call center telephone tree hangs up at every option.

Finding a doctor in a new city

• (This was done in the Canadian context, so impossible)
• Where do you start?

As people share what they have experienced, the facilitator should note down all of the reasons why participants find these services difficult.

Brief review

After everyone shared, bring everyone back together to review the experiences people felt were in the way of planning their day, paying their bill, or getting their flu shot.

3. Ideating features of services that we hate to love

Facilitators will emphasize the tips to keep in mind and provide an example of a service that you love so much, you may be annoyed by it sometimes. These are the services that integrate seamlessly into your lives. They have become a part of your daily routine and you never think about how it got there, but you somehow recommend it to your friends and family.

Give participants 5 minutes to write down 1–2 feature or product experiences (depending on the time, and the number of total participants). Once everyone is done, have them share the service and why it is oddly satisfying.

Past examples:

Curated content via video streaming autoplay

• The continuous playback of curated content is satisfying when you are multitasking or if you are looking for new content.
• The feature on Youtube is automated so it is easier to listen and engage with the new content, rather than to stop it.

Butcher’s recommendations

• A participant mentioned how much they enjoyed going to their butcher. The butcher would remember what their usual order was
• They would also recommend new things he thought the participant’s family would like.

Fitness step trackers

• The Steps feature on Fitbits have changed how some folks quantify a healthy walking cadence. “Gotta get my steps in” has become an acceptable phrase for those who don’t even own the product.
• The gamification of the steps feature allows users to compete with their friends, which encourages an active lifestyle.

Apps for quick food delivery and payment

• I am not happy about this one. However, UberEats removed the awkward and uncomfortable interaction of waiting to pay for someone to deliver your food. It has integrated seamlessly into my weekend routine.
• As people share what they have experienced, the facilitator should note down all of the reasons why participants find these services pleasant and easy to use.

Brief review

After everyone shared, bring participants back together to review the experiences people felt helped them find a playlist of podcasts to learn from, recommend new cured meat to try, and automate long processes.

Now that we have gathered all of our experiences and engagements with services around us, we now have a couple of lists to think about when we create public services.

Good services have:

• Clear expectations of who to talk to when the user needs help completing their goal
• Flexible and quick flows to not be burdensome.
• Built trust and credibility in order to personalize an experience and recommend content.
• Integrated so seamlessly into your daily routine that it makes your day easier.

Bad services have:

• Dead ends and set unclear expectations
• People altering their day
• People trying to complete their goal a number of times
• An old and outdated infrastructure that can’t maintain a good user experience.

These lists are not design principles, constraints, or guardrails. They are merely lists that help put us in the shoes of the people who are renewing their passport, filing their taxes, or reporting a crime online.

Services run by governments come with a user base. Sometimes people don’t have a choice but to use some of these services.

We want to do our best job at making a comfortable and good experience for the public by understanding what is in the way of their goal and figuring out what we can do to relieve those pains, whilst measuring impact.

That starts by understanding what we admire in the services that are so good, we recommend it aggressively to friends and family (My hairdresser has gotten 5+ extra clients since me), and what we dislike so much that we avoid and plan it for the weekend to get to it.

This ice-breaker activity promotes service retrospection, collaboration, and dialogue around a good user experience design beyond one product (or channel).

(Thank you to the Canadian Digital Service where I am able to explore more ways of sharing human-centered collaboration methods and help create more designers 🤘🏾 — reach out if you have any feedback)